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THE LOVE OF JOHN RUSKIX
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RUSKIN DISCOVERS MILLAIS DECLARING HIS LOVE FOR EUPHEMIA
prophecy or irony fell from his brush or not, it would be unfair for me to predicate. However, there it hangs today, a tragedy within a tragedy to the seeing eye.
The intimacy of friend and wife ripened faster than they knew. One day it would be a playing at draughts, with the board upon their knees, she all intent upon the pieces, with rounded chin cupped in supporting hands; another would be a childlike game of skipping stones upon the lake. In one of these artless contests, carried away by her girlish abandon, he had taken her hand and, bending low, had saluted it for its prowess. . A something of fear might have startled her then, for she started back to become quiet and abstracted. Up to this point, what may have lain between them was as impassable as any garden wall.
And now comes the time — after so
much outlining of counsel — when the defendant must be called to the bar.
The day following, dawning clear and cloudless overhead, found the household stirring early, as if much was to be taken advantage of. After a light breakfast, Millais had excused himself, suggesting a ramble in the woods in search of an uncommon wild flower. Euphemia sat in the lozenge window, an embroidery frame in her hands. As the patch of morning light crept over her, tinting her heavy hair with the countless shades of gold in a crucible, she turned toward John Ruskin, bent over his desk at his selfimposed task. "Dear John," she said quietly, "have you noticed how beautiful the countryside is this morning ? All Nature seems out for a holiday."
He looked up with far-away eyes for a moment. "Yes, yes, it is true/' he said; "the morning of my life I spent in drinking it in. Now I feel it working thru every pore in its effort to be free. It surges around my heart in its channel to the world — it wells into my eyes and chokes in my breath. I can never be rid of it all, never!"
"Will you not walk out with me into the pasture, where the oak leaves will soon begin to fall?" she asked, softly.
His cold face softened around mouth and eyes, and his quill dropped to his desk. His trembling fingers groped for it again. "You do not understand, child, ' ' he said ; ' ' nobody ever will — the effort that lies struggling within me to bring forth my naked soul to the sunlight. Some one, some day, will have attained it, and then that creature will have touched the robe of his God, to see with eyes deeper and larger than the sum of all humankind."
She turned sadly away, like a lectured child, and stole from the room of visions.
On the stone portico she found John Millais, on a Grecian bench. He had noticed her swift outcoming and her high color, and cavalierly rose and bowed her to a seat beside him. The