The hymn ceased.
"Give me your arm, Arthur; I feel a little faint. That's right. Now let us go back."
The rain had begun to fall, and the wind was rising. It was nine o'clock when they reached Tottenham, and both were wet through.
The next day he went to his work as usual. The weather was miserable. A raw north-east wind blew, bringing with it snow. The snow became sleet, and the wind changed to the south-east, bearing on its wings continuous rain. After the rain came black, impenetrable fog. Tottenham was submerged beneath the clammy vapour.
On the Thursday, when Arthur returned from Bundy's, he found his father huddled over the fire, coughing violently.
"Are you ill, father?" he asked in alarm.
"Oh! just a cold. Nothing to be troubled over."
But the next morning he did not rise from his bed. Bronchitis had declared itself. A local doctor, hastily called in, hinted at some injury to the lungs, and spoke guardedly of a possible weakness of the heart. From that hour Arthur never left his father's bedside.
Mrs. Bundy no sooner heard the news than she flew to the rescue. The astonished street beheld a carriage with prancing horses at the door, from which emerged a lady in a long sealskin jacket, who entered the humble house, and did not return. She had established herself as Masterman's nurse, glad to exchange the idle trivialities of Kensington for these hard duties of helpful service. Bundy sent his own physician, a famous specialist, who took Arthur aside, and asked him gravely what his father's habits of life had been. When Arthur told him who his father was, and how he had lived since he came to Tottenham, he became yet more grave.
"I think I see," he said. "You won't mind my saying that a sudden change of life at your father's age was a great mistake."
"My father would have it so."
"I understand."
"Is there any danger?"
"There is always danger where there is serious illness. I ought to tell you, your father's condition is precarious. There is such a thing as a man's loosening his grasp on life—doing it purposely, I mean. Against that condition the best medical skill is useless."
"Then you think he will die?"
"Yes; his troubles are nearly over."
Arthur returned to the sick-room with a sinking heart. It seemed an inconceivable thing that that strong frame, the vehicle of so many energies, should be in process of dissolution. It had fulfilled the intention of its Maker for so many years, borne heat and cold, the strain of struggle and fatigue, with such a perfect adaptation, with such indefatigable vigour, its every atom mutely obedient to the guiding will; and now it must be numbered with the spent forces of creation. It must return to the womb of Nature from which it sprang, and become part of the innumerable dust of perished generations. Such was the law of waste that ruled the world—an awful thought to a son beside a father's death-bed. And against the certain working of that law, what had man to place but frail and feeble hopes; what, at best, but the solemn asseveration of a faith daily contradicted by the incontrovertible realities of physical dissolution, by the stark facts of departure, disappearance? ... An awful thought, indeed, before which the stoutest hearts have trembled.
His father lay quite silent. He had not spoken for many hours. There was no sound but the soft hissing of the steam in the bronchitis kettle, and the dropping of a cinder on the hearth.
Towards dawn he spoke.
"Well... well! ... Seems as if it was all a mistake.... A-striving and a-struggling, and nothing come of it. Folk'll laugh.... Him as had the city at his feet, working for poor old Grimes. It's a poor end!—a poor end!"
"Father, don't you know me?"
"It isn't Helen, is it? No, she went away. Poor little girl!"
The mind pursued its own sad communings.
"Well, I guess God's got to put up wi' me. He's big enough to understand. He don't want apologies. I am what I am."
The grayness of the dawn filled the room.
Suddenly he raised himself slightly on his pillow. He grasped Arthur's hand. There came into the tired eyes a new light, a long, intense wonder-look.
"Mary!"
It was his wife's name.
Then the strong face grew slowly empty of expression, the eyes closed.
Archibold Masterman had laid himself down to rest among the generations of the dead, and all his love and hatred had perished with him, neither had he any more a portion in anything that is done under the sun.
Against the main-line platform of Waterloo Station the special boat-train was drawn up. It was half-past eight in the morning. Almost momently suburban trains arrived, discharging their crowds of workers, who passed in long files toward the portals of the station, and were swallowed up, like so many tiny streams, in the great sea of London. Some of them turned their eyes curiously, perhaps a little yearningly, toward the boat-train; but for the most part these arriving throngs passed on with sedate, indifferent faces. The boat-train represented liberty—it was the symbol of things free and large; but their thoughts did not go so far as that. For them, life offered no release; there was no discharge in their warfare; to the end of their days they would tread the city streets, push their humble fortunes as they best could amid its clangour, and sink into rest at last beneath its gray skies.
Yet this morning the skies were not gray. The magic of June lay upon the city. The toil-worn metropolis had dressed itself in shining raiment, as if it would fain remind its departing sons that it also could be fair; as if it meant that this last vision of its fairness should be for them a rebuke and a torturing memory through all the years of absence.
A man and a woman crossed the platform, closely observing the labels on the windows of the carriages.
"Ah! here it is! 'Masterman and party,'" said Bundy.
"They should be here by this time, shouldn't they?" said Mrs. Bundy.
"No, there's plenty of time—nearly half an hour."
They stood beside the train, talking in eager tones.
"You ordered flowers for their cabin, didn't you?"
"Yes; and I've done something else. I've got a suite of rooms for them. But they won't know that till they get aboard."
"Ah! I'm glad of that! I suppose it's the last thing we can do for them."
"Pray don't be melancholy," said Bundy, with an attempt at cheerfulness. "They're going to be very happy. Let us see them off with smiles."
"Ah! it's very well to talk. But these partings make me miserable. I couldn't have loved Arthur more if he'd been my own son. But he won't want me any more now. He'll have Elizabeth."
"Well, aren't you glad of it?"
"Oh yes, I'm glad. It was a beautiful wedding. And she is a sweet girl. But there's nothing makes you feel so old as weddings, somehow. They make you realise how much of life lies behind you."
This intimate talk was interrupted by the increasing crowd that thronged the platform.
"Well, cheer up! Here they come!" said Bundy.
And Mrs. Bundy, instantly superior to grievous meditations, ran to meet the little group, with smiles and tenderness. She made no scruple of kissing Arthur openly, embraced Elizabeth with fervour, wrung Vickars's hand, to the last moment bought them books, papers, and magazines, and whispered various occult directions for the attainment of health and happiness into Arthur's ear, much as she had done years before when he went to school for the first time. And then came the crowded sensations of the moment when the shrill whistle sounded, the wheels moved, and the train sped into the spacious sunshine.
For Arthur, newly married, was leaving the city of so many tragic memories for ever; Vickars also had decided to accompany Arthur and Elizabeth to Kootenay. Each felt that with the death of Masterman the last tie to England was snapped.
As the train flashed on past trim suburban villas, into the greenness of the open country, they talked in hushed tones of the life that lay behind them.
"One feels a little like a recreant at leaving it all," said Vickars. "It is such a big thing, this London. And, when all's said and done, there's far more heroism packed into those struggling, drudging London lives than is found in a thousand battlefields."
"You've done your part, father. You, at least, need have no compunctions," said Elizabeth.
"I've done a little—how little! You didn't think, when I was speaking of heroism, that I meant myself, did you, my child?"
"I only meant what I said, father. You have done your part."
"Ah! an easy part," he said meditatively. "I have sat apart, aloof and sheltered, writing books. That is but an easy and little thing."
He was silent for some moments, watching the green unfolding of the country, the quiet farms and cottages, the ancient churches lifting gray towers above their guardian elms, the bright water-courses, the level roads and sun-washed fields.
"It comes to me," he said presently, "that there's another kind of life which I have never fully understood. A man comes to London, young, strong, eager, and is speedily infected with a passion for success. He is exposed daily to a hundred gross temptations. If he had some original fineness of nature, it is soon blunted by the conditions of his life. He fights for standing-room because that is the first law of his existence. He then fights for conquest, and he conquers. At last he receives a fatal wound. But his courage does not fail him. He stands lonely and weak, fighting to the last. In the hour of his adversity he is wholly unconquered. That is real heroism. The final virtue of life is courage. He has this courage, and it is so great that it eclipses the memory of his faults."
"You are thinking of my father?" said Arthur, in a low voice.
"Yes. I who sat apart, criticising the world, am the sham hero. He who endured the crucifixion of the world is the real hero. Suffering does not necessarily ennoble men; but to suffer bravely is always noble. Ah, Arthur! when I think of that lonely grave which lies behind us, I say, not 'what bitterness is hidden there!' but 'what fortitude!' With all its faults, the life hidden in that grave may teach us all a lesson."
And that was the epitaph of Archibold Masterman.
The train sped on. The ancient towers of Winchester rose and sank; and were not they also the memorial of a Life not alone pure and gentle, but of a divine courage? ... And in that Life, as in multitudes of soiled and human lives, was not the final efficiency found in the fortitude that endures?
"That is the real heroism," said Vickars. "At least it is clear that without this fortitude no kind of heroism is possible."
Through the trees the gray hospice of St. Cross was visible for a transient moment. The high chalk downs succeeded, the green marshland, the broad estuary with its tossing boats and wide glimmering waters.
An hour later a great ship loosed her moorings, and turned her bows toward the wider waters and the New World.
THE END
W. J. DAWSON'S WORKS
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