When I had assured him that this was the case he continued: “And as for goin’ off sudden—well, it’s awful ’ard on relations when a old, ancient man’ll lay round sick and don’t know when ’is time’s come. I’ve knowed ’em when you’d swear they hung on a-purpose, just to spite them as ’ad to take care of ’em. I ’ad a grandfather o’ me own—well, you’d think that old man just couldn’t die. Ninety, I believe he was, and a wicked old thing when he got silly, like. Take the pepper, he would, and pour it into the molasses-jug, and everything like that. Terr’ble fun he was for us young ones, especially one day when he dressed all up in ’is Sunday clothes and went out in the street without ’is pants. I don’t suppose yer guv’nor ever did the like o’ that, Slim. Don’t seem as if old people on this side ’ad them playful ways.”
In this sort of reminiscence the evening went by, and in the morning I received a note that did much to comfort me. It was no more than the conventional letter of condolence from Mrs. Barry, but it was tactfully couched.
“A loss like yours,” she wrote, “painful as it is at all times, becomes tragically so when the support one finds in family ties is too far away to sustain one. I have often found in my own experience that loneliness added a more poignant element to grief. I wish you would remember, dear Mr. Melbury, that you have friends at this Christmas-time quite near you. Run in and see us whenever you feel the need of a friendly word. We are leading a life here absolutely without engagements, and you will cheer us up more than we can cheer you. If on Christmas Eve you would care to look in between four and five you would find us here, and we could give you a cup of tea.”
Needless to say all through the day of Christmas Eve my thoughts were with the gathering in our house on the slopes of Mount Royal. I saw in fancy every detail of the lugubrious pomp through which Christians contradict their Saviour in his affirmation that there is no death. Solemnity, blackness, muffled drums, and long lines of men throwing awe into their faces—would smite the heart with a sense of the final, the irreparable, the gone and lost. Flowers would lend a timid touch of brightness, but they would bloom in little more than irony. The roll of many wheels, the tramp of many feet, and a funeral service in which the triumphant note itself would be turned into a dirge, these would be the massive accompaniment to the few sobs welling up from hearts in which they would be irrepressible. Though shut out in person, in spirit I was there, standing in the shrouded room, witnessing my mother’s farewell kiss, watching the lid placed on the coffin, marching with my brothers, kneeling in the church, hearing the clods fall in the grave. At the very moment when Mrs. Barry handed me a cup of tea I was saying to myself, “Now it is all over, and they are coming back to the darkened, empty house.”
I was not cheerful as a companion, and apparently no one expected me to be so. We can scarcely be said to have talked; we merely kept each other company. It was Miss Barry herself who suggested, when we had finished tea, that she and I should take a walk.
The weather had grown clear, bright, and windless. All along the promenade there was Christmas in the shops and in the air. It was not like any Christmas I had ever known before, with the blare, the lights, the gay, homeless people, and the thundering of breakers under starlight; but some essential of the ancient festival was present there, and it reached me. It reached me with a yearning to have something belonging to me that I could claim as my own—something to which I should belong and that wouldn’t cast me off—something that would love me, something that I should love, with a love different from that with which even the City of Friends could supply me.
But out on the crowded, starry sea-front we neither walked nor talked. We sauntered and kept silent. On my side, I had the feeling that there was so much to say that I could say nothing; on hers, I divined that there was the same. I will not affirm that in view of all the circumstances I could be anything but uneasy; and yet I was ecstatic. This wonderful creature was beside me, comforting me, liking to be with me! But if she knew exactly who I was....
I was swept by an intense longing that she should be told. It was a longing I was never free from, though it didn’t often seize me so imperiously as to-night. It seized me the more imperiously owing to the fact that I could see her moving farther and farther away from any recollection and realization coming through herself. I had hoped that both would occur to her without my being obliged to say in so many words, “I am the man who tried a few months ago to steal your jewelry.”
But if ever the shadow of this suggestion crossed her mind, it didn’t cross it now. From the beginning the face and figure of that man had been blurred behind the memory of my brother Jack. Recent events had fixed me, just as she saw me, definitely in conditions in which sneak-thieving is unimaginable. I was the son of Sir Edward Melbury, Baronet, of Montreal and Ottawa, a man who would rank among the notables of the continent. Though a son in disfavor, I was still a son, and moreover I was exercising an honorable craft with some credit. I might propose to her, I might marry her, I might live my whole life with her, and the chances were that she would never connect me with the man she had seen for a few hurried minutes on pulling the rose-colored hangings aside.
For this very reason it seemed to me I must tell her before our friendship went any further. It was an additional reason that I began to think that the information would be a shock to her. How I got that impression I can scarcely tell you; the ways in which it was conveyed to me were so trifling, so infinitesimal.