CHAPTER XII

Mr Burden stood at the counter where little rails of shining brass were reflected in the polished wood. He looked for some immediate obedience; but his aspect at this moment was not such that his wealth or station could be seen.

Mr Burden stood at the counter with both his hands upon it, waiting till someone should notice that he was there. Such duties are reluctantly undertaken by the youngest of a company, and there approached him at length a young clerk with pale and curly hair, watery blue eyes, and of a frank, uncivil manner, as though his heart were in the right place but very small.

Mr Burden said to him:

“I want to see Mr Abbott.”

With easy negligence the young clerk shoved across the counter a form on which was printed:—

form

Mr Burden looked at this form a moment, and then lifting his head:

“Give him my name,” he said.

“Whatisyer name.”

“Burden ... Mr Burden. Tell Mr Abbott Mr Burden is here, and wishes most particularly to see him.”

The young clerk sauntered off with a careless ease, and Mr Burden stood waiting at the counter. His face was very pale, his manner unsteady. Beyond, in little pens of glass, ill-paid men, working at books, peeped furtively; some smiled, others looked round to catch a neighbour’s eye. Mr Burden was oblivious of it all.

The young clerk returned and said, as a servant in livery speaks to a tradesman in none:

“Mr Abbott can’t see you.”

Patches of colour lit up in Mr Burden’s face; but, before he spoke or moved, a little dry, grey man who had served his master faithfully for twenty years, and to whom Mr Burden was as familiar as the City streets, had seen what was passing and had come forward. He pushed aside the very foolish youth, and said in a low, respectful voice:

“You had much better wait a little, Mr Burden, sir; you had indeed.”

Mr Burden shook his head slowly. He tookup an office pen and wrote a few lines upon a memorandum sheet. He folded it and put Mr Abbott’s name outside.... “Take him that,” he said, “I must see him.”

What he had written I do not know; but I am assured that the address was almost illegible, so violently did his hand tremble.

The little grey man went off in some fear. He was not long away. When he came back, he bore in his hand the same note, unopened. “I am very sorry, Mr Burden, sir,” he said, most anxiously ... “indeed, if you will let me....”

Mr Burden took the note from him and tore it into twenty pieces methodically and strongly, and scattered them upon the floor, casting them deliberately down like seed to grow up into some remorseful harvest. Then, the little grey man watching him anxiously as he went, he passed through the monumental doors into the street.

It was with a most unnatural energy that he pushed through the crowds on the pavement. His emotion forced a spasm of life through the worn channels of his brain; he walked rapidly, his head bent down, till he came to Broad Street and the offices of the M’Korio. The giant saw him as he passed up the great stairs and saluted him, but Mr Burden noticed nothing. He went on at once to that principalroom, where he knew that a meeting of the Board was to be held, and into this room he strode, full of purpose, but checked a moment by the presence of others as he entered.

He saw by the window the little group which, as he thought, had ruined his peace for ever, and, among them, he saw Cosmo. He saw Cosmo standing as a friend of theirs should stand, talking with them familiarly.

They were four: Cosmo and Mr Barnett, Lord Benthorpe and Mr Harbury: their minds at ease on that quiet and sunlit afternoon, fresh with the activity of the City, ready for the action of life.

To each of them great fortune promised: and to Mr Barnett, who was already very wealthy, more than fortune—true political power, a thing to him worth all the effort of a life. They stood there at the window, these four men, making not only their own success, but the success of England, and building up yet another new people over seas. There was a natural buoyancy in all their attitudes; the hard work had been done, and only the last stone remained to be raised. Then the one would have recovered his honour, another have solved his indebtedness, another have found himself secure for the first time inpermanent wealth, another in retirement and leisure, and strong over men.

They knew, indeed, what phantasies and little meticulous rules had haunted this fifth man that had entered. They knew their Mr Burden by this time; especially Cosmo, his son, foresaw what effort had still to be gone through. But they had no doubt of success, for a man thus sensitive is also weak and very yielding to persuasion: nay, as he entered, that weakness of his was apparent, in the hesitation of his step and the uncertain glance which he cast upon them.

Cosmo hung back a little, for he revered his father. The three others came forward with effusion; Lord Benthorpe with perhaps rather more restraint than the rest; and Mr Barnett, taking it upon himself to be spokesman said:

“My dear Mr Burden!” and he took Mr Burden’s hand in his right hand and put his left hand over it and held it fast, to show a real friendship; and then he pulled up to the table a great chair of dignity, and asked Mr Burden to be seated in it. Mr Burden said: “Thank ye”: he sat down slowly, as would a man that bore a heavy sack upon his shoulders, and the rest sat down around the table.

After a little silence, Cosmo asked his father whether his train had been punctual. Mr Burden answered oddly. He said in a manner, which (alas!) still savoured of pomposity:

“Gentlemen....” Then he coughed and was silent.

Mr Barnett, who all his life had possessed the art of managing men, smiled a ready, but not convincing smile, and said:

“Eh, Mr Burten? Yes?”

Mr Burden, with a troubled look, and with eyebrows drawn together and upwards, looked round at them, avoiding the eyes of each, and gazed to his right at the window, as might a man who had the direction of a battle, but who knew nothing of war, and who saw the closing in of lines;—and fate, and dread, and ending coming forward upon him out of the smoke and clamour.

He turned his head slowly round; he shifted his feet nervously, and he began again:

“Gentlemen ... I have been thinking ... that there are some things ... I don’t say many ... but still there are some things which might be settled without hurting us and without hurting anyone else, and.... Of course I understand the position fully.” He tried to smile and failed. “I am a man of the world, gentlemen; I understand the positionfully ... I know it may be a little sacrifice ... I think you will all agree with me it should be settled.”

Mr Barnett, who all his life had possessed the art of managing men, cleared his throat, and spoke rapidly in a confident tone: his hands were clasped before him upon the table, his short creative thumbs were pressed together. He said:

“I think we exactly know what it is in Mr Burten’s mind? It does Mr Burten to his honour. Mr Burten is alluding herein, Lord Bent’orpe” (for Mr Barnett always addressed Lord Benthorpe upon such occasions—and Lord Benthorpe bowed very slightly, as men do who owe nothing and can give much) “Mr Burten is alluding, Lord Bent’orpe, I say, to our policy with regard to Mr Âppott herein. Mr Burten, it does you much to your honour.”

Lord Benthorpe, whose ignorance of all these things was that of a sincere and honourable gentleman, bowed again to Mr Burden: it was a very slight bow, even more slight than that accorded to Mr Barnett; and I am sorry to say that, immediately afterwards, he had the lack of tact to remark: “I am sure that any such small matter as Mr Burden wishes can be arranged.”

Mr Barnett betrayed considerable irritation.

“With all respect due,” he said—in spite of his accent, he had a great command of English idiom—“with all respect due, and ready, Lord Bent’orpe, and with every desire I have to spare——” here he hesitated a moment, and Mr Harbury, to whom English was a familiar language, murmured, “susceptibilities”—“susceptibilities,” continued Mr Barnett, still pondering on all the syllables, “we have other interests herein than alone our own to consider. We have the interests also of the shareholders surely to consider. I think one will agree with me? Ah?”

He lay back a little in his chair, and looked round at his three companions, and then a little rapidly to his left at Mr Burden: Mr Burden was silent, and Mr Barnett went on:

“We have, I say also, the shareholder-interest to consider. If we had ourselves alone to safeguard so, we should be understanding Mr Åppott’s position; indeed, I am very sure. Büt” (and here Mr Barnett lowered his voice in a manner which would have been impressive even to a larger audience, and wagged his head gloomily): “Büt have we choice I fear...?”

He looked sadly a moment at the middle of the table, with an expression not unlike that ofan animal about to be sacrificed, then throwing up his hands with the palms outwards, said in a sudden return of native feeling:

“Ach! God! He hass not come in! He hass not come in! It is right on his own head, I say.”

It was not often that Mr Barnett allowed a sudden revulsion of feeling to awaken in him the exclamations of his youth, but he felt strongly upon Mr Abbott’s action; he thought it stupid; he thought it unbusiness-like. He thought it dangerous to the M’Korio Delta Development Co. He thought it, from what he knew of the English, un-English, and, during the few seconds of that angry phrase, a native phrase had returned to him, strongly borne upon a gust of natural passion.

Cosmo tentatively intervened:

“Perhaps, father, you could go and see Mr Abbott again?” Mr Burden, hearing the voice of his son, and being thereby suddenly reminded of his home and of many years, looked up with an awful pain in his eyes.

“No,” he said.

Then there was another awkward silence, which Lord Benthorpe did not much relieve by saying twice the words, “I hope, ... I hope,” and looking round with an uncertain smile.

Mr Harbury broke in, with the air of a man whose thought has matured; he leant his chin upon his left hand, and looked steadily at Mr Burden.

“Mr Burden, I think you will admit that Mr Abbott should have come in. If he does not come in, we are absolutely bound to oppose him with all our force. You see that as well as I do. You cannot justly complain if we destroy that which attempts to destroy us. You cannot justly complain if you refuse to persuade him further, and refuse also to help us in our self-defence against him. There is no possible third course.”

All this was said fixedly and clearly, as Mr Harbury had long learnt to say the thing that should dominate a weak man’s mind; but Mr Burden was so ill as to be perverse and irrational; and the anger that makes men drunk was rising up in him again.

He cried much louder than he had meant:

“I have said all I have to say.”

His anger filled and impelled him; he kept control of his body to some extent, but no longer of his mind; and he continued still loudly, without reason, and forgetting his determination to be cold:

“I will not be a party to any intrigue against my friend!”

Now such are the limits of human nature, and such is its feebleness, that even men like Mr Barnett (who had known all his life how to manage men) can lose their steadfast poise in a sharp moment of wrath. He looked round smartly, he put his face somewhat too suddenly forward, as towards an opponent, and thrust into Mr Burden’s already kindled fires the fuel of an insult.

Those two deep sunken lines which marked the financier’s heavy cheeks like furrows and drew down the lowering corners of his mouth, were contracted into a kind of intense sneer; and he said, without opening his teeth:

“You will party be to your pocket whatever!”

Then Mr Burden, power bubbling up within him in spite of his age, in spite of his illness, and filled, in spite of his wealth, with a desire for freedom, cried out at him:

“Take care, Barnett, you’re going a little too far, just a little too far.... I wouldn’t have that ... not for worlds!”

Mr Burden’s breath came very quickly, and he had his lips as closely pressed together as any had yet seen them, and his head was full with the blood of his anger. But there was anger in Mr Barnett also, though of another race and kind and climate; and he said with afull sneer, where only half a sneer had been before:

“What can you do? So?”

I repeat, for the twentieth time, that Mr Barnett’s knowledge of men had never failed him. He must not be judged on this exceptional case, nor condemned because he underestimated the follies that men like Mr Burden can commit, when their state of mind is such as was then Mr Burden’s state of mind. For, a passion like a fighting passion possessed Mr Burden, and rioted through his aged and enfeebled body, forcing its organs beyond their power, and straining the material framework of his life. In that passion he had forgotten decent conduct; he had forgotten investments and all that investments should mean to a just and reasonable man. He repeated without moving:

“What can I do?” He said it two or three times in a low voice. He remembered a furious letter to the Press which he had not posted: he remembered his fear lest the Press should refuse to print it. He remembered his sufferings as the syndicate was preparing, he remembered his yielding, and what that yielding had cost him in the soul. He remembered above all Mr Abbott, Charles Abbott, his friend—and, remembering these things, he lost all control.

He snatched up his hat from the ground, and thrust it far back upon his head at random: he sprang upright: he held his chair tilted back with one hand; with the other he grasped his umbrella in a kind of swagger, tip to ground, as though it had been the scabbard of a sword. He seemed vigorous, or perhaps distraught: intoxicated with the words that rose in him.

Mr Harbury, whose judgment I will always trust in such matters, and who was once not unacquainted with the management of the stage, has told me that never in his life, not even in the Levant, had he seen so dramatic a passage of anger as was that of this old Englishman in the toils: all his respectable English dress was at random; his sober English gestures became those of a man who fights or labours; and it is a detail worthy of notice, that the bone stud at his throat broke as he started up, and that his collar went flying loose at random. He shouted at them:

“What can I do? Oh, I can do a great deal, I can! You, Barnett, and you, Harbury, and all of you! All!”

Perhaps he actually felt the presence of a crowd: the massed forces of this new world surging against him; he spoke as though to numbers.

MR BURDEN IN HIS LAST UNFORTUNATE FIT OF PASSION(FROM A SKETCH VERY KINDLY PROVIDED BY MR HARBURY)

“I can smash it! I can smash you, and yourprecious shareholders ... and, and the Duke ... and the whole thing! I can go and say why I went! Eh? Oh! good Lord! and I shall print it.... If they won’t print it in your cursed papers, I’ll placard it; I’ll cover the town with it; I’ll put your names up high—all your names—your names that you hide, and the names that you have had and lost ... swindlers and thieves and scum!”

And, after that outburst, he recovered himself a moment, and stood away from them, breathing too hard, while Mr Harbury looked down, and Mr Barnett smiled a drawn smile of hatred that would not betray fear.

Lord Benthorpe, a soldier in his youth, was very genuinely afraid; he was afraid of something indefinable, of catastrophe ... he did not understand these things.

There passed through Mr Burden’s mind a spasm of calm which he mistook for self-control; he fumbled at his collar trying to straighten it, he put on a civic dignity, and stood up stiffly, and turned to his son and said:

“Come with me, Cosmo.”

Cosmo, whom this wild scene had distressed beyond bearing, looked down nervously at the table, shuffled the papers before him, and murmured almost inaudibly:

“Don’t make a fool of yourself, father.”

Then Mr Burden, stooping forward hurriedly, went out.

There was a full three minutes of silence, during which Mr Barnett’s face looked like the face of one of those old and monstrous things, enormous, dug from Assyrian sands, while Mr Harbury coughed twice, and sidled his eyes uncertainly, and Lord Benthorpe twiddled his fingers upon his trembling knees.

Then Cosmo, still in confusion, desiring to see whether indeed he would ruin them all and desiring to be rid of the atmosphere of anger, got up and went out after his father.

In the street another beam of those few which support the structure of human life crashed within him; the old man’s brief draft of energy ran out and was lost utterly.

The mechanical action continued; he could pass through the crowds with whom he had mixed for fifty years, but he felt a growing tension of the brain and some such abandonment of grasp and power, as men feel who are drowning, and who lose their consciousness just before they drown.

A few steps behind him followed Cosmo, his son. Interests, more momentous than the life of one man, made it imperative to Cosmo that the M’Korio should not be betrayed. Therewas just time for his father to give notice of disclaimer; there was ample time to visit some one of those newspapers that continued in spite of loss and a deserved unpopularity to attack our great scheme of Empire. The exchange was shut. There was time to ruin everything before the morning. Nor could Cosmo know what his father suffered: he followed in the interests of the M’Korio, and, happily, his father did not know that he followed.

There are duties of many kinds; and Cosmo was doing one of these many duties as best he knew.

He saw his father pass the statue of Mr Peabody, philanthropist, cross Cornhill, and King William Street, and make for the Cannon Street terminus; but Cosmo was a man to do his duty, when he did it, thoroughly: it is a habit to which he owes the great position he now enjoys.[11]He did not lose sight of Mr Burden until he had seen him actually enter the gates of the railway station; then only did he turn away, with heaven knows how much relief, and plan such recreation as was legitimately his after the strain of the last few hours. He sent first a telegram to Mr Barnett to reassure him, and then cast off all business andwent west, to spend the evening with such companions as he had previously engaged.

But Mr Burden, bowing under the increasing weight of his malady, hesitated as he went up to take his ticket. He had forgotten, and was at a loss in everything. He did not remember his season ticket; and, when he stood before the little window, an impatient crowd gathered behind him, cursing at his delay. He had forgotten even the name of the station for his home. The trained clerk was quick enough to meet the difficulty. He took the gold piece that the old merchant had put down, and gave him in exchange such a third-class ticket as would carry him to the very extremities of the suburban zone. Mr Burden looked at the unfamiliar name upon the paste-board and moved slowly on to the platform; a considerable volley from the long queue whom he had just released followed his shambling figure; till a wit at the head of it restored the public humour by giving him very publicly the title of Methuselah. Mr Burden, wandering vaguely towards the train, did not so much as hear.

On the platform the porters knew him, and, in spite of the colour of his ticket, opened for him a first-class carriage; one, with the ready courtesy of his kind, helped him to his place, then, turning, tapped his forehead and jerkedhis thumb over his shoulder with a leer; for Mr Burden was evidently very ill indeed.

In the train he sat, relieved by some repose, and conscious (in a blurred way) that an old man in the corner of a railway carriage was safer from insult and observation, than wandering on a platform, a thing for gibes.

He sat dully, his brows contracting now and then. The names of the stations pleased him, because they were familiar. He tried to remember their order, or at least the name of such as he had not yet reached; but he could not. He was puzzled, and looked round at his fellow passengers, as though for help. They glanced at him above their papers, and saw that he was ill. They feared for the decencies. One, more refined than the rest, bolted out at the next stopping-place. The others defended themselves with silence, reading steady behind the bulwark of the evening papers.

The old man turned to the window beside them, and watched the stations and the people as the train went on. He saw the news upon the placards, flaring under the flaring lights. He recited the headlines slowly to himself. They were associated dimly, he knew not why, with anxiety; they distressed him.

Then there was a little darkness and arumble, and he heard the name of Norwood. He recognised it at once, and got out, and stood irresolutely at the gate. The collector took the ticket out of his hand, and smiled. Mr Burden looked at him fixedly, wondering at his smile, and felt for a moment an angry wave of emotion. He took this man also for one of his enemies.

But a muddled feeling of pleasant association came after. He took him foolishly for a friend, and smiled and nodded in reply. Then, by pure instinct, such as animals have, he found the way towards his home.

He came up that familiar road, his head reeling, and a bond, as though of iron, oppressing it within; and, as he walked, he suffered some dull ache continually. His slow steps jarred him; and now and then those pulsating throbs that are Death’s artillery preparing his attack, hammered at the walls of his being.

THE SERIOUS INDISPOSITION OF MR BURDEN IN THE TRAIN

He kept to one line of the pavement to make more sure; and once he thought: “Perhaps I am drunk.” For it flashed twice on him that he was something different from himself; and he mixed with a night forty years gone, when he had drunk a whole bottle of some kind of wine. He heard again his father’s anger; and it seemed to him, in a fantastic way, that he wasabout to meet that anger now—after all those years.

The functions of humanity were breaking down in him: memory, connection, harmony. Oh, poor Mr Burden! He had not known what was meant by the preachers when they preached; he had not known what was before him when they talked of the Soul. Mr Burden had called it immortal in his recited creed, and very right had he been in so calling it, and he was to prove it right in astounding trials, but in so doing quite to pass beyond the meaning of his word or theirs.

He came up that familiar road: he saw the gates of his own house—they both stood white in the evening. Habit (or ritual) the mistress of men sane, the good nurse of the last hours, carried him stumbling beyond the first gate. He passed the lodge, and, stumbling still, he reached the steps at his door. Here the old man would have sat down, as beggars do, to rest, had not habit still sustained and preserved his manhood: for never in his life had he done so strange a thing as to sit upon the doorsteps of a house.

It was his house, and he was master of it. He felt in his pocket for a key, and found one. He tried the door with it; but the key was too large. Many thoughts at once confused him,for he was troubled by Pain and Mortality: Pain and Mortality wrestled with his failing manhood, to mount, to ride, to conquer. But they were not in the saddle yet. He was determined to open his own door. He fancied many things at once. That his door had changed, or the key. Of his home and himself he was still sure; but his key and his door had already entered that world where all things common change and mingle, and where some other things, less known, emerge quite fixed for ever. Of his home and himself, he was still sure. His key and his door were already passing; himself and his home were, alas! to follow.

As he grated at the door, a faithful servant of his, a woman of the name of Kate Hatteras, heard him, and ran and opened. He would have told her the miracle of the door and of the key, but Pain—now grown into the whole of himself and wrestling hard, a power that knew its aims—Pain constrained him. He groaned, and his servant supported him deftly with her laborious and dutiful arm, and there flashed between them that good bond of long acquaintance, and Charity came into this house and visited its dying master—the first of the last angels. And, after Charity, there came those three great spirits, whose Hebrew namesI never knew, but which are called in our language the Design, and the Mercy, and the Justice, of God.

Charity and the old servant helped him up the stair, soothing him; he would have still spoken of the key and of the door; he smiled with smiles that were those of a child or of a man in extreme old age. Then his pain returned, and he groaned; for the pain was in the head, where is the citadel of a man besieged. His keep was taken.

Once, during that last little pilgrimage, upon a landing, he stopped, and tried to speak some senile syllables. He wished to thank his companion courteously. No one else had been directly good to him and to his dissolving humanity in all these terrible hours; but, in the midst of his attempt, the key returned to him. He mixed the mention of it into his speech, frowned a little, and stopped.

“Come, sir,” said that admirable woman, “come along; you’ll be better, sir. Don’t you take on; now don’t ’ee”; for she had been born away from towns, and her duty, her service, her honour, her hard work, and her kind of English, were all one thing.

So he took comfort, in spite of his pain, and her help was his support; nor had he any other friend, from that moment until he died.

Mr Burden was put to bed, not only by this servant, but by another named Elizabeth, and by the knife-and-boot boy too, whose daily task was indeed accomplished before nine, but who commonly remained against orders till eleven, that he might enjoy communion with his kind. And all these three, Kate Hatteras, Elizabeth, and the knife-boy, were awed in the presence of this good man, whom God had made and preserved, and was now taking back from them, and from Upper Norwood, and from England.

The burden and the grotesque of their task wreathed up into the sublime; they felt like travellers over whom a mist is lifted until they see, startled, the majesty of great hills before them. Their souls were raised by the sharp apparent nearness of those awful gates, through which it was their high destiny also to pass at last. They saw revealed for another (they themselves had caught the revelation), the things which each of us is born to see, each at his own time, upon his dreadful day.

Kate Hatteras, resolute and exact, left the boy to watch, called a messenger by telephone, sent him to a nursing home near by, and, finding a cab, directed it to fetch, not this or that celebrity, but a doctor of the place in whom she had some confidence. Within an hour, she had in the house a nurse of some age and experience,but insufficiently refreshed with sleep; there came next all manner of appliances, and, soon after, the young doctor, nervous and smiling rhythmically, who went up to the room and gave Death a long particular name.

But Death could have no need of definition here. He was present with his most ancient titles, dominant upon a throne, ordering that infinite vast wherein the narrow walls of one poor human habitation were not seen, so tenuous were they. His armies at a summons filled the place all around: He was in his court and power.

The servants were bidden by Kate Hatteras to go and sleep. The doctor wrote some useless thing, and left it for the morning. It was past midnight. Kate Hatteras lay down in the dressing-room near by, where, some few days before, the consultation had been held; she lay down dressed, and slept, and dreamt of a lonely shore where twilight stretched out endlessly along dull sands by a silent sea. But next door, in his bed (and above him some text or other in a frame) lay Mr Burden, her good master, in the agony of that last steep beyond which, they say, is an horizon.

He muttered incoherently, with pauses of silence between, and the nurse, though lacking sleep, yet thought it her duty to watch. TheSeptember night was chilly; a fire was lit. She sat rigid and staring at the fire, till, in a longer spell of silence, her head drooped; and she living, her living body in spite of her will, fell unconscious into repose. But round the dying man were other companions.

Now this, now that, out of the long past was with him; persons and things all trivial. He spoke twice of an order—then he would bid a clerk write something ... to whom? He forgot the name ... he forgot the name. He complained of his memory; then he sighed a little, and was still.

In a moment he turned, and began his muttering again. To many friends, long dead, he spoke of the key and of his honour, and of ... of ... he sought for a name that would fit at once a traitor and a lost friend, something evil in the world;—some spirit or other. Perhaps a son. The effort strained him; he groaned again and was silent. One fixed and harassing perplexity recurred. There was something being done against his will at home; some quarrel of judgment: the children surely—or was it a servant? His wife was there by the bedside, renewing some ancient domestic difference: ... but there! he was willing to yield. Anything, anything to cool the press of fever that was gaining upon the turmoilwithin him: yet he wished her nearer to him and understanding more, for he was very ill; and he kept on whispering: “As you will, my dear, as you will.” Then, almost aloud: “Don’t go! ... don’t go without settling it, my heart!” But she was gone.

Mr Burden opened his eyes: he knew that he was awake: he saw the ceiling plainly, and the stucco pattern of it, above the dull light of the falling fire. His wife, the real picture of her, rushed into his mind; he knew that she had gone that very moment, shutting the door and leaving him. He could not move, for something had snapped, and all was changing; he felt himself utterly alone.

Loneliness caught him suddenly, overwhelming him; wave upon wave of increasing vastness, the boundaries leaping, more and more remote, immeasurably outwards with every slackening pulse at the temples. Then it was dark; and the Infinite wherein he sank was filled with that primeval Fear which has no name among living men: for the moment of his passage had come.

Sanctus Fortis, Sanctus Deus,De profundis oro Te.Miserere, Judex Meus,Mortis in discrimine.

Sanctus Fortis, Sanctus Deus,

De profundis oro Te.

Miserere, Judex Meus,

Mortis in discrimine.

Mr Burden’s head jerked a little to the right, his jaw fell, his hands twitched and grew rigid. Mr Burden was dead.

The dirty light grew in the east of the world, and lit without hope the labour and despair of the city; the masts and spars of the ships a long way off in the docks showed delicate and true. There was a little streak of murky rose which faded, and, without, one cameo noise and then another led on to the life of a new day. A bird among the black branches of the ruined smoky trees, a footfall in the road outside; a few more moments and the sound of wheels. It was Cosmo coming home.

His subdued, but rather husky voice, as he paid the driver, was carried on the rare morning; he dropped a coin to the pavement and it rang. Even the shaking key in the lock could be heard, though he turned it softly. He was careful for his father’s repose, as he had always been when he came home after a night of pleasure with his equals. He pulled off his boots, not without many blunders, and went up the stairs noiselessly, holding the banisters well. He reached his room above, and lay down at once to sleep, half dressed, the sleep he needed.

An hour later, when it was broad day, thenurse in the room with the dead man snored fitfully, stirred, and awoke. She started suddenly, as she looked round at what was in the bed. Then her long experience composed her, she did what she had to do, and went into the next room, not liking to be alone. Kate Hatteras woke at her touch; and they watched together; and only when they saw that the time had come did they rouse the household. The fires were lit for breakfast to be cooked, and someone called Cosmo and told him what had fallen in the night.

Two days after, with reasonable pomp, they restored the body to the earth, in that part of the cemetery at Norwood where lay the vault he had purchased: just beyond the sections consecrated to the Roman Catholics and the Jews. Already, for some fifty-three hours, his spirit had returned to God who gave it.

Thus did they bury Emmanuel Burden, a dealer in hardware; and his son inherited his wealth.

I have no fears for him at the Judgment Seat. He had borne with affection for more than twenty years the common trials of domestic life. He had brought up three children to maturity. He had dissipated nothing of his health or patrimony; he had increased his fortuneby sober and by honest means, and with it in some part the wealth of the country which he adored. He had voted consistently as he thought best for the interests of Britain, supporting Mr Gladstone’s Administrations until the fatal year of 1885, and, since that date, concerning himself for the success of the Unionist or Conservative candidate. But Mr Burden is dead, and I do not quite see who there is to take his place.

Honest Englishman and good man—I wish I could have written of him in nobler terms.

FOOTNOTES:[11]Honorary L. L. D. of Dublin: trustee of Holy Souls Hospital. P. G. M. of the A. G. O. and major in the volunteers.

[11]Honorary L. L. D. of Dublin: trustee of Holy Souls Hospital. P. G. M. of the A. G. O. and major in the volunteers.

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