“And may I make one change, which the bishop’s sermon suggested?”
“By all means,” said Power; and Walter, taking a pencil, added after the line “Nothing that is fair can stay,” these words, which Power afterwards copied, writing at the top, “In memoriam, J.D.”
“Nothing that is fair can stay
But while Death’s sharp scythe is sweeping,
We remember ’mid our weeping,
That a Father-hand is keeping
Every vernal bloom that falleth underneath its chilly sway.
And though earthly flowers may perish
There are buds His hand will cherish
And the things unseen Eternal—these can never pass away;
Where the angels shout Hosanna,
Where the ground is dewed with manna,
These remain and these await us in the homes of heaven for ay!”
The lines are in Walter’s desk; and he values them all the more for the tears which have fallen on them, and blurred the neatness of the fine clear handwriting.
On the following Tuesday our boys saw the dead body of their friend. The face of poor Daubeny looked singularly beautiful with the placid lines of death, as all innocent faces do. It was the first time they had seen a corpse; and as Walter touched the cold cheek, and placed a spray of evergreen in the rigid hand, he was almost overpowered with an awful sense of the sad sweet mystery of death.
“It is God who has taken him to Himself,” said Mrs Daubeny, as she watched their emotion. “I shall not be parted from him long. He has left you each a remembrance of himself, dear boys, and you will value them, I know, for my poor child’s sake, and for his widowed mother’s thanks to those who loved him.”
For each of them he had chosen, before he died, one of his most prized possessions. To Power he left his desk; to Henderson, his microscope; to Kenrick, a little gold pencil-case; and to Walter, a treasure which he deeply valued, a richly-bound Bible, in which he had left many memorials of the manner in which his days were spent; and in which he had marked many of the rules which were the standard of his life, and the words of hope which sustained his gentle and noble mind.
The next day he was buried; only the boys in his own house, and those who had known him best, followed him to the grave. They were standing in two lines along the court, and the plumed hearse stood at the cottage door. Just at that moment the rest of the boys began to flock out of the school, for lessons were over. Each as he came out caught sight of the hearse, the plumes waving and whispering in the sea-wind, and the double line of mourners; and each, on seeing it, stood where he was, in perfect silence. Their numbers increased each moment, till boys and masters alike were there; and all by the same sudden impulse stopped where they were standing when first they saw the hearse, and stood still without a word. The scene was the more strangely impressive because it was accidental and spontaneous. Meanwhile, the coffin was carried downstairs, and placed in the hearse, which moved off slowly across the court between the line of bareheaded and motionless mourners. It was thus that Daubeny left Saint Winifred’s, and passed under the Norman arch; and till he had passed through, the boys stood fixed to their places, like a group of statues in the usually noisy court. He was buried in the churchyard under the tower of the grand old church. It was a lovely spot; the torrent murmured near it; the shadows of the great mountains fell upon it; and as you stood there in the sacred silence of that memory-haunted field, you heard far-off the solemn monotone of the everlasting sea. There they laid him, and the stream of life, checked for a moment, flashed on again with turbulent and sparkling waves. Ah me!—yet why should we sigh at the merciful provision, which causes that the very best of us, when we die, leaves but a slight and transient ripple on the waters, which a moment after flow on as smoothly as before?
Mrs Daubeny left Saint Winifred’s that evening; her carriage looked strange with her son’s boxes and other possessions piled up in it. Who would ever use that cricket-bat or those skates again? Power and Walter shook hands with her at the door as she was about to start; and just at the last moment, Henderson came running up with something, which he put on the carriage seat without a word. It was a bird-cage, containing a little favourite canary, which he and Daubeny had often fed.