Gerald Eversley's Friendship: A Study in Real Life

by J. E. C. Welldon

When the mourners of the family had withdrawn, many lingered around the grave, weeping. It was growing dark before the last mourner went home. The coffin was covered with wreaths and crosses. At the lych-gate two women, farmers’ wives, who had a long-standing quarrel, chanced to meet, and, hardly realising what they were doing, one of them clasped the other’s hand, saying fervently amidst her tears, ‘She loved us all.’

Lord Venniker and Harry sobbed like children, standing by the grave. Gerald alone remained unmoved, as if insensible.

On his return to the Hall he went to his bedroom and locked the door. A packet of letters was waiting for him on the table. He looked at the envelopes and put them down, all except one. It was in the handwriting of Mr. Selby.

Just as he was about to open it there came a gentle knock at the door, and the voice of the old family butler was heard inquiring if he could do anything for him. Gerald answered, ‘Nothing.’ He heard the butler’s steps returning along the passage, and it seemed that the butler stopped once not far from the door and listened.

Gerald opened Mr. Selby’s letter and read it. It was written on black-edged paper. At one place the paper was blistered a little, as if a tear had fallen upon it; but that might be fancy. Mr. Selby wrote that, being away from home, he had only just heard of Gerald’s bereavement. It was so terrible, so personal, that he feared to intrude upon it, even by a word of sympathy. But Gerald would forgive him for writing. He could never forgive himself if he did not write. And there was something (he said) which seemed to give him perhaps a title to write such a letter; something beyond the privilege of friendship, something which he had never told to anyone at St. Anselm’s. Nobody knew it, nobody guessed it. (Perhaps that was not quite so, Mr. Selby.) ‘Many years ago,’ he went on, ‘it was my own blessed privilege to know and love one so much higher than myself in life and character, that now, after all those years, I can only wonder how it was ever permitted me to win her love. We were going to be married soon. She died. O my dear Eversley, may not my affliction minister to yours? The world has not been the same to me since then; it can never be. There is not a day of my life when I do not dwell upon her memory, and in the thought and hope of seeing her again death has lost for me its sting.’ It was idle, Mr. Selby’s letter proceeded to say, to seek to minimise such sorrows; it was only the base or the shallow who could forget the past, or live as if it had not been; but God, who is all-merciful, did send with human grief the grace to bear it, and at last the consciousness of a blessing underlying it. ‘And what inspiration of good,’ said Mr. Selby, ‘can be so potent as the memory of a saintly life now veiled in heaven?’

Gerald folded the letter again. It had done for him what the funeral service had not done. It had touched the fountain-springs of his heart. He wept.

An hour—two hours—three hours passed away, and then the butler knocked again, bringing him some food. He opened the door and took it in. ‘Mr. Henry thought you would like it best here, sir,’ said the butler. Gerald placed it on the table. He tasted it, but could not eat it.

A little later, perhaps in consequence of something that the butler had said, Harry himself entered the room. He made the excuse of bringing him some verses which had been found lying in his sister’s room with the inscription, ‘For dear Gerald on Good Friday.’ Gerald remembered that they had been talking, when he was last at Helmsbury, about the Divine Passion to which that day is sacred. Whether the verses were her own or another’s did not appear; probably another’s, but it has not proved possible to trace them.

Gethsemane, Gethsemane,
My spirit yearneth to be free
From sin and shame at thought of thee.
There did the Saviour’s blood-sweat rain
In agony of mortal pain
Upon thy soil—oh! not in vain.
Friendship’s default, the lying kiss,
The serried spite of enemies,
This was His soul’s experience, this.
Gethsemane, Gethsemane,
Oh! that thou wouldst reveal to me
That which thine olives once did see!
And what in that fierce strife with hell
He suffered none may dare to tell,
But the Lord God remembereth well.
For in that solemn hour He bore
The sins of all that sinned before
Or shall sin till sin be no more.
Gethsemane, Gethsemane,
From thy deep shades of silence He
Passed to His death upon the tree.
He died—and all the angelic eyes
Looked in adoring strong surprise
On that eternal sacrifice;
And He who sits upon the throne
Declared the deed divinely done,
And God and man for ever one.

Gerald read the lines mechanically. The two friends sat side by side. Never had Harry’s character shown itself so tender and beautiful as now. He forgot himself in his sorrow for his friend. He said not a word of his own loss; he spoke of Gerald’s. He said his mother was very ill, dangerously ill, but it was her deep desire to see Gerald, if only for a minute, to-morrow. With a true instinct of sympathy he poured out his reminiscences of Ethel’s life, telling how she used to write to him every week when he was at St. Anselm’s, and used often to mention his great friend Gerald Eversley, and ask after him; how the people of Helmsbury loved her, and would do anything for her sake, and could never speak of her since her death without weeping; how she had been delicate even from childhood, and could not bear unkindness or roughness; how fond she had been of all living creatures, and would never hurt any one of them, but treated them (like St. Francis of old, though Harry did not say so) as brothers and sisters, and would not let them be deprived of their native liberty. Poor Harry! he reproached himself bitterly if he had ever acted against her wish. Death makes little disagreements or disobediences seem terrible. Then he went on to tell how she had spoken to him of her love for Gerald, saying with womanly self-forgetfulness that she was unworthy of him—he was so clever, so far above herself—but she would try to make him happy when she was his wife, and to sympathise with his interests and pursuits, and to live for him alone.