“‘You were right, Phœbe,’ he says, brokenly, taking hold of my icy hands; ‘you knew best. He is gone! God has taken him.’
“My heart dies. I had thought that I had no hope, but I was wrong. ‘I knew it!’ I say, in a dry stiff voice. ‘Did not I tell you so? But you would not believe me—go on!—tell me how it was—do not think I cannot bear it—make haste!’
“And so he tells me all that there is now left for me to know—after what manner, and on what day, my darling took his leave of this pretty and cruel world. He had had his wish, as I already knew, and had set off blithely home in the last prize they had captured. Father had taken the precaution of having a larger proportion than usual of the Frenchmen ironed, and had also sent a greater number of Englishmen. But to what purpose? They were nearing port, sailing prosperously along on a smooth blue sea, with a fair strong wind, thinking of no evil, when a great and terrible misfortune overtook them. Some of the Frenchmen who were not ironed got the sailors below and drugged their grog; ironed them, and freed their countrymen. Then one of the officers rushed on deck, and holding a pistol to my Bobby’s head bade him surrender the vessel or die. Need I tell you which he chose? I think not—well” (with a sigh) “and so they shot my boy—ah me! how many years ago—and threw him overboard! Yes—threw him overboard—it makes me angry and grieved even now to think of it—into the great and greedy sea, and the vessel escaped to France.”
There is a silence between us: I will own to you that I am crying, but the old lady’s eyes are dry.
“Well,” she says, after a pause, with a sort of triumph in her tone, “they never could say again that Bobby Gerard was afraid!
“The tears were running down my father’s cheeks, as he told me,” she resumes presently, “but at the end he wiped them and said, ‘It is well! He was as pleasant in God’s sight as he was in ours, and so He has taken him.’
“And for me, I was glad that he had gone to God—none gladder. But you will not wonder that, for myself, I was past speaking sorry. And so the years went by, and, as you know, I married Mr. Hamilton, and lived with him forty years, and was happy in the main, as happiness goes; and when he died I wept much and long, and so I did for each of my sons when in turn they went. But looking back on all my long life, the event that I think stands out most clearly from it is my dream and my boy-lover’s death-day. It was an odd dream, was not it?”
UNDER THE CLOAK.
UNDER THE CLOAK.
If there is a thing in the world that my soul hateth, it is a long night journey by rail. In the old coaching days I do not think that I should have minded it, passing swiftly through a summer night on the top of a speedy coach with the star arch black-blue above one’s head, the sweet smell of earth and her numberless flowers and grasses in one’s nostrils, and the pleasant trot, trot, trot, trot, of the four strong horses in one’s ears. But by railway! in a little stuffy compartment, with nothing to amuse you if you keep awake; with a dim lamp hanging above you, tantalizing you with the idea that you can read by its light, and when you try, satisfactorily proving to you that you cannot; and, if you sleep, breaking your neck, or at least stiffening it, by the brutal arrangement of the hard cushions.