“Hang it all,” he growled at last, “what is there in this life anyhow? What are we here for, I should like to know? What’s the object of the whole, miserable procession? It’s a devil of a grind for everybody, and we have to give it up at last, and go out of it, God only knows where. What do you think is at the end of it, Mrs. Doring?”
“O Colonel, I think and think, but I know nothing.”
“Yes, that’s the dickens of it, nobody knows,” he sighed. “But if there is a hell most of us will be well seasoned for it by tough times here. I feel about ripe myself. At least I am certain they can’t get up anything worse than this world anywhere. Mighty little happiness here.”
There was something inexpressibly pathetic in this ruined man’s mention of happiness. Like all others he had been in pursuit of it, yet his seeking had but led him farther astray.
“Should you like to live your life over again?” he asked with sudden animation.
“I have not the courage,” she answered.
“I don’t know that I have either,” he said, with a weary air. “I don’t know that I want to; yet all the morning I have seen myself as I was when a child in my father’s house, and my grown-up life seems but a dream. If it were so, and I remembered the dream, I would not again travel the same road, I assure you. I recall one spring morning, particularly—a Sunday morning—when I sat with my mother on the shady old porch with vines running up the sides, and she sang this:
“‘There is a land of pure delight,
Where saints immortal reign.
Infinite day excludes the night,
And pleasures banish pain.
“‘There everlasting spring abides
And never-withering flowers.
Death like a narrow sea divides
That heavenly land from ours.’”
A good tenor voice had once been his, but the best of it had gone the irrevocable road, like many of his other endowments and possessions. Enough remained, however, to give a touching sweetness to the grand old words, and as he sang his face became softened, beautified, transfigured, all that was erring and evil dropping out of it. The years, too, fell away, and he was a little child again—nor had he ever been anything else—just a child, weak, wandering, blundering, stumbling often—just a child, brother to us all.
“Do you think there is anything for us on the other side of death?” he asked, the childlike look still upon his face.