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It is no longer a half-despairing resignation to a superior force external to ourselves, which we can only vaguely hope is acting kindly and wisely, but it is an intelligent recognition of the true nature of our own interior forces and of the laws by which a robust spiritual constitution is to be developed; and the submission is no longer to limitations which drain life of its livingness, and against which we instinctively rebel, but to the law of our own evolution which manifests itself in continually increasing degrees of life and strength.
The doctor found him pacing his room in a manner betokening his half-despairing perplexity. "Colonel Graham," he said, "shall I surprise you when I say physicians are very fallible? I know that it is not the habit of the profession to admit this, but I have not come here to talk nonsense to you.
He stopped irresolutely, and cast a last, long, half-despairing look around him. Hitherto he had given that part of the wood nearest the plain his greatest attention. His glance now sought its darker recesses. Suddenly he became breathless. Was it a beam of sunlight that had pierced the groined roof above, and now rested against the trunk of one of the dimmer, more secluded giants?
He had once been a religious man; and with the old instinct of dependence on God, he clasped his hands together with a sudden, desperate energy, and looking up, cried, in a half-despairing, half-trustful voice, "Lord, help me!" No earnest cry like that ever goes up without an instant answer in the gift of divine strength. The man felt it in a stronger purpose and a quickening hope.
The fortress of Louisbourg arose not from victory but from defeat; not from military strength but from naval weakness; not from a new, adventurous spirit of attack, but from a half-despairing hope of keeping one last foothold by the sea. It was not begun till after the fortunes of Louis XIV had reached their lowest ebb at the Treaty of Utrecht in 1713.
On the rocky ridges of Waggon Hill and Cæsar's Camp, when the burghers in one supreme effort dashed against them the pick and pride of the commandos, they fought through the hours of night till dawn gave place to day, and the daylight waxed and waned, with a dogged, half-despairing courage that laughed to scorn even the regardless valour of a worthy foeman.
Many a young woman plants the seeds of consumption in some early sorrow, and many more sink the tone of their health to a low degree by desponding reveries and half-despairing longings for something they have but half conceived in their own minds, and put forth no efforts to obtain. It is a burning shame to our nation and age that our women are so impotent and sickly.
That would be quite time enough for her deed of courage, and no one thought of a midnight ride a wild, half-despairing girl, and a horse so full at once of timidity and courage, who would go forth to perform their feat of all feats at the hour of midnight. As usual, the girls crowded round Hollyhock that evening and asked for bogy and ghost stories.
She was disappointed by her sister's tone; for in the time past she had more than once suspected that Geraldine Challoner loved George Fairfax with a passionate half-despairing love, which, if unrequited, might make the bane of her life.
"Of course we're going to see each other," she said. "And there's such a lot you can do." She looked so earnestly entreating that Choate, who sat not far from her, gave a murmured: "Ah, Miss Amabel!" In his mind the half-despairing, wholly loving thought had been: "Good old girl! You're spending yourself and all your money, but it's no use no use."
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