Already,
next day, with the rumour that Sebastian had left his home, it was
known that the expected marriage would not take place. The girl,
indeed, alleged something in the way of a cause on her part; but
seemed to fade away continually afterwards, and in the eyes of all
who saw her was like one [103] perishing of wounded pride. But to
make a clean breast of her poor girlish worldliness, before she
became a beguine, she confessed to her mother the receipt of the
letter--the cruel letter that had killed her. And in effect, the
first copy of this letter, written with a very deliberate fineness,
rejecting her--accusing her, so natural, and simply loyal! of a
vulgar coarseness of character--was found, oddly tacked on, as their
last word, to the studious record of the abstract thoughts which had
been the real business of Sebastian's life, in the room whither his
mother went to seek him next day, littered with the fragments of the
one portrait of him in existence.
The neat and elaborate manuscript volume, of which this letter formed
the final page (odd transition! by which a train of thought so
abstract drew its conclusion in the sphere of action) afforded at
length to the few who were interested in him a much-coveted insight
into the curiosity of his existence; and I pause just here to
indicate in outline the kind of reasoning through which, making the
"Infinite" his beginning and his end, Sebastian had come to think all
definite forms of being, the warm pressure of life, the cry of nature
itself, no more than a troublesome irritation of the surface of the
one absolute mind, a passing vexatious thought or uneasy dream there,
at its height of petulant importunity in the eager, human creature.
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