Not even her father's
dying charge is needed to confirm her purpose, to fix her life in a self-
devotedness already fixed beyond all relaxing and all change. With his
death, indeed, the last faint hope fades utterly away that his great
purpose shall be achieved; and she thenceforth is
"But as the funeral urn that bears
The ashes of a leader."
But necessity lies only the more upon her--that most imperious of all
necessities which originates in her own innate nobleness--that she should
be _true_. When first she accepted this burden of her nobleness and her
sorrow, she had said--
"I will not count
On aught but being faithful;"
and faithfulness without hope--truthfulness without prospect, almost
without possibility, of tangible fulfilment--is all that lies before her
now. She accepts it in a mournful stillness, not of despair, and not of
resignation, but simply as the only true accomplishment of her life that
now remains.
The last interview with Don Silva almost oppresses us with its deep
severe solemnity. No bitterness of separation broods over it: the true
bitterness of separation fell upon her when her lover became false to
himself in the vain imagination that, so doing, he could by any
possibility be fully true to her.
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