“Well, he’s dead now, poor fellow, and there are none so poor as to do him reverence; but he was a good sort, a very clever chap, and many the Scotch we’ve had together. But I won’t moralize, my dear lady. He drank more and more. Heaven knows where he got it. I believe there must be some special Providence, whose business it is to see that the thirsty never languish too long. Beebe began to neglect his personal appearance, and, his liver being a little congested, his nose became a bit red. It altered his looks horribly. I felt quite sorry for him. He had been warned often enough by the district physicians (very humane chaps), but poor Beebe took no notice, not caring, I presume. At last he got in the habit of drinking some beastly stuff they sell in the Chino shops. Last night he took an overdose of the poison. He died to-day at 12 o’clock. I have been trying to get him an American flag for a winding sheet. Did I get one? No, indeed, my dear lady. I have asked numbers of his former friends, but not one of them seemed to care. They had no sympathy for him, nor could they condone his mode of life, and its squalid ending. But I am different, you know. I’ve been a devil of a fellow in my time, even though I do come from a long line of clergymen. My word! we Comstocks are the very devils. You see, Beebe’s motto is mine also: ‘As we journey through life, let us live by the way,’ and I may add: ‘Never put up the night’s share for the morning.’ I went to one of poor Beebe’s friends, who just laughed, and said. ‘You’d better put the wench’s petticoat on him for a shroud.’ Another one said he had too much respect for the flag to ‘see that mutt’ wrapped in it. The brutes!
“Would you like to come with me and view the remains? Then we’d better go right along, or those bounders will have buried the poor chap. You will buy him a winding sheet? How good of you! Poor old Beebe would have appreciated that.”
Beebe’s kind-hearted friend led me through many winding streets to a most dismal neighborhood in that region of the city which, until lately, had been known as the underworld; and in a dingy tenement above a Chino shop I was shown the remains of “poor Beebe.” In a cheap, rough coffin, laid upon boards stretched between two barrels, he looked very handsome in his peacefulness. There was no evidence now of his nose ever having been red. The hand of death had eliminated the disfigurement, which his friend had so deplored. He was clothed in a striped shirt, with a collar and red tie. Something white covered the lower part of his body. After a minute I discerned that it was a woman’s voluminous petticoat. “Why! what iniquity is this?” said Mr. Comstock, tugging at the unseemly garment. “Why, Beebe would turn in his grave if he was buried in this! My word! How he would laugh if he were here looking at some one else. Beebe, old boy, you’re in a better world now—a world where you’ll be understood,” he continued, as he divested the silent Beebe of the objectionable covering.
Meantime, several persons came into the room and stood about as though waiting for something to happen. There were several swagger black men in long black coats, carrying tall hats, and some white men rather shabbily dressed, very seedy and with very red noses—derelicts in this black Sargasso Sea. One of the negroes brought a box and asked me to sit down, but the black women looked upon me with evident displeasure, plainly showing that they regarded me as an intruder, until a boy arrived with the shroud for the dead man. Then they smiled upon me, and set to work to prepare it. Now, a young man, who might have been Irish, came into the room and asked for Comstock. “Here I am,” said the Englishman, stepping forward, and bowing courteously. “What do you wish?” “ ‘Blinky’ says he ain’t got no American flag, but he sends you this, an’ he says that it will be good enough, an’ too good for the likes o’ him.” So saying, he threw down a green bundle into the lap of one of the women. “My word! It’s an Irish flag!” exclaimed Comstock, “and Beebe had no use whatever for the Irish. It was his only prejudice. What irony?”
Judging from Beebe’s face, there was no doubt but what he had descended from a long line of New England ancestors, all of whom had a fine scorn, doubtless, for everything Irish. The white shroud was now wrapped about “poor Beebe,” and then, ye shades of the Pilgrim Fathers! the coffin was draped in the folds of what once had been Erin’s glory.
“The harp that once through Tara’s halls,
The soul of music shed,”
quoted Mr. Comstock, as he arranged the folds so that the golden harp would show in bold relief on Beebe’s breast. It was the only touch of respectability in Beebe’s last earthly trappings; and a drop of Irish stirred somewhere within me and burned hot at the thought that the flag was considered of no better use than to cover the remains of an outcast, who had disgraced his own flag.
A black clergyman now arriving, a hush fell upon the little gathering. The black men tiptoed into positions behind the white mourners, who tried their best to look solemn. The minister (“a blooming Dissenter,” whispered Mr. Comstock to me), carrying a prayer-book and a Bible, advanced in a most reverential manner. He opened the Bible and read as follows:
“Malachi, fourth chapter, first verse: ‘For behold, the day cometh that shall burn as an oven, and all the proud, yea, and all that do wickedness, shall be stubble, and the day that cometh shall burn them up, saith the Lord of Hosts; that it shall leave them neither root nor branch.’ ”
He then repeated the regular burial service. As he raised his eyes from the prayer-book they fell upon a woman who hung over the silent form of Beebe. In her arms she held a pretty, golden-haired child, whose wistful blue eyes looked in wonderment at the motley group about her. “Who is this?” asked the minister, closing the book and pointing to the child. “This is the woman and child,” answered Mr. Comstock. “Do you mean his wife?” “Well—so to speak, sah,” said the woman between her sobs. The minister sighed, and continued with calmness: “I knew that this man had died from drink, but I did not know that he had left this curse behind him. All you white men and black women mark well what I am about to say.” The white men looked uneasily at each other. The black ones retreated to the background, while the women stared at the speaker with mouths wide open. “Do you know,” said he “that the crime which this man has committed cries to God for vengeance? Look at that beautiful, golden-haired, blue-eyed child, who is fated to be an outcast on the face of the earth. Think of what her future must be, with the Caucasian in her veins running riot with the African! Oh, you white men and black women who abide together in sin, and bring these innocent ones into the world—the curse of God is upon you.”