misery.
How was it, after all, that the little figure of this infant should
overshadow earth and heaven to a man, a reasonable being, whose mind and
life were full of interests far more important? Love, yes! but love must
have some foundation. The feeling which clung so strongly to a child
with no power of returning it, and no personal qualities to excite it,
must be mere instinct not much above that of the animals. He would not
say this before Lucy, but there could be no doubt it was the truth. He
shook himself up mentally, and recalled himself to what he attempted to
represent as the true aspect of affairs. He was a man who had obtained
most things that this world can give. He had sounded life to its depths
(as he thought), and tasted both the bitter and the sweet; and after
having indulged in all these varied experiences it had been given to
him, as it is not given to many men, to come back from all wanderings
and secure the satisfactions of mature life, wealth, and social
importance, and the power of acting in the largest imperial concerns.
Round about him everything was his; the noble woods that swept away into
the mist on every side; the fields and farms which began to appear in
the misty paleness of the morning through the openings in the trees. And
if he had not by his side such a companion as he had once dreamed of,
the beautiful, high-minded ideal woman of romance, yet he had got one
of the best of gentle souls to tread the path of life along with him,
and sympathise even when she did not understand. For a man who had not
perhaps deserved very much, how unusual was this happiness. And was it
possible that all these things should be obscured, cast into the shade,
by so small a matter as the sickness of a child? What had the baby ever
done to make itself of so much importance? Nothing. It did not even
understand the love it excited, and was incapable of making any
response. Its very life was little more than a mechanical life. The
woman who fed it was far more to it than its father, and there was
nothing excellent or noble in the world to which it would not prefer a
glittering tinsel or a hideous doll. If the little thing had grown up,
indeed, if it had developed human tastes and sympathies, and become a
companion, an intelligence, a creature with affections and
thoughts,--but that the whole house should thus be overwhelmed with
miserable anxiety and pain because of a being in the embryo state of
existence, who c