A few days
after I left them, the child fell ill, and died within a week. The
shock was too much for the wife, and within a month she followed the
child to the grave. My friend was left alone; and it seemed to me like
a ghastly fulfilment of his desires. I was with him at the funeral of
his wife; is it terrible to relate that there was a certain
tranquillity about him that suggested the weariness of one off whom a
strain had been lifted? But his own life was to be a short one; about
two years after he himself died very suddenly, as he had always desired
to die. I saw him often in the interval; he never recurred to the
subject, and I never liked to reopen it. Only once did he speak to me
of her. "I feel," he said to me on one occasion, quite suddenly, "that
the two are waiting for me somewhere, and that they understand; and my
hope is that when I am freed from this vile body I shall be
different--perhaps worthy of their love; it is all within me somewhere,
though I cannot get at it. Don't think of me," he said, turning to me,
"as a very brutal person. I have tried my best; but I think that the
capacity for real feeling has been denied me."
It is a very puzzling episode; what I feel is that though we always
recognise the limitations of people physically and mentally, we do not
sufficiently recognise the moral and emotional limitations. We think of
the will as a dominant factor in people's lives, as a thing that we can
all make use of if we choose; we forget that it is just as strictly
limited and conditioned as all our other faculties.
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