For who can always act? but he,
To whom a thousand memories call,
Not being less but more than all
The gentleness he seemed to be.
In Memoriam.
Mr. Wycherly, a look of great perplexity upon his face, sat by the hearth far into the night. The lamp burned low, went out, and he sat on staring into the darkness till the dawn, cold and gray-mantled, came creeping through the unshuttered windows to find him still seated, clear-eyed and contemplative, but with the puzzled lines smoothed out of his forehead as by a kind hand. Bewilderment and self-reproach had given place to memory, as the years since the children had come passed before him in procession.
There was that strange, dreadful journey homeward from Portsmouth, the long cramped hours of sitting, he and Miss Esperance, each with a child clasped in stiff, unfamiliar arms: those first bewildering days when the children made all sorts of incomprehensible demands upon his inexperience. As he sat alone in the darkness Edmund's indignant lamentations because he could not "make a 'abbit" sounded in his ears, and his triumphant outcries when once the manufacture of the creature was accomplished.
The rabbit scenes came back to him, and a thousand others—those pretty daily doings full of quaint solemnity, that parents take for granted, but that come with an ever-recurring shock of almost reverential pleasure upon such gentle-hearted maids and bachelors as have to do with little children late in life.
It had never ceased to fill Mr. Wycherly with amazement that baby Edmund managed to put his spoon into his mouth and not into his eye; and he never fastened those absurd little strap shoes that were for ever coming undone, without a slight trembling of the hands. It seemed so wonderful that he, of all people, should be permitted to officiate at these mysteries. His memory was clamorous with the children's endless demands for "stories." Picture after picture unrolled before him of attentive, eager-eyed Montagu, listening with breathless interest to the tales that are old and new as life itself; of sturdy, fidgety Edmund with the loud laugh and handsome, fearless face.... And in all the pictures, the figure of Miss Esperance, bent now, but quick as ever to deeds of kindness, moved like the sound of music, gracious and beneficent.
The clock on the mantel-piece struck four, and the room was suddenly filled with the clear, rosy light that proclaims the advent of the day. Mr. Wycherly raised himself stiffly from his chair, and crossing the room to Montagu's table, rearranged his already tidy pile of books with gentle, tremulous hands. As he left the room to go to bed he stood still on the threshold and looked back into it as though to fix its image on his mind.
When Montagu came in to lessons that morning his tutor was not as usual seated at his writing-table, but in the big chair by the fire. He was not reading, and was so evidently waiting for the little boy that Montagu, instead of going to his own seat in the window, went straight to Mr. Wycherly, who stood him between his knees, laid his hands on the child's shoulders, and looked long and earnestly into his face. Montagu, although rather puzzled by this unusual proceeding, was always patient, and waited in silence, holding the lapels of his old friend's coat the while, till he should choose to speak.
At last he said, "Montagu, tell me exactly what you meant when you told Miss Esperance that you would like to be an Epicurean when you are grown up?"
It seemed a sudden reversal of the accepted order of things that Mr. Wycherly should ask Montagu to explain anything, and as that youth had entirely forgotten his enthusiasm for the doctrines of Epicurus directly his own fear of death had evaporated, he looked rather foolish and mumbled:
"It seems a comfortable sort of religion."