CHAPTER XXV
Wherein the Major takes to his Bed
Thewinter dawdled late in the city.
Saint Valentine went out into the darkness of the night, with silent feet muffled in a heavy fall of snow.
And Major Modeyne went with him.
They brought him home in the early morning, dead and icy cold, and laid him upon his bed; and when they were gone Betty sat by the still figure and stroked the chill hand that had done intentional ill to none; in such strange manner she tasted for the first time the bitterness of death—in such sorry fashion the poor tattered remains of her childhood fell from her, sitting there, listening for the deep mystic significance of the eternal slaying that is a part of the eternal life....
Betty, as by pronounced habit, was to suffer for it.
A jury had to sit upon the tragedy; and the coroner, embarrassedly enough, had to rake up the details that were called the life of the poor broken man that lay silent in death, unheeding and unprotesting and unashamed. Modeyne’s hand had always fallen heaviest upon the small child from whom his thin will would have the most flinched as to the giving of pain. His death, that should have closed the book of the record of the child’s struggles against the public washing of the linen of his sordid details of life, was instead a new whip wherewith she was scourged—the manner of it was the very event that compelled the uncovering of all those little tragedies which the proud child had so courageously hushed under the dignity of her silence.
It was made clear by the sworn evidence that the Major had wandered to the great flight of steps on which he was found, that he had taken off his boots to prevent the waking of his landlady, that he had climbed a few of the steps in the darkness, and lain down, under the delusion that he was in bed, and had slept into death, the white snow weaving his winding-sheet.
Then it came out that he had sat late at a festive orgy in the rooms ofThe Cock and Bulltavern in Fleet Street, and had left the place, like most of the others, somewhat vague as to his destination.
It also came out that he was some sort of agent for the tavern,which had wine-merchandise in its connection; but this seems to have become, in the Major’s case, but a sleeping partnership—his chief office having been an ornate one—to attract the city loungers to the place by the exercise of his genial and ready fancy and his pleasant friendship, which was wholly untainted with the ignoble thing called snobbery. The very waiters felt in him a personal loss. Yet he had not had the means to be prodigal of anything but his whimsical tongue.
It was also hinted that the dead man was highly connected—but the magnificent in their high places kept a frigid silence that showed a dogged decision to bear their loss unflinchingly.
Indeed, on the evening of the day on which the dead man was put to his rest for the last time by the silent girl and the handsome youth who had so often shared the task in the small hours of the morning when the unknowing world snored and slept, it was, truth to say, a somewhat vulgar little knot of city men that sat round the table ofThe Cock and Bulltavern and passed a silk hat round about to collect the little sum that one of them was deputed to take to the girl herself with a vote of their respect and affection for a dead friend and as true a gentleman as any into whom the good God had put good wine.