“He’s . . . he’s at Plymouth. Dead. They found him in the train, shot in the side.”
Francis stood very still, his mind slowly grasping this new appalling fact. Tears trickled down his cheeks into his beard.
“I shall go to Plymouth by the first train,” said Mr. Clibran-Bell, “I must get at the truth for Jessie’s sake.”
“Yes. It is very good of you.”
It was a long time after Mr. Clibran-Bell had gone before Francis went upstairs again. The candle burnt itself out. His thoughts see-sawed up and down.
“Frederic—dead. Frederic—dead.”
When he had groped his way back to his own existence, burdened with this new catastrophe, he said to himself:
“I can’t go on. . . . I can’t go on.”
He saw Frederic lying huddled in the corner of a railway carriage, strangers to whom he was nothing finding him. . . . Then he thought of that other dead body that he had seen long, long ago, the woman lying in the little dark house, under the guttering light of the tallow candle and the clement light of the moon. Death violent, death insistent, death that would not be shrouded away or softened or made seeming blessed with words or tears. Tears! Death was too harsh. And yet it mattered nothing how it came about. It was always the same: bitter, the bitter end to bitterness. All life was salt with the savour of death. Vain, vain the endeavour to sweeten it. Sweetness and corruption, were they not yoke-fellows? . . . Words from the Bible passed through Francis Folyat’s mind: “I am the resurrection and the Life,” and again: “For behold, the days are coming in which they shall say, Blessed are the barren, and the wombs that never bare, and the paps which never gave suck,” and again in his bitter grief he turned to the Book of Job: