Изображения страниц
PDF
EPUB

Edmunds, as he glanced towards the gaudier

victim, while re-loading his gun.

"Yes," observed Cécile ; the little hen is not. ing still."

"but I fear

See, Conny, she is flutter

"Oh! so she is, Cécile. It is a shocking sight! I cannot bear to look upon it."

[ocr errors]

"It is in truth, and yet it arrests the eye. Poor little modest housewife,' continued Cécile, in a low, musing tone, "thy homely garb might well have protected thee from the fate of thy chivalrous lord! I do not know how it is, Conny, but I am less moved by the aspect of the torn and mangled limbs, beautifully and intricately fashioned as they are, than by the thought that a life-a distinct, animated, sentient existence, is even now flitting before our eyes. See, there is the last con

vulsive struggle ;-now, all is ended."

"Poor little animal," cried Constance,

I wish she were alive again!"

፡፡ how

"Ah!" resumed Cécile, "will Kings, or Councils, or Parliaments restore for one brief hour that priceless gift which the ruthless shot has destroyed!-What say you, Conny? Perhaps this is the same poor little lady who, in

January last, used to hang about the windows of the library, and so tremulously pick up the crumbs of bread we would throw to her. Do you remember how we discovered her afterwards so carefully preparing her lonely nest in the shrubbery. Twice we fell in with the young unfledged brood. How anxiously she

watched over them; with what unwearied solicitude she provided for all their wants, and defended them from every peril until the whole sixteen could sally out, in noble array, around their exulting parent! I do not know how it is, but I do not think that I should much like shooting."

"What's the row?" exclaimed the Baronet, who with his son had drawn close to the unconscious speaker. "Has anything happened?"

"Oh! it is only Saint Cecilia moralizing upon the death of a pheasant," observed Edward.

"That girl will die in a mad-house, upon my word, she will," remarked Sir Charles, in a tone of the deepest conviction.

"Nothing more probable," said Cécile, scarcely recovered from her alarm on perceiving

that her half uttered thoughts had found so many listeners.

[ocr errors]

'Well, but I shall have to join you there some day or other," resumed Edward, "if to be strangely arrested by such a sight is any indication that so fearful a goal is to be the term of our course. Shall I tell you what often strikes me when I witness the gradual extinction of any life, however humble, in the order of Creation ?"

"No, pray do not," cried his smiling cousin : "I am sure that it is some dreadful induction of your German rationalism, which may full as

well remain untold and unheard."

"Come, come," resumed Edward, observing that his father and Constance had moved on, "I cannot allow my thoughts to be put to the Index before they are spoken. Did you ever reflect, Saint Cecilia, when you have chanced to watch, as now, the conscious, animated, immaterial spirit forsaking the frail form of one of these little beings, what close kindred that spirit might claim to our own?"

"I have, Edward, and not without some feeling of awe."

"Have you ever remembered, then, that since the spiritual nature of the soul is invoked as the principal earnest of its separate and immortal existence, we should either concede some such independent vitality to that intricate assemblage of immateriate faculties which constitute what we, in our ephemeral pride, call the instinct of animals; or else, we must resign ourselves to some such futurity as we attribute"

66

Enough, enough, Edward," cried his cousin. "I had well guessed what the conclusion was to be, and am sorry that I listened even so far.”

"What, Saint Cecilia! are you a doctor in Israel and will not dare to look that truth in the face, which is inscribed in each phrase of Nature's ever open volume."

"I have not feared more than yourself, Edward, to read in that volume, though I am not a doctor in Israel, and the lesson which it has taught me is far different from that which I am afraid you have learned, not there but elsewhere. I have seen, not in every phrase, but at every line, at every word, the evidences of that Great Being, inscrutable in his nature, still more inscrutable to us in his designs, yet whose

presence the arch-priest of your faith, if you have one, has pronounced it absolutely necessary to imagine in the order of nature, were it not so distinctly revealed.”

"Well, but Cécile, if Voltaire is your authority, you should abide by his conclusions upon other points as well as that one. When such as he have averred, that they hesitate in attributing to our destiny so immeasurable a superiority over that of those countless and also highly gifted living creatures who sport for an hour with us on the face of the creation, and then are seen no more perhaps we might pause likewise."

"But I cannot, I will not pause," cried the ardent Cécile, "when a thousand voices within me and around me are urging me onward to a far different conviction. I love and admire, as much as you can, the exterior marvels of the creation, and more particularly those humbler children of nature, so many of whom are destined to be our cherished companions and followers here below: I could not for a moment entertain the fearful delusion that my responsibility and my vocation are no other than theirs. I see the presence of an all-creating,

« ПредыдущаяПродолжить »