“Man that is born of a woman hath but a short time to live and is full of misery. He cometh up and is cut down, like a flower; he fleeth as it were a shadow, and never continueth in one stay.”
Miss Ley, pale of face, took Frank’s arm and hurried on. Here and there dead flowers were piled upon new graves; here and there the earth was but freshly turned. They came at last to where Jenny lay—an oblong stone of granite whereon was cut a simple cross; and Frank gave a sudden cry, for it was covered at that moment, so that only the cross was outlined, with red roses. For a while they stared in silence, amazed.
“They’re quite fresh,” said Miss Ley; “they were put here this morning.” She turned to Frank and looked at him slowly. “You said they’d forgotten—and they came on their wedding day and laid roses on her grave.”
“D’you think she came, too?”
“I’m sure of it. Ah, Frank, I think one should forgive them a good deal for that! I told you that they did strive to do right, and if they fell it was only because they were human and very weak. Don’t you think it’s better for us to be charitable? I wonder if we should have surmounted any better than they did their great difficulties and their great temptations.”
Frank made no reply, and for a long time they contemplated those rich red roses and thought of Hilda’s tender hands laying them gently on the poor woman’s cold grave-stone.
“You’re right,” he said at last. “I can forgive them a good deal because they had this thought. I hope they will be very happy.”
“I think it’s a good omen.” She laid her hand on Frank’s arm. “And now let us go away—for we are living, and the dead have nothing to say to us. You brought me here, and now I want to take you on farther—to show you something more.”
He did not understand, but followed obediently till they came to the cab; Miss Ley told the driver to go straight on, away from London, till she bade him stop. And then, leaving behind them that sad place of death, they came suddenly into the open; the highway had the pleasant brown hardness of a country road, and it was bordered by a hawthorn hedge; green fields stretched widely on either side, and they might have been a hundred miles from London town. Miss Ley stopped the cab, and told the man to wait whilst she and her friend walked on.
“Don’t look back,” she said to Frank, “only look forward. Look at the trees and the meadows.”
The sky was singularly blue, and the dulcet breeze bore gracious savours of the country; there was a suave limpidity of the air which chased away all ugly thoughts. Both of them, walking quickly, breathed with wide lungs, inspiring eagerly the radiance of that summer afternoon. On a turn of the road Miss Ley gave a quick cry of delight, for she saw the hedge suddenly ablaze with wild roses.
“Have you a knife?” she said. “Do cut some.”
And she stood while he gathered a great bunch of the simple fresh flowers; he gave them to her, and she held them with both hands.
“I love them because they’re the same roses as grow in Rome from the sarcophagi in the gardens; they grow out of those old coffins to show us that life always triumphs over death. What do I care for illness and old age and disease! The world may be full of misery and disillusion, it may not give a tithe of what we ask; it may offer hatred instead of love—disappointment, wretchedness, triviality, and heaven knows what. But there is one thing that compensates for all the rest, that takes away the merry-go-round from a sordid show, and gives it a meaning, a solemnity, and a magnificence which make it worth while to live. And for that one thing, all we suffer is richly overpaid.”
“And what the Dickens is that?” asked Frank, smiling.
Miss Ley looked at him with laughing eyes, holding out the roses, her cheeks flushed.
“Why, beauty, you dolt,” she cried gaily. “Beauty.”
The End
The Bishop's Apron
I
The world takes people very willingly at the estimate in which they hold themselves. With a fashionable bias for expression in a foreign tongue it calls modesty mauvaise honte; and the impudent are thought merely to have a proper opinion of their merit. But Ponsonby was really an imposing personage. His movements were measured and noiseless; and he wore the sombre garb of a gentleman’s butler with impressive dignity. He was a large man, flabby and corpulent, with a loose, smooth skin. His face, undisturbed by the rapid play of expression, which he would have thought indecorous, had a look of placid respectability; his eyes, with their puffy lower lids, rested on surrounding objects heavily; and his earnest, obsequious voice gave an impression of such overwhelming piety that your glance, involuntarily, fell to his rotund calves for the gaiters episcopal.
He