It was just after they had finished reading and discussing Dante's
Vision. What a wonderful man Mr. Severn was that he had taken two
children and guided them through that beautiful, fearful, wonderful
story! How it had impressed him then, and stayed with him all these
awful months and days since he had trodden the same fiery way--!
He reached his hand out for the book, bound in dull blue cloth, the
symbol of its serious import. He had not opened the book since they
finished it and Mr. Severn had handed it over to him and told him to
keep it, as he had another copy. He opened the book as if it had been
the coffin of his beloved, and there between the dusty pages lay a bit
of blue ribbon, creased with the pages, and jagged on the edges because
it had been cut with a jack knife. And lying smooth upon it in a golden
curve a wisp of a yellow curl, just a section of one of Marilyn's, the
day she put her hair up, and did away with the curls! He had cut the
ribbon from the end of a great bow that held the curls at the back of
her head, and then he had laughingly insisted on a piece of the curl,
and they had made a great time collecting the right amount of hair, for
Marilyn insisted it must not make a rough spot for her to brush. Then
he had laid it in the book, the finished book, and shut it away
carefully, and gone home, and the next day,--the very next day, the
thing had happened!
He turned the leaves sadly: "In midway of this our mortal life,
I found me in a gloomy wood, astray
Gone from the path direct:--"
It startled him, so well it fitted with his mood. It was himself, and
yet he could remember well how he had felt for the writer when he heard
it first. Terrible to sit here to-night and know it was himself all the
time the tale had been about! He turned a page or two and out from the
text there stood a line: "All hope abandon ye who enter here."
That was the matter with himself. He had abandoned all hope. Over the
leaf his eye ran down the page: "This miserable fate
Suffer the wretched souls of those who lived
Without praise or blame, with that ill band
Of angels mixed, who nor rebellious proved
Nor yet were true to God, but for themselves
Were only."
How well he remembered the minister's little comments as he read, how
the sermons had impressed themselves upon his heart as he listened, and
yet here he was, himself, in hell! He turned over the pages again
quickly unable to get away from the picture that grew in his mind, the
vermilion towers and minarets, the crags and peaks, the "little brook,
whose crimson'd wave, yet lifts my hair with horror," he could see it
all as if he had lived there many years. Strange he had not thought
before of the likeness of his life to this. He read again: "O Tuscan! thou who through the city of fire
Alive art passing,--"