Blathwayte shook his head. "He once might have been; he had it in him, but he lost his opportunity, and lost opportunities don't return."
"No, Arthur, you are right there. There is no bringing the shadow on the dial ten degrees backward. What is past is past, and what is written is written, and Fate sends us no revise proofs to correct. The youth we wasted or frittered or abused or ignored never comes back to us to be lived over again, though we may shout ourselves hoarse with crying for it." And for the moment the backwater feeling rushed over me with such force that I felt almost suffocated with the hopeless pain of it. "That is the real tragedy of life," I went on, "that there are no encores."
"Poor Wildacre had it in him to do great things," said Arthur, "but he lost his chance. At least he did worse than lose it; he threw it away to the swine, and trampled it among the husks."
"But he may do something even yet," I argued.
"Genius—and Wildacre had genius—never grows old. And, hang it all, man, he isn't so old after all! He is only two or three years older than we are, and we aren't really old—only buried alive, which is quite a different thing. If we lived in London instead of in the blessed, peaceful country, we should still be considered young men about town. Mind you, I'm not grumbling: I should hate to be a young man about town, and I enjoy being buried alive; but I kick at being called old at forty-two. It's positively libellous!"
"It isn't because Wildacre is old that he won't do anything now," replied Arthur simply; "but because he is dead."
The words came to me with a shock. Though it was twenty years since I had seen Wildacre, I had never forgotten the vividness of his personality; somewhere at the back of my mind there had been a subconscious thought that he and I would meet again some day and pick up the thread of that friendship which at one time had meant so much to me. And now he was dead, and I should never see his handsome, laughing face again! The world seemed suddenly to have grown colder and darker.
"Tell me all about it," I said, lighting another cigarette with hands that trembled: and Arthur told me.
"Not long after you and Miss Kingsnorth had left England last February, to my great surprise I received a letter from Wildacre. In it he told me that he had spent the last twenty years of his life in Australia, but was stricken with a mortal disease, and had come home to die."
"Where did he write from?" I asked.