"Let my life be a lesson to you teaching you—if nothing else—that it is of no use to fight society. They have a hopeless advantage, the contemptible advantage of numbers, and they are not ashamed to use it.... But my spirit would not let me lie quiet under injury and insult. I was ever a fighter, born to die with my spurs on. And when I die at last, they will find that I go with a Parthian shot ... and after all have the last word.
"So I came out into a bright world again, an old man before my time, ruined forever, marked with a scarlet mark to wear to my grave....
"And then in time, as of course it would, the resolve came to me to come straight back here to die. A man wants to die among his own people. They were all that ever meant anything to me—they have that to boast of.... I loved this city once. To die anywhere else ... why, it was meaningless, a burlesque on death. I looked at my face in the glass; my own mother would not have known me. And so I came straight to Jennie Paynter's, such was my whim ... whom I held on my knee fifty years ago.
"... Oh, it's been funny ... so funny ... to sit at that intolerable table, and hear poor old Brooke on Reconstruction.
"And I've wondered what little Jennie Paynter would do, if I had risen on one of these occasions and spoken my name to the table. How I've hated her—hated the look and sight of her—and all the while embracing it for dear life. She has told me much that she never knew I listened to—many a bit about old friends ... forty years since I'd heard their names. And Brooke has told me much, the doting old ass.
"But the life grew unbearable to a man of my temper. I could afford the decency of privacy in my old age. For I had worked hard and saved since....
"And then you came ... a scholar and a gentleman."
It was quite dark in the room. Surface's voice had suddenly changed. The bitterness faded out of it; it became gentler than Queed had ever heard it.
"I did not find you out at once. My life had made me unsocial—and out of the Nazareth of that house I never looked for any good to come. But when once I took note of you, each day I saw you clearer and truer. I saw you fighting, and asking no odds—for elbow-room to do your own work, for your way up on the newspaper, for bodily strength and health—everywhere I saw you, you were fighting indomitably. I have always loved a fighter. You were young and a stranger, alone like me; you stirred no memories of a past that now, in my age, I would forget; your face was the face of honor and truth. I thought: What a blessing if I could make a friend of this young man for the little while that is left me!... And you have been a blessing and a joy—more than you can dream. And now you will not cast me off, like the others.... I do not know the words with which to try to thank you...."
"Oh, don't," came Queed's voice hastily out of the dark. "There is no question of thanks here."