And, truth to tell, they needed collecting and setting in order not a little. The memories of eight years were all dancing through his brain, and carrying him about whither they would; while, beneath them all, his heart was throbbing with the dull sense of a loss that could never be made up to him. The rays of the evening sun came solemnly through the painted windows above his head, and fell in gorgeous colors on the opposite wall, and the perfect stillness soothed his spirit by little and little. And he turned to the pulpit, and looked at it, and then, leaning forward with his head on his hands, groaned aloud:
“If he could only have seen the Doctor again for one five minutes—have told him all that was in his heart, what he owed to him, how he loved and reverenced him, and would by God’s help follow his steps in life and death—he could have borne it all without a murmur. But that he should have gone away for ever without knowing it all, was too much to bear.”—“But am I sure he does not know it all?”—the thought made him start—“May he not even now be near me, in this very chapel? If he be, am I sorrowing as he would have me sorrow—as I should wish to have sorrowed when I shall meet him again?”
He raised himself up and looked around; and after a minute rose and walked humbly down to the lowest bench, and sat down on the very seat which he had occupied on his first Sunday at Rugby. And then the old memories rushed back again, but softened and subdued, and soothing him as he let himself be carried away by them. And he looked up at the great painted window above the altar, and remembered how when a little boy he used to try not to look through it at the elm-trees and the rocks, before the painted glass came—and the subscription for the painted glass, and the letter he wrote home for money to give to it. And there, down below, was the very name of the boy who sat on his right hand on that first day, scratched rudely in the oak paneling.
And then came the thought of all his own school-fellows; and form after form of boys nobler, and braver, and purer than he, rose up and seemed to rebuke him. Could he not think of them, and what they had felt and were feeling, they who had honored and loved from the first, the man whom he had taken years to know and love? Could he not think of those yet dearer to him who was gone, who bore his name and shared his blood, and were now without a husband or a father? Then the grief which he began to share with others became gentle and holy, and he rose up once more, and walked up the steps to the altar; and while the tears flowed freely down his cheeks, knelt down humbly and hopefully, to lay down there his share of a burden which had proved itself too heavy for him to bear in his own strength.
LXXVI.
“It will be forty years ago next month,” said the old Captain, “since the ship I was then in came home from the West Indies station, and was paid off. I had nowhere in particular to go just then, and so was very glad to get a letter, the morning after I went ashore at Portsmouth, asking me to go down to Plymouth for a week or so. It came from an old sailor, a friend of my family, who had been Commodore of the fleet. He lived at Plymouth; he was a thorough old sailor—what you young men would call ‘an old salt’—and couldn’t live out of sight of the blue sea and the shipping. It is a disease that a good many of us take who have spent our best years on the sea. I have it myself—a sort of feeling that we must be under another kind of Providence, when we look out and see a hill on this side and a hill on that. It’s wonderful to see the trees come out and the corn grow, but then it doesn’t come so home to an old sailor. I know that we’re all just as much under the Lord’s hand on shore as at sea; but you can’t read in a book you haven’t been used to, and they that go down to the sea in ships, they see the works of the Lord and His wonders in the deep. It isn’t their fault if they don’t see His wonders on the land so easily as other people.
“But, for all that, there’s no man enjoys a cruise in the country more than a sailor. It’s forty years ago since I started for Plymouth, but I haven’t forgotten the road a bit, or how beautiful it was; all through the New Forest, and over Salisbury Plain, and then on by the mail to Exeter, and through Devonshire. It took me three days to get to Plymouth, for we didn’t get about so quick in those days.
“The Commodore was very kind to me when I got there, and I went about with him to the ships in the bay, and through the dock-yard, and picked up a good deal that was of use to me afterwards. I was a lieutenant in those days, and had seen a good deal of service, and I found the old Commodore had a great nephew whom he had adopted, and had set his whole heart upon. He was an old bachelor himself, but the boy had come to live with him, and was to go to sea; so he wanted to put him under some one who would give an eye to him for the first year or two. He was a light slip of a boy then, fourteen years old, with deep set blue eyes and long eyelashes, and cheeks like a girl’s, but as brave as a lion and as merry as a lark. The old gentleman was very pleased to see that we took to one another. We used to bathe and boat together; and he was never tired of hearing my stories about the great admirals, and the fleet, and the stations I had been on.
“Well, it was agreed that I should apply for a ship again directly, and go up to London with a letter to the Admiralty from the Commodore to help things on. After a month or two I was appointed to a brig, lying at Spithead; and so I wrote off to the Commodore, and he got his boy a midshipman’s berth on board, and brought him to Portsmouth himself a day or two before we sailed for the Mediterranean. The old gentleman came on board to see his boy’s hammock slung, and went below into the cockpit to make sure that all was right. He only left us by the pilot-boat when we were well out in the Channel. He was very low at parting from his boy, but bore up as well as he could; and we promised to write to him from Gibraltar, and as often afterwards as we had a chance.