68. CHAPTER LXVIII.
Grief and patience, rooted in her both,
Mingle their spurs together.
— Cymbeline.
Leslie was dead; beyond the reach of wounds and sorrow;
and the only tie which held his daughter to Vinal was
at last broken. She left him, as she had promised, and made
her abode with Mrs. Ashland, in her cottage by the sea shore.
She sat alone at an open window, looking out upon the
sea, an illimitable dreariness, waveless and dull as tarnished
lead; clouded with sullen mists, but still rocking in long,
dead swells with the motion of a past storm.
Her thoughts followed on the track of the absent Morton.
“It is best for you to have gone; to have made for yourself
a relief in your man's element of action and struggle.
Such a change is happiness, after the misery you have known.
It was a bitter schooling; a long siege, and a dreary one;
but you have triumphed, and you wear its trophy, — the
heroic calm, the mind tranquil with consciousness of power.
You have wrung a proud tribute out of sorrow; but has it
yielded you all its treasure? Could you but have rested less
loftily on your own firm resolve and unbending pride of manhood!
Could you but have learned that gentler, deeper,
higher philosophy which builds for itself a temple out of
ruin, and makes weakness invincible with binding its tendrils
to the rock!
“Your fate and mine have not been a bed of roses; but
the fierceness of yours is past, and I must still wait the issues
of mine. I have renounced this fraud and mockery of empty
words which was to have bound me to a life-long horror.
The world will think very strangely of me. That must be
borne, too; and such a load is light, to the burden I have
borne already.”
A few days later, tidings came that Vinal was ill. Edith
Leslie rejoined him; but, finding that her presence was any
thing but soothing to him, she left him in the care of others,
and returned to her friend's house. It was but a sudden and
short attack, from which he recovered in a week or two.
