Youth, ambition and resolve would have saved him from the worst then. Age has its powers, but it has its defects, and he had no hope that his own defects would be wiped out by luck at the polls. Spirit was gone out of him, longing for the future had no place in his mind; in the world of public work he was dead and buried. How little he had got from all his life! How few friends he had, and how few he was entitled to have! This is one of the punishments that selfishness and wrong-doing brings; it gives no insurance for the hours of defeat and loss. Well, wealth and power, the friends so needed in dark days, had not been made, and Barode Barouche realized he had naught left. He had been too successful from the start; he had had all his own way; and he had taken no pains to make or keep friends. He well knew there was no man in the Cabinet or among his colleagues that would stir to help him—he had stirred to help no man in all the years he had served the public. It was no good only to serve the public, for democracy is a weak stick on which to lean. One must stand by individuals or there is no defence against the malicious foes that follow the path of defeat, that ambush the way. It is the personal friends made in one’s own good days that watch the path and clear away the ambushers. It is not big influential friends that are so important—the little unknown man may be as useful as the big boss in the mill of life; and if one stops to measure one’s friends by their position, the end is no more sure than if one makes no friends at all.
“There’s nothing left for me in life—nothing at all,” he said as he tossed in bed while the thunder roared and the storm beat down the shrubs. “How futile life is—‘Youth’s a dream, middle age a delusion, old age a mistake!’” he kept repeating to himself in quotation. “What does one get out of it? Nothing—nothing—nothing! It’s all a poor show at the best, and yet—is it? Is it all so bad? Is it all so poor and gaunt and hopeless? Isn’t there anything in it for the man who gives and does his best?”
Suddenly there came upon him the conviction that life is only futile to the futile, that it is only a failure to those who prove themselves incompetent, selfish and sordid; but to those who live life as it ought to be lived, there is no such thing as failure, or defeat, or penalty, or remorse or punishment. Because the straight man has only good ends to serve, he has no failures; though he may have disappointments, he has no defeats; for the true secret of life is to be content with what is decreed, to earn bread and make store only as conscience directs, and not to set one’s heart on material things.
He got out of bed soon after daylight, dressed, and went to the stable and hitched his horse to the buggy. The world was washed clean, that was sure. It was muddy under foot, but it was a country where the roads soon dried, and he would suffer little inconvenience from the storm. He bade his host good-bye and drove away intent to reach the city in time for breakfast. He found the roads heavy, and the injury of the storm was everywhere to be seen. Yet it all did not distract him, for he was thinking hard of the things that lay ahead of him to do—the heart-breaking things that his defeat meant to him.
At last he approached a bridge across a stream which had been badly swept by the storm. It was one of the covered bridges not uncommon in Canada. It was not long, as the river was narrow, and he did not see that the middle pier of the bridge had been badly injured. Yet as he entered the bridge, his horse still trotting, he was conscious of a hollow, semi-thunderous noise which seemed not to belong to the horse’s hoofs and the iron wheels of the carriage. He raised his eyes to see that the other end of the bridge was clear, and at that moment he was conscious of an unsteady motion of the bridge, of a wavering of the roof, and then, before he had time to do aught, he saw the roof and the sides and the floor of the bridge collapse and sink slowly down.
With a cry, he sprang from the carriage to retrace his way; but he only climbed up a ladder that grew every instant steeper; and all at once he was plunged downwards after his horse and carriage into the stream. He could swim, and as he swept down this thought came to him—that he might be able to get the shore, as he heard the cries of people on the bank. It was a hope that died at the moment of its birth, however, for he was struck by a falling timber on the head.
When, an hour later, he was found in an eddy of the river by the shore, he was dead, and his finders could only compose his limbs decently. But in the afternoon, the papers of Montreal had the following head-lines; DEFEAT AND DEATH OF BARODE BAROUCHE THE END OF A LONG AND GREAT CAREER
As soon as Carnac Grier heard the news, he sent a note to his mother telling her all he knew. When she read the letter, she sank to the floor, overcome. Her son had triumphed indeed.