"When you read this letter, it will be of no use to come to me. Don't come. I said my final word to you to-day when I went to make my will and testament. You will discover on your table all my fortune. It counts up to a thousand dollars. I have a feeling that it may help you to success. You know what a failure I have been. I should have been one right along. Now that I have found out that a mortal disease is upon me, my last spurt of courage is gone. When I stood before your work to-day, Tony, it was a benediction to me. Although I had fully decided to go out, I should have gone hopelessly; now there is something grand to me in the retreat. The uplift and the solemnity of the far horizon charm me, and though I open the door for myself and have no right to any claim for mercy, nevertheless I think that I shall find it there, and I am going through the open door. God bless you, Fairfax. Don't let the incidents of your life in Albany cloud what I believe will be a great career.
"Thomas Rainsford."
CHAPTER XXXVII
He was too young to be engulfed by death.
But he did not think or understand then that the great events which had racked his nerves in suffering were only incidents. Nor did he know that neither his soul nor his heart had suffered all they were capable of enduring. In spite of his deep heart-ache and his feelings that quivered with the memories of his wife, he was above all an artist, a creator. Hope sprang from this last grave. Desire in Fairfax had never been fully born; how then could it be fully satisfied or grow old and cold before it had lived!
Tony Fairfax was the sole mourner that followed Rainsford's coffin to the Potter's Field. They would not bury him in consecrated ground. Canon Prynne had been surprised by a visit at eight o'clock in the morning.
Fairfax was received by the Bishop in his bedroom, where the Bishop was shaving. Fairfax, as he talked, caught sight of his own face in the glass, deathly white, his burning eyes as blue as the heavens to which he was sure Rainsford had gone.
"My friend," the ecclesiastic said, "my friend, I have nothing to do with laws, thank God. I am glad that no responsibility has been given me but to do my work. But let me say, to comfort you, is not every whit of the earth that God made holy? What could make it more sacred than the fact that He created it?"
Fairfax thought of these words as he saw the dust scatter and heard the rattle of the stones on the lid of Rainsford's coffin, and in a clear and assured voice of one who knows in whom he has believed, he read from Bella's Prayer-book (he had never given it back to her), "I am