"Tragic dooms of separation" on public issues were not the only trouble with G.K.'s Weekly: the staff were also engaged in violent personal quarrels about which Gilbert was asked to take sides—was even bitterly reproached by one for supposedly favouring another. It would be hard today to say what it was all about, but two of the contestants have told me since that had they had the least notion how ill he was getting they would have died rather than so distress him. For it was a real and a very deep distress.
It may be remembered that Miss Dunham noted how Gilbert used to make a mysterious sign in the air as he lit his cigar. That sign, says Dorothy, was the sign of the cross. Long ago he had written of human life as something not grey and drab but shot through with strong and even violent colours that took the pattern of the Cross. He saw the Cross signed by God on the trees as their branches spread to right and left: he saw it signed by man as he shaped a paling or a door post. The habit grew upon him of making it constantly: in the air with his match, as he lit his cigar, over a cup of coffee. As he entered a room he would make on the door the sign of our Redemption. No, we must never pity him even when his life was pressed upon by that sign which stands for joy through pain.
Those nearest to him grew anxious quite early in 1936. He was overtired and working with the weary insistence that over-fatigue can bring. The remedy so often successful of a trip to the continent was tried. They went to Lourdes and Lisieux and he seemed better and sang a good deal in his tuneless voice as Dorothy drove them through the lanes of France. From Lisieux he wrote a pencilled letter, long and almost illegible "under the shadow of the shrine"—trying to reconcile the disputants with himself and with one another.
The summer was cold and bleak and the tour was all too short. Home again his mind seemed not to grip as well as usual and he began to fall asleep during his long hours of work. The doctor was called and thought very seriously of the state of his heart—that heart which many years ago another doctor had called too small for his enormous frame. The thought of a Chesterton whose heart was too small presents a paradox in his own best manner.
To Edward Macdonald who had missed a message that he was too ill to be visited, Gilbert talked in his old fashion and promised a poem he had just thought of for the paper—on St. Martin of Tours. "The point is that he was a true Distributist. He gave half his cloak to the beggar."
Soon after this he fell into a sort of reverie from which awaking he said:
"The issue is now quite clear. It is between light and darkness and every one must choose his side."
Frances and he had both thought his recovery in 1916 was a miracle.
"I did not dare," said Frances, "to pray for another miracle."
Monsignor Smith anointed him and then Father Vincent arrived in response to a message from Frances which he thought meant she wanted him to see Gilbert for the last time. Taken to the sick room he sang over the dying man the Salve Regina. This hymn to Our Lady is sung in the Dominican Order over every dying friar and it was surely fitting for the biographer of St. Thomas and the ardent suppliant of Our Lady:
"Salve Regina, mater misericordiae, vita dulcedo et spes nostra salve. . . . Et Jesum benedictum fructum ventris tui nobis post hoc exsilium ostende. . . ."