What was the good of a life like that? Why had he ever become a parson? It was no career for an active man in the flush of youth and energy.
But it was too late now to change.
He suddenly realised that his arm hurt intensely after his climb on the ivy, and that he was very tired, and he sat down on the edge of the tombstone.
It was the dark hour before dawn now, and the stars were setting. Andy and plain Will Ford—not Gulielmus—seemed to be very alone and very near together in the darkness.
It was as if the young had crept to the old, crying—
“Did you ever feel like this? How did you fight through it?”
Then the first cock crowed to herald in the morning, and it seemed almost like an echo of the sane and jolly laughter of Will Ford, now asleep. A dog barked somewhere—birds began to chirp—and—it is a strange thing, but true—Andy heard a voice say to him, so distinctly that it might have been Will Ford speaking: “Help the living—comfort the dying.”
Andy started—the words did so seem to come from nowhere—then he remembered that they came from somewhere very near indeed.
“His work was to help the living, to comfort the dying”—so ran, in Latin, the inscription on the tombstone, where Andy sat. And then he realised, of course, what most of us have done at one time or another, that an inward voice says things to us which seem to come from nowhere, and are arrestingly true, though they are but the echo of something we have heard before.
And by the way in which life turns sometimes on one of those echoes we get a glimpse—a vague glimpse, all shadowy—of how echoes from this existence may influence our souls in the next: we hold our breath in the face of what seems, then, to open out before us.