Adam, the kindly gardener of our special plot of earth, has been struck down; hurled, by an inscrutable decree of Providence in the zenith of his activities, from life to death.
He was as much a part of the Villino as we ourselves; a just and kindly man, not yet forty; one of the handsomest of God’s creatures, and the most gentle-hearted. We cannot see the meaning of such a blow; we can only bow the head.
“Doesn’t it seem hard,” cried the daughter of the Villino, “that in these days there should be one unnecessary widow!”
The last time the Signora saw him alive was about a week before the tragedy. He had come into the funny little Roman drawing-room—all faint gay tints and flamboyant Italian gilt carved wood—carrying a large pot of arum lilies. He scarcely looked like an Englishman with his dark, rich colouring and raven hair prematurely grey; though he was so all-English, of England’s best, in his heart and mind.
A little Belgian child, on a visit to us, rushed up to him, chattering incomprehensibly. She is just three and very friendly; something in Adam’s appearance must have attracted her, for she left everything she had been playing with to run to him the moment he appeared.
This is how the Signora will always remember him, standing, big and gentle, looking down at the child with those kind, kind eyes.
There was never anyone so good to little animals. We used to say he was a true if unconscious brother of St. Francis, and loved all God’s small folk. Never was a sick cat or dog but Adam would have the nursing of it.
One would see him walking about the garden wheeling his barrow, with a great black Persian coiled round his neck like a boa. Nearly two years ago a little daughter was born to him here, to his great joy. She was always in her father’s arms during the free hours of the day; and not the least piteous incident of the tragedy was the way this baby, just beginning to babble a few words, kept calling for “Daddy, daddy,” while he lay next door in the tiny sitting-room he had taken such pleasure in, like a marble effigy, smiling, beautiful, awful, for ever deaf to her appeal.
He had been slightly ailing since an attack of influenza; but on the morning of his death he said to his wife that he felt as if he could do the work of six men that day. The kind of cruel light-heartedness which the Scotch call “being fey” was upon him. Like Romeo before the great catastrophe, “his bosom’s lord sat lightly on his throne.” Strange freaks of presentiment never to be explained on this side of the grave! There are those who feel the shadow of approaching fatality cloud their spirits—we have heard a hundred instances of certain forebodings of death during the present war—but this mysterious gaiety of the doomed is rarer and more awful. Yet Adam must have had his secret sad warnings too, for his poor wife found, to her astonishment, his insurance cards, his accounts made up to the end of the week on the Thursday of which he died, the ambulance badge he had been so proud of—all laid ready to her hand. He had set his house in order before the summons came. We have every reason to think that in a deeper, graver sense he was equally prepared.