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But only for an instant; then my horror, my anger turned to a great, crushing, all-consuming agony of pity for Bob, and I dropped my head on my hands and wept. It is hard to admit it, but it is true I wept uncontrollably. In an instant the room was quiet except for the sound of my own awful grief. I heard it, was ashamed of it, but I could not stop.
With all a strong man's virility and power he loved as only the strong can love, and through all his brooding that undercurrent ran like a swift and mighty river, love, stronger than hate, love, triumphing over death, love, deeper than hell, love, lifting to the zenith of heaven; only two things seemed to him verities at that moment, God above, and love within, two overwhelming truths, terrible in their power, all-consuming in their sweetness, one in their vast, incomprehensible entity of force, beneficent, to be forever sought for and chosen out of all the universe of good.
To a Being whom we have no faith in whom such a man has no faith in, I mean to say to the hand that struck which we can only think of as armed with an avenging sword, or an all-consuming firebrand! Pray to one who stands before us as a Nemesis of wrath and terror, hating and ready to crush us? humph!" And the lawyer wiped his brow.
Donald skilfully diverted the child's mind from this all-consuming topic by sliding the boy down to his foot and permitting him to swing gently there. Presently Nan excused herself, for the purpose of looking after the embers of Donald's recent raid. The instant the door closed behind her, old Caleb Brent looked across at his visitor. "You've heard of course, Mr.
Close to her heart she hugged the memory of the brief hours spent with the man whom she had been taught since childhood to look upon as her future husband, but for whom the all-consuming fires of love had only been fanned to life within her since that moment, now three weeks gone, that he had crushed her to his breast to cover her lips with kisses for the short moment ere he sacrificed his life to save her from a fate worse than death.
Thus the passion had grown all the more powerful for not being observed, and now the unseen fire had at a flash appeared as an all-consuming one. Turning back, he stood without the window, in the shadow, and looked through the glass at the trim young girl at work with her pies. In the modest, restful face he read the story of a heart that had carried great burdens patiently and nobly.
He was deciduous, but unlike a tree, he suffered a loss of most of the trunk of his entire being: the full love of a child for his mother that would never come again; the family that damaged and then vanished almost as quickly as one was conceived, gestated, and delivered as a member into its cell of sordid and clandestine activities; an infatuation with a girl that once seemed garish, all-consuming, and eternal as the sun; and the full pleasure of feeling those awesome gusts of wind hit against his face as a boy would, smelling the pile of winter leaves that he once jumped into as they began to suffocate him, and appreciating the significance of the simple delights of the ordinary as a child's mind did, and to which no vacation to Vientiane as an adult had the hope of restoring.
Infinite it is, and unthinkable; glorious, all-consuming, all-sufficing; food and drink, friendship and love, ambition and victory, joy, power, and eternity it is to him who finds it; and all things in this world are nothing to him who finds it. And so comes the victory to this soul.
His passion to share the secret had become all-consuming, as curiosity must when it works in the mind of a lonely man. To this end he had shadowed Eyelids all that day, giving him no opportunity for private talk with his family, and, finally, had prepared this trap of a drinking-bout, hoping that someone might commit himself.
But he was not as stout-mettled as she deemed him, or else the all-consuming thirst of life, youth's stark horror of death, made him a temporizing craven in that hour. "Who knows?" he answered. "Certes, I do not. But a thing so done, a thing in which the will and mind have no part, resolves itself perhaps into a sacrifice " He broke off there, perhaps from very shame.
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