The damp-stained wall at his side was starred with memorials. He began to contemplate them, idly at first, then with an enkindling interest. Here was an old stone slab commemorating, in half-obliterated words, some son of a Dorset house who had died for the country in far Peninsular days. "In the twentieth year of his age." A young existence, to be thus cut short! Yet, had he lived, and given life, his own sons would now be well-nigh forgotten.
Under this was a black marble tablet. The blood rushed to his face as he read, and then ebbed, leaving him cold:
To THE MEMORY OF
CAPTAIN HENRY ENGLISH,
OF HER MAJESTY'S INDIAN STAFF CORPS,
KILLED ON SERVICE IN THE PAMIRS. AGED 28.
Thus ran the sober inscription; followed the text, more triumphant than sorrowful:
He that loseth his life shall find it.
And then the words:
THIS TABLET WAS ERECTED BY HIS MOTHER.
Behind him, by just turning his head, he could see another memorial. A plate of flaming brass, this one; large, for it had to hold many names, and very new. It was scored in vermilion tribute to those yeomen—gentlemen and peasant—who, at the first breath of disaster, had hurried overseas from the peaceful district to uphold the mother country in a point of honour and had found quick honour themselves. In a little while these blood-red letters, too, would fade, but not so quickly as the memory of grief in the hearts of those who had sent their lads off with such tears, such acclamations. Bethune thought to himself, with a bitter smile, that there was not one of the churches dotted all over the wide English land where some such brand-new memorial had not been nailed this last year, and how, Sunday after Sunday, the eyes of the congregation would sweep past it, with ever-growing dulness of custom, until the record came to mean no more than the grey stones of the walls themselves. No less quickly than England, the moment of peril past, forgets those who rose to her call and fell for her name, does the thought of the brother, the comrade, the son, pass from the home circle! Not that he pitied the forgotten; not that he wished it otherwise with his country. It was well for England that her sons should think it a matter of course to give their lives for her. And it was what he could wish for himself, to die where his duty was, and be obliterated. Who, indeed, should remember him who had no ties of kinship and had lost his only friend? ... Who should be remembered when Harry English was already forgotten?
His lips curled, as he flung a glance along the aisles and wondered if any heart, under these many-coloured Sunday garments, still beat true to the lost lover; nay, how many comfortable widows had already brought a second mate to worship under the tablet that commemorated the first? Hold! yet the mothers remember—this was the church where Harry English had worshipped, beside his mother, the grand tender silent woman whom Bethune, too, had loved: the mother who had been alone, with himself, to mourn!
When he had set out on his way this morning he had been moved by the thought that to kneel where his friend had knelt was the last and only tribute he could pay that memory. The mountain torrent had robbed them of his grave; but in the shrine which sheltered his tablet, in this church of a communion that had rigidly severed the old fond ties between the living and the departed, no service could yet now be held that would not be in some sort a commemoration.