A TALE FROM THE BORDERLAND
“Well, it is a story to take or to leave. I tell it you as it happened to me. Think what you like about it.”
The speaker was a spare man of middle height; an Anglican priest, whose long black coat and white band set off a face that might have belonged to a seer of old: pallid yet not bloodless, with delicately cut mobile nostrils and grey eyes now piercingly bright, now losing themselves in far-off mystery. The few grey hairs combed across the ample brow seemed instinct with the life beneath them. In moments of great spiritual excitement, when the eyes kindled and the nostrils worked, they would appear to rise as into a halo above the inspired pallor of the face. And the cypresses were around us, gloomily aspiring; while the ground on which we sat was alive and gay with the most delicious little pink cyclamens: sweet, everyday human thoughts that come like a smile across the over-strained soul.
“I was in England then, working in a large Northern parish in the midst of dirt, misery and ignorance; and would often come home exhausted by the sufferings I had seen and could do so little to alleviate. One pouring wet evening I got in very late, soaked to the skin, faint with hunger, oppressed by the thought of the preparation needed for an early communion service I was to celebrate on the morrow. I told Janet to admit no one: that for no reason would I go out again that night; and sat down to dinner.
“I had hardly begun when the door bell rang, and voices reached me from the hall—that of a woman, evidently a lady, pleading, and Janet’s, repeating my order.
“‘But,’ the strange voice insisted, ‘he would surely come if he knew. It is to see a dying man. Tell him it is to see a dying man. To save a passing soul.’
“The woman’s distress and anxiety were so evident that I could remain passive no longer. I called Janet and told her to show the lady in. She was tall, graceful, dressed in black, with a long veil which she kept lowered, so that I could see the features but indistinctly. With every sign of agitation she repeated to me what she had said in the hall. ‘Would I come with her? It was to see a person who must die this night, and all unprepared.’
“I had no heart to refuse; and we sallied forth together, she leading, I following. After some time I found myself in a better part of the town, where the rows of squalid houses had given place to detached residences, each in its garden. At one of these we stopped, ascended the steps, and I rang.