Chapter XXV: Epilogue

ERIC, I fancy, will never marry. At least, he says so, and the words mean more with him than they would do on the lips of other men.

His was not a character—I recognised at last—to love lightly, or to change the object easily where once it had given its love. In every single point he had falsified the career which I had mapped out for him at starting. Not always, it is clear, does Cicero’s rule hold good—“_Imago animi vultus_; _indices oculi_.” Eric, for one, had demonstrated its incompleteness. I had thought him weak and vacillating. And his weakness, if ever it existed, had become his strength. Strong he had shown himself (in spite of his own words) both for the friend of his youth and the woman of his choice; strong to build himself a grand career; strong above all to conquer a temptation before which the strongest might have fallen; strong finally to fall and rise again, which is greater and grander, I take it, than not to fall. True of him, if of anyone—

“That men may rise on stepping-stones
Of their dead selves to higher things.”

Thank Heaven! there is no shadow of a cloud between us now. And though I cannot look for him at Fleetwater as yet, where the tantalising proximity of all he held most dear would make life for a time unbearable; yet surely, most surely, I know that we shall see him there some time, some day.

In appearance he is not altered much from the lad I loved at school and college, and from whom I parted not quite three years ago in his rooms at Trinity, starting, each of us, so confidently on the journey of a life for which I had made forecast of such different results. Only a weary look in his eyes, which time, I think, will surely lighten; only a line or two on his forehead, which time, I think, will surely smooth away.

And when he left us again for a long round of travel in Italy, Egypt, and the East, to enlarge his ideas and find fresh subjects for his pencil, it was with a heart full of hope and thankfulness that I bade him Godspeed.

For surely, most surely, I know that we shall have him once again with us—the Eric of the past, the dearest friend, save one, I ever knew—to share in and complete the happiness he had won for us out of the strong heart that only failed him once, and made out of failure a greater and far more glorious recovery. For time has been quietly perfecting its work, and when he comes to us again, we shall meet, I know, the Eric of the future, too, uprising from the Eric of the past.

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THE END.

FOOTNOTE.

{190} The following legend formed the subject of a short story in the “Cambridge Review,” June 1903.

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