To-night that mysterious sight came to Richard Travis, as it comes in the great crises of life and death, to every strong man, and he saw dimly, ghostily, into the shadow; and the shadow stopped at the terrible abyss which now barred his ken; and he felt, with the keen insight of the dying eagle on the peak, that the thing was death.
In the first streak of light, he was rudely awakened to it. For there on the rug, as naturally as if asleep, lay the only thing he now loved in the world, the old setter, whose life had passed out in slumber.
All animals have the dying instinct. Man, the highest, has it the clearest. And Travis remembered that the old dog had come to his bed, in the middle of the night, and laid his large beautiful head on his master's breast, and in the dim light of the smouldering fire had said good-bye to Richard Travis as plainly as ever human being said it. And now on the rug, before the dead gray ashes of the night, he had found the old dog forever asleep, naturally and in great peace.
His heart sank as he thought of the farewell of the night before, and bitterness came, and sitting down on the rug by the side of the dead dog he stroked for the last time the grand old silken head, so calm and poised, for the little world it had been bred for, and ran his palm over the long strong nose that had never lied to the scent of the covey. His lips tightened and he said: “O God, I am dying myself, and there is not a living being whom I can crawl up to, and lay my head on its breast and know it loves and pities me, as I love you, old friend.”
The thought gripped his throat, and as he thought of the sweetness and nobility of this dumb thing, his gentleness, faithfulness and devotion, the sureness of his life in filling the mission he came for, he wept tears so strange to his cheek that they scalded as they flowed, and he bowed his head and said: “Gladstone, Gladstone, good-bye—true to your breeding, you were what your master never was—a gentleman.”
And the old housekeeper found this strong man, who had never wept in his life, crying over the old dead setter on the rug.
And the same feeling, the second sight—the presentiment—the terrible balking of his mind that had always seen so clearly, ever into the future, held him as in a vise all the morning and moved him in a strange mysterious way to go to the church and see the woman he had loved all his life, the being whose very look uplifted him, and whose smile could make him a hero or a martyr, married to the man who came home to take her, and half of his all.
Numbed, hardened, speechless, and yet with that terrible presentiment of the abyss before him, he had stood and seen Alice Westmore made the wife of another.
He remembered first how quickly he had caught the text of the old man; indeed, it seemed to him now that everything he heard struck into him like a brand of fire—for never had life appeared to him as it did to-day.
“For the hand of God hath touched me—” he kept repeating over and over—repeating and then cursing himself for repeating it—for remembering it.