The Wildfire Club - The Emma Hardinge Britten Archive

66 TIlE HAUNTED GRANGB,
beautiful, would have found fruition in the ltudy of a better
and nobler purpose in creation than a mere sojourn on
the earth, from which his I!pirit longed to flee away and be
at rest. As it was, he thought bitterly of the fate 'which
condemned him to uphold a proud name on a scanty fortune,
broken by extravagance, and saddled with debt, and
to maintain the show of a landed proprietor on an estate
swallowed up in mortgages.
He tumed with disgust from the ever-involved theme of
his. worldly difficulties; and gazed dreamily on the rushing
current of the deep and rapid river by whose side he pursued
his melancholy evening walk. .. One plunge," he
murmured, II the ODe sharp, fierce struggle between life
and death, and then - peace, rest, oblivion - • ay, ana
after! ' Would it be all rest? Could it be oblivion? A
prick of the finest blade, the sharp tooth of the smallest
reptile might poison the earthly casket, and let "Out the
wondrous thing called life; that life that thought and
breathed, devised plans, and so longed for eternity, could
that be soul? and how to !"ill tAat so as to insure obli-vion."
"The soul cannot die," echoed the immortal part
within him. " The soul never dies," murmured the rushing
torrent. .. The soul lives forever," whispered the
dying breeze. "Forever, forever," sang the lone st.ars
which now began to twinkle forth one by one, repeating
the tale of creation, and pointing on the dial plate of the
firmament to the watchword eternity.
II Eternity! eternity! eternity!" shrieked a human soul,
breaking from its narrow prison-house in the wild struggle
of the foaming waters beneath the very feet of the half unconscious
dreamer. ... suicide! - that suicide a woman!
- met his horror-struck gaze. 0, the deep lesson which
the presence of violent. criminal death reads to the most
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