For mine eyes have seen Thy salvation.
THE SONG OF SIMEON.
MANY wise men have laughed at the futility of thought and discarded an opinion as a worthless thing.
In the garden at Crabtrees Francis grew roses and delphiniums and tall hollyhocks and all homely flowers, and busily he tended his vegetables and herbs. He kept bees and grew skilled in their ways. Every day in summer Mrs. Folyat sat in the gazebo, and in the winter she had her own little drawing-room where the gossips would come in and take tea over a great fire.
Their living was very frugal, for their means were small. Only two houses besides Crabtrees were left of Mrs. Folyat’s inheritance.
Outwardly Potsham was hardly at all changed since the day when Francis and his bride had set out on their honeymoon, but its glory was departed. Its fragrance and faint perfume of the high manners of an older day were gone. Little boys whom they remembered playing barefooted in the street called the Strand, down by the little dock and the mud flats, had made fortunes and dispossessed little by little the old gentlefolk. Their sons had gone to the universities and their daughters had visited London. No longer were the inhabitants of Potsham gently little in a little place, but in a little place aped the follies of great cities. People and place were no longer in harmony. Men and women seemed continually to be adjusting themselves to an outside standard. They were as sluggards who protest their wakefulness. . . . But for Francis and Martha, Potsham was as it had been in their youth, a place of sleep, of tranquil sleep attended by pleasant dreams [Pg 342]of roses and blue water and warm figs ripening in the sunlight mellowed by the soft, moist air.
Their golden wedding came, their diamond-wedding, and between the two was but the drowsy humming of bells in a lofty tower. The hair of both was snow-white, and Francis had his brushed into two long ringlets that fell down on to his shoulders on either side of his head. His eyes were bright and young, often twinkling with merriment behind his spectacles, and people used to come and tell him funny things to see him enjoy the joke and chuckle down in his throat and shake all over with his inward mirth.
Gertrude often came to stay with her two children, and upon a day she arrived and never went away. Streeten had shed his capital bit by bit in one profession after another until he had not enough left to support his family. Then he disappeared without a word and no trace of him could be found.
Every two years Annette used to come and bring with her one or more of her children. Like her mother, she had eight. She could never stay long because Bennett would write every day and implore her to come back. . . . When any of her children had been ill she used to send them down, and they stayed until Francis judged them well enough to return, and that was never until their little pinched white faces were filled out and baked as brown as a bun. The second boy, Stephen, once spent five months at Crabtrees. He was a very queer, silent little creature, and he used to sit and stare at his grandparents and his aunts. Once, after dogging Francis for two days and scrutinising him in the most embarrassing way, he said:
“Grandpa, what is it makes your eyes so bright and blue, like the sky?”
Francis chuckled and replied:
“My dear, they’re little mirrors and I polish them.”
A great summer passed into a melancholy misty autumn, but on a rare fine day, the sun warming the first sighing breath of winter, Stephen Lawrie sat with a book in his lap under the Siberian crabtree on the lawn. His grandfather was digging in the vegetable garden near by, when, looking up, Stephen saw him pitch forward and fall [Pg 343]flat on his face. It was as though he had been blown down.
The boy sat staring, stunned by the heaviness of the fall. Then he was seized by the terror of it and rushed screaming away.
It was a stroke, and Crabtrees became a house of the sick. Stephen was packed off home.
Before the winter was out Francis seemed to be quite well again, and he was out and about and busy preparing for the spring. February was hardly gone when he was laid low again, this time never to rise. He was partially paralysed and could not speak. For a long time his wits were gone. . . . Slowly he crept back again into the existence of the house. His spirit would not yield up his body to the earth.
Gertrude was his nurse, and very gentle with him. She was creeping about his room, thinking him asleep, with her shadow swinging to and fro as she moved. In a sudden, strangled voice, she heard him say:
“I can speak.”
She turned to him, but he lay very still, and his face looked pinched and whiter than it had done. She was alarmed and sat up with him all night. In the early morning he asked to see his wife. Gertrude fetched her, and she came huddled and bunched up in shawl and flannels and sat by his bedside. He moved his hand a little and she reached out and took it in hers. He said:
“It has been a long time, but it has been a good time. It has not all been good for you. I would be glad if you—if you could forgive me . . .”
“Oh! my dear, my dear. . . . The best . . .”
“I have always been afraid,” he went on, and his voice gained in strength. “I have always been afraid of saying too much, and I have said too little. . . . It has been best when we were old. You have much to forgive.”
Mrs. Folyat could only weep. Francis asked to be given his Bible and the amethyst cross he had worn on Sundays on his watchchain. They were laid by his side and he took the cross in his hand. He said that everything [Pg 344]he left was to go to Mary, but she was to help the others when they needed help. . . . Then he told his wife she must go away and rest, for he desired to communicate for the last time and must have a space in which to prepare himself. Gertrude aided Mrs. Folyat out of the room.
It was All Fool’s Day.
At nine o’clock Mary was having breakfast alone when Serge walked in. She told him, and he went up at once to his father’s room. He stood by the bed for a long time before Francis opened his eyes and saw him. His eyes smiled and he said:
“My son.”
“Father.”
“I am not of those who believe that understanding is not given to us, for I came to understand. The beginning and the ending of all things is in God, and we may not question, nor idly interpret the beginning and the end. We pass from dust to dust, but the spirit endureth for ever, and in all things in our passage the spirit moves us. Is it not so?”
“It is so.”
“And life is very good, to be rounded with a sleep.”
“Life is very good.”
“Surely I have not altogether failed my God, since I have known you.”
“We have known each other. A man must die many times before his life be done.”
“So be it. . . . I shall sleep now.”
Serge stooped and kissed his father’s brow, and in a few minutes he was dead.
The End