"Well, you're a strange girl!" said Cornelia, who was a little confused.
"I don't see how you can ever be either happy or unhappy. Nothing human
seems to have any hold upon you."
"I'm very human," returned Sophie, shaking her head. "There are some
things, I think, would soon drive me out of the world, if God wore to
send them to me."
The idea of death, when brought home to Cornelia, never failed to affect
her. If she had been planning the destruction of an enemy, she would
have wept bitterly at the sight of that enemy's dead body; nay, even at
a vivid account of his death. Sophie's words brought tears to her eyes
at once, and a quaver into her voice.
"Don't--please don't talk that way, dear; it isn't so easy to die as you
think, I'm sure. The idea of dying because anybody was wicked! It's only
because you've been ill, and have got into the habit of expecting to
die, that you have such ideas--isn't it? don't you think so? You'll stop
feeling so as soon as you're well again--won't you?"
"Perhaps," said Sophie, with, it may be, a particle of satire in her
smile.
They now got up from the rock and began to descend toward the Parsonage.
Sophie stepped with a quick but careful precision, never slipping or
missing her footing. Cornelia made short rushes, and daring jumps, often
coining near to fall. Her mind was a Babel of new thoughts; or rather
one idea spoke with many tongues, and made much disturbance.
The greatest crimes are often perpetrated by those who, in their own
phrase, follow the lead of the moment, and let things take their course.
Things never take their own course, in a certain sense; what we do, and
say, and think, creates circumstances and shapes results. There seems
always to be a choice of paths. We profess--and believe--that we are
neutral; that we surrender ourselves to the chance of the current. But
let an evil hope--a dangerous wish--once enter our minds: something we
venture only half to hint to ourselves in the non-committal whispers of
a craven, unacknowledged longing-working secretly within us, it will act
upon our course as a rudder, which, hidden beneath the water, steers the
vessel inevitably toward a certain goal. Perhaps, when the current has
become too swift, and the rudder, clamped in one fatal position, cannot
be turned, we may realize, and recoil; but now, indeed, we follow the
lead of the moment; now, beyond a doubt, we let things take their
course: we are hurried on irresistibly; that which we dared not openly
to name, or fairly to face, now looms awfully above us--an irrevocable,
accomplished fact.
Beyond doubt it would have been safer to have steadily and fearlessly
kept the end in view from the outset: for the full horror of it would
have been visible while yet there was time to change our minds. Few
people have the nerve to jump from a precipice, or stand in way of a
railway-engine, without first shutting their eyes, and perhaps their
ears also.