“Ah, yes, yes,” he said, “a worthy young fellow.”
By an auspicious chance too—if indeed it were one—a female clerk now entered the room, bearing in her hands a specimen copy of the nineteenth edition of the Bible for Schools. He glanced up from his wife’s letter.
“Yes, yes,” he said, “that will interest you.”
“Nothing,” I replied, “could have interested me more, unless perhaps a specimen of the twentieth.”
Afterwards, as I shall show, my initial distrust of the man proved to have been only too well founded. But, as matters turned out on this particular afternoon, I left his office as a junior assistant. Placed under the charge of the show-room manager, I was to help this gentleman with his accounts and to act when necessary as a salesman of the firm’s congenial and Xtian literature. It was a supreme moment—it was perhaps, in a good many ways, the supremest moment of my life—and I did not hesitate, after some further buns, to make suitable acknowledgment of it in St. Paul’s Cathedral. Nor was the news with which I was confronted on my return to Angela Gardens entirely able to counteract the deep satisfaction with which it filled me.
Nevertheless it was perhaps a timely reminder of the ever-present imminence of eternity, and it was certainly one that I have made a point of recalling in many subsequent moments of elation. For hardly had I opened the front gate when somebody touched me on the shoulder, and turning round, I observed Simeon Whey looking more preoccupied than I had ever seen him. His lips at any rate were moving rather convulsively and his laryngeal spasm was extremely marked.
“Kck,” he said. “It’s Silas.”
“Dear me,” I replied. “What’s the matter with him?”
“Kck,” he repeated. “He’s dead.”
“You don’t say so?” I cried. “What did he die of?”