Читать книгу Vashti; Or, Until Death Us Do Part - Augusta J. Evans - Страница 7

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“My knowledge of arithmetic is barely sufficient to take me through a brief shopping expedition.”

“Have you no ambition to increase it?”

“Dr. Grey, I have no ambition. That ‘last infirmity of noble minds’ has never attacked me; and, folding my hands, I chant ceaselessly to my soul, ‘Take thine ease, eat, drink, and be merry.’ The rapture of the mathematician, who bows before the shrine of his favorite science, is to my dull intellect as incomprehensible as the jargon of metaphysics or the mysteries wrapped up in Pali cerements. Equations, conic sections, differential calculus, constitute a skull and cross-bones to which I allow as wide a berth as possible.”

The weary dissatisfied expression of her large, luminous eyes, belied the sneer in her voice and the curl of her thin lip, and it cost her an effort to answer his next question.

“Will you tell me what rule you have adopted for the distribution of your time, and the government of your life?”

“Yes, sir; you are heartily welcome to it: ‘Yet a little slumber, a little folding of the hands to sleep.’ Laissez nous faire. Moreover, Dr. Grey, if you will courteously lend me your ears, I will favor you with a still more felicitous exposition of my invaluable organon.”

Stooping suddenly, she raised from the floor a small volume which had been concealed by her dress, and, as it opened at a page stained with the juice of a purple convolvulus, she smiled defiantly, and read with almost scornful emphasis,—

... “‘Ah, why Should life all labor be? Let us alone. Time driveth onward fast, And in a little while our lips are dumb. Let us alone. What is it that will last? All things are taken from us, and become Portions and parcels of the dreadful Past. Let us alone. What pleasure can we have To war with evil? Is there any peace In ever climbing up the climbing wave? All things have rest, and ripen towards the grave In silence; ripen, fall, and cease: Give us long rest or death; dark death or dreamful ease.’

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There, Dr. Grey, you have my creed and method,—Laissez nous faire.”

With a degree of gravity that trenched on sternness, he bowed, and answered,—

“So be it. I might insist that the closing lines of ‘Ulysses’ nobly refute all the numbing heresy of the ‘Lotos Eaters’—

... ‘But something ere the end, Some work of noble note may yet be done. That which we are, we are: One equal templer of heroic hearts, Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.’

But I would not rouse you from a lethargy, which, knowing it to be fatal to all hopes of usefulness, you still deliberately prefer. Take care, however, lest you bury the one original talent so deep that you fail to unearth it when the Master demands it in the final day of restitution. I have questioned you concerning your studies, because I desired and intended to offer my services as tutor, while you prosecuted mathematics and the languages; but I forbear to suggest a course so evidently distasteful to you. Unless I completely misjudge your character, I fear the day is not distant, when, haunted by ghosts of strangled opportunities, you will realize the solemn and painful truth, that,—

‘There is nothing a man knows, in grief or in sin, Half so bitter as to think, What I might have been!’”