“A fugitive and gracious light he seeks,     Shy to illumine; and I seek it too.
  This does not come with houses or with gold,
    With place, with honor, and a flattering crew;
  'Tis not in the world's market bought and sold.”
 
Three days passed by after Helen had returned to her father, during which the girl stayed by herself most of the time. When the breaking off of her engagement was known, many of her old friends came to see her, but the hints that they dropped did not move her to any confidences; she felt that it would not be possible for her to find among them any understanding of her present moods. Her old life, or rather the life to which she had been looking forward, seemed to her quite empty and shallow, and there was nothing useful that she knew of to do except to offer to help her father in such ways as she could. She drew back into her own heart, giving most of her time to thinking about Mr. Howard and Arthur, and no one but her father knew why it was that she was so subdued and silent.
It was only on the third morning, when there came a letter from Mr. Howard saying that he was coming out that afternoon to see her, that Helen seemed to be interested and stirred again. She went to the window more than once to look for him; and when at last her friend had arrived, and the two were seated in the parlor, she said to him without waiting for any circumstance, “I have been wishing very much to see you, Mr. Howard, because there is something I am anxious to talk to you about, if you will let me.”
“I am sorry to say that it is about myself,” she went on, when the other had expressed his willingness to hear her, “for I want to ask you to help me, and to give me some advice. I ought to have asked you the questions I am going to before this, but the last time I saw you I could think about nothing but Arthur. They only came to me after you had gone.”
“What are they?” asked the man.
“You must knew, Mr. Howard,” said Helen, “that it is you who have shown me the wrongness of all that I was doing in my life, and stirred me with a desire to do better. I find now that such thoughts have always been so far from me that the wish to be right is all that I have, and I do not know at all what to do. It seemed to me that I would rather talk to you about it than to anyone, even my own father. I do not know whether that is just right, but you do not mind my asking you, do you?”
“It is my wish to help you in every way that I can,” was the gentle response.
“I will tell you what I have been thinking,” said Helen. “I have been so unhappy in the last three days that I have done nothing at all; but it seemed to me somehow that it must be wrong of me to let go of myself in that way—as if I had no right to pamper myself and indulge my own feelings. It was not that I wished to forget what wrong things I have done, or keep from suffering because of them; yet it seemed to me that the fact that I was wretched and frightened was no excuse for my doing no good for the rest of my life. When I have thought about my duty before, it has always been my school-girl's task of studying and practicing music, but that is not at all what I want now, for I cannot bear to think of such things while the memory of Arthur is in my mind. I need something that is not for myself, Mr. Howard, and I find myself thinking that it should be something that I do not like to do.”
Helen paused for a moment, gazing at the other anxiously; and then she went on: “You must know that what is really behind what I am saying is what you said that evening in the arbor, about the kind of woman I ought to be because God has made me beautiful. My heart is full of a great hunger to be set right, and to get a clearer sight of the things that are truly good in life. I want you to talk to me about your own ideals, and what you do to keep your life deep and true; and then to tell me what you would do in my place. I promise you that no matter how hard it may be I shall feel that just what you tell me to do is my duty, and at least I shall never be happy again until I have done it. Do you understand how I feel, Mr. Howard?”
“Yes,” the man answered, in a quiet voice, “I understand you perfectly.” And then as he paused, watching the girl from beneath his dark brows, Helen asked, “You do not mind talking to me about yourself?”
“When a man lives all alone and as self-centered as I,” the other replied, smiling, “it is fatally easy for him to do that; he may blend himself with his ideals in such a curious way that he never talks about anything else. But if you will excuse that, I will tell you what I can.”
“Tell me why it is that you live so much alone,” said the girl. “Is it that you do not care for friends?”
“It is very difficult for a man who feels about life as I do to find many friends,” he responded. “If one strives to dwell in deep things, and is very keen and earnest about it, he is apt to find very little to help him outside of himself; perhaps it is because I have met very few persons in my life, but it has not happened to me to find anyone who thinks about it as I do, or who cares to live it with my strenuousness. I have met musicians, some who labored very hard at their art, but none who felt it a duty to labor with their own souls, to make them beautiful and strong; and I have met literary men and scholars, but they were all interested in books, and were willing to be learned, and to classify and plod; I have never found one who was swift and eager, and full of high impatience for what is real and the best. There should come times to a man, I think, when he feels that books are an impertinence, when he knows that he has only the long-delayed battle with his own heart to fight, and the prize of its joy to win. When such moods come upon him he sees that he has to live his life upon his knees, and it is rarely indeed that he knows of anyone who can follow him and share in his labor. So it is that I have had to live all my life by myself, Miss Davis.”
“You have always done that?” Helen asked, as he stopped.
“Yes,” he answered, “or for very many years. I have a little house on the wildest of lakes up in the mountains, wyhere I play the hermit in the summer, and where I should have been now if it had not been that I yielded to your aunt's invitation. When I spoke of having no friends I forgot the things of Nature, which really do sympathize with an artist's life; I find that they never fail to become full of meaning whenever my own spirit shakes off its bonds. It has always been a belief of mine that there is nothing that Nature makes that is quite so dull and unfeeling as man,—with the exception of children and lovers, I had much rather play my violin for the flowers and the trees.”
“You like to play it out of doors?” Helen asked, with a sudden smile.
“Yes,” laughed the other, “that is one of my privileges as a hermit. It seems quite natural to the wild things, for they have all a music of their own, a wonderful, silent music that the best musicians cannot catch; do you not believe that, Miss Davis?”
“Yes,” Helen said, and sat gazing at her companion silently for a minute. “I should think a life of such effort would be very hard,” she said finally. “Do you not ever fail?”
“I do not do much else,” he replied with a sad smile, “and get up and stumble on. The mastership of one's heart is the ideal, you know; and after all one's own life cannot be anything but struggle and failure, for the power he is trying to conquer is infinite. When I find my life very hard I do not complain, but know that the reason for it is that I have chosen to have it real, and that the essence of the soul is its effort. I think that is a very important thing to feel about life, Miss Davis.”
“That is why I do not wish to be idle,” said Helen.
“It is just because people do not know this fact about the soul,” the other continued, “and are not willing to dare and suffer, and overcome dullness, and keep their spiritual faculties free, that they sink down as they grow older, and become what they call practical, and talk very wisely about experience. It is only when God sends into the world a man of genius that no mountains of earth can crush, and who keeps his faith and sweetness all through his life that we learn the baseness of the thought that experience necessarily brings cynicism and selfishness. There is to me in all this world nothing more hateful than this disillusioned worldliness, and nothing makes me angrier than to see it taking the name of wisdom. If I were a man with an art, there is nothing, I think, that I should feel more called to make war upon; it is a very blow in the face of God. Nothing makes me sadder than to see the life that such people live,—to see for instance how pathetic are the things they call their entertainments; and when one knows himself that life is a magic potion, to be drank with rapture and awe,—that every instance of it ought to be a hymn of rejoicing, and the whole of it rich and full of power, like some majestic symphony. I often find myself wishing that there were some way of saving the time that people spend in their pleasures;
    “'Life piled on life
  Were all too little, and of one to me
  Little remains.'
As I kneel before God's altar of the heart I know that if I had infinite time and infinite energy there would be beauty and joy still to seek, and so as I look about me in the world and see all the sin and misery that is in it, it is my comfort to know that the reason for it is that men are still living the lives of the animals, and have not even dreamed of the life that belongs to them as men. That is something about which I feel very strongly myself,—that is part of my duty as a man who seeks worship and rightness to mark that difference in my own life quite plainly.”
Mr. Howard paused for a moment, and Helen said very earnestly, “I wish that you would tell me about that.”
“I consider it my duty,” the other replied, “to keep all the external circumstances of my life as simple and as humble as I should have to if I were quite poor. If I were not physically unable, I should feel that I ought to do for my own self all that I needed to have done, for I think that if it is necessary that others should be degraded to menial service in order that my soul might be beautiful and true, then life is bad at the heart of it, and I want none of its truth and beauty. I do not have to look into my heart very long, Miss Davis, to discover that what I am seeking in life is something that no millions of money can buy me; and when I am face to face with the sternness of what I call that spiritual fact, I see that fine houses and all the rest are a foolish kind of toy, and wonder that any man should think that he can please me by giving the labor of his soul to making them. It is much the same thing as I feel, for instance, when I go to hear a master of music, and find that he has spent his hours in torturing himself and his fingers in order to give me an acrobatic exhibition, when all the time what I wish him to do, and what his genius gave him power to do, was to find the magic word that should set free the slumbering demon of my soul. So I think that a man who wishes to grow by sympathy and worship should do without wealth, if only because it is so trivial; but of course I have left unmentioned what is the great reason for a self-denying life, the reason that lies at the heart of the matter, and that includes all the others in it,—that he who lives by prayer and joy makes all men richer, but he who takes more than his bare necessity of the wealth of the body must know that he robs his brother when he does it. The things of the soul are everywhere, but wealth stands for the toil and suffering of human beings, and thousands must starve and die so that one rich man may live at ease. That is no fine rhetoric that I am indulging in, but a very deep and earnest conviction of my soul; first of all facts of morality stands the law that the life of man is labor, and that he who chooses to live otherwise is a dastard. He may chase the phantom of happiness all his days and not find it, and yet never guess the reason,—that joy is a melody of the heart, and that he is playing upon an instrument that is out of tune. Few people choose to think of that at all, but I cannot afford ever to forget it, for my task is to live the artist's life, to dwell close to the heart of things; it is something that I simply cannot understand how any man who pretends to do that can know of the suffering and starving that is in the world, and can feel that he who has God's temple of the soul for his dwelling, has right to more of the pleasures of earth than the plainest food and shelter and what tools of his art he requires. If it is otherwise it can only be because he is no artist at all, no lover of life, but only a tradesman under another name, using God's high gift to get for himself what he can, and thinking of his sympathy and feeling as things that he puts on when he goes to work, and when he is sure that they will cost him no trouble.”
Mr. Howard had been speaking very slowly, and in a deep and earnest voice; he paused for a moment, and then added with a slight smile, “I have been answering your question without thinking about it, Miss Davis, for I have told you all that there is to tell about my life.”
Helen did not answer, but sat for a long time gazing at him and thinking very deeply; then she said to him, her voice shaking slightly: “You have answered only half of my question, Mr. Howard; I want you to tell me what a woman can do to bring those high things into her life—to keep her soul humble and strong. I do not think that I have your courage and self-reliance.”
The man's voice dropped lower as he answered her, “Suppose that you were to find this friend of yours that knows you so well, and loves you so truly; do you not think that there might be a chance for you to win this prize of life that I speak of?” Helen did not reply, but sat with her eyes still fixed upon the other's countenance; as he went on, his deep, musical voice held them there by a spell.
“Miss Davis,” he said, “a man does not live very long in the kingdom of the soul before there comes to be one thing that he loves more than anything else that life can offer; that thing is love. For love is the great gateway into the spiritual life, the stage of life's journey when human beings are unselfish and true to their hearts, if ever the power of unselfishness and truth lies in them. As for man, he has many battles to fight and much of himself to kill before the great prizes of the soul can be his—but the true woman has but one glory and one duty in life, and sacredness and beauty are hers by the free gift of God. If she be a true woman, when her one great passion takes its hold upon her it carries all her being with it, and she gives herself and all that she has. Because I believe in unselfishness and know that love is the essence of things, I find in all the world nothing more beautiful than that, and think that she has no other task in life, except to see that the self which she gives is her best and Inghest, and to hold t............