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If the daughter had only dropped her strain of care and her habit of "bossing" she would have found a true companion in her mother, and would have been a healthier and happier woman herself. In pleasant contrast to this is the story of a family which had an old father who had lost his mind entirely, and had grown decrepit and childish in the extreme.
A gardener was in a leisurely way scraping the path with a spade, and a decrepit old woman in a black woollen cloak was hobbling across the garden walk. Sanin could not for one instant mistake this poor old creature for Gemma; and yet his heart leaped, and he watched attentively the retreating patch of black. Seven! chimed the clock on the tower. Sanin stood still.
I felt as if the whole man were a moral and physical humbug; his wonderful beauty of face, for aught I knew, might be removable like a mask; and, tall and comely as his figure looked, he was perhaps but a wizened little elf, gray and decrepit, with nothing genuine about him save the wicked expression of his grin.
Women instantly responded to the proclamation. Only the old men were left to help, only decrepit horses, rejected by the military requisition. More than once I journeyed far into the country, but I never saw an able-bodied man. What a gap to be filled! but the French peasant woman filled it. She harvested that first year, she has sowed and garnered season by season ever since.
The decrepit dame, who travelled round the parish upon a hand-barrow, circulating from house to house like a bad shilling, which every one is in haste to pass to his neighbour, she, who used to call for her bearers as loud, or louder, than a traveller demands post-horses, even she shared the same disastrous fate.
Have your days, Father, been passed in this deep solitude? and has your religion demanded it? 'Your freedom pleases me, replied the venerable man; 'and I wonder not at the question you propose. Not my religion, lady, but an enfeebled and decrepit frame chains me to this solitude. I have now outlasted a century, and my powers are wasted and gone.
Pah! this prating about immortality was absurd, convicted of meaninglessness before a tragedy like this; for what was an immortality worth that was given to her last decrepit phase of life, after all its beauty and strength and loveliness had passed soulless away? To be aught but a mockery, immortality must be as manifold as the manifold phases of life.
Verily, oftentimes my heart sinks within me when it is mine to vindicate the honour of thy holy cause against the young and the tender, the aged and the decrepit. But what are beauty and youth, grey hairs and trembling knees, in the eye of the Creator? Miserable worms are we all; nor is there anything acceptable in the Divine sight but the hearts of the faithful.
I sat down to an English breakfast and ate with a sort of languid appetite an appetite many weeks old and very decrepit and stirred myself to answer the questions of the four young men. And I told them the truth. "Well," said I, "as you press me I got it in the moon." "The moon?" "Yes, the moon in the sky." "But how do you mean?" "What I say, confound it!" "Then you have just come from the moon?"
Watching as you did the frolic of my little household, you saw how the memory of their bygone youth yet beautifies the Nymphs and Fauns in the moment of their loves, and how their ardour, reanimated an instant, can reanimate their charms. But the ruin of centuries shows again directly after. Alas! alas! the race of the Nymphs is old, very old and decrepit."
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