And the companion
walking beside him showed himself a true minister of Christ---humble,
tactful, delicate, yet with the courage of his message. What struck him
most, perhaps, was the revelation of what must have been Buntingford's
utter loneliness through long years; the spiritual isolation in which a
man of singularly responsive and confiding temper had passed perhaps a
quarter of his life, except for one blameless friendship with a woman now
dead. His utmost efforts had not been able to discover the wife who had
deserted him, or to throw any light upon her subsequent history. The law,
therefore, offered him no redress. He could not free himself; and he
could not marry again. Yet marriage and fatherhood were his natural
destiny, thwarted by the fatal mistake of his early youth. Nothing
remained but to draw a steady veil over the past, and to make what he
could of the other elements in life.
Alcott gathered clearly from the story that there had been no other woman
or women in the case, since his rupture with his wife. Was it that his
marriage, with all its repulsive episodes, had disgusted a fastidious
nature with the coarser aspects of the sex relation? The best was denied
him, and from the worse he himself turned away; though haunted all the
time by the natural hunger of the normal man.
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