“When they came down and told me there’d been an accident, my hands were in the washtub, miss,” she told one of us later, “and as I ran up the garden drying them in my apron, I was praying God all the while that he would give me strength to bear what I might have to see.”
God never refuses such a prayer as that. Adam was an example. It is astonishing the effect the death of this simple gardener has made in the district, and the testimonies of his worth keep coming in. It shows how wide the influence one good man can exercise in any class of life—
“The very ashes of the just
Smell sweet and blossom in the dust.”
In a narrower sense we shall ourselves always feel that something of him has gone into the soil of our little garden, for which he worked so faithfully. Some of the fragrance of that humble soul will rise up from the violet beds and hang about the roses.
We have been the more disposed to draw these parallels between the Old Faith and its substitute because, by a curious coincidence, Adam’s was the second death to fling sadness over the Villino.
The first was not a personal loss, like that of a servant in the house. It concerned, indeed, a being whom only one of us had seen. It happened far away in the bloody swamps of the Yser; yet, none the less, the tidings filled the little household with mourning.
Among the many exiles flying to our shores from the horror of the advancing Hun were two young mothers with their children—two charming, delicately nurtured, high-born, high-minded women, whose husbands were, one, an officer in the Belgian army, the other, a volunteer working in the ambulance at Calais. The soldier’s wife, the niece of an old friend of ours, a gay, courageous creature, who twice had gone into the line of fire to see her husband, was never tired of speaking to us of “Charley.” He seemed in the end to have become almost a familiar among us. We knew by his photographs that he was handsome, and, by the portions of his letters which she read to us, that he was tender and deep-feeling and strong of courage.