This is what I heard, with my very own ears, before the hospitable door closed behind me, and I turned my back on the lights and glowing Christmas fire, and walked out among the snow-covered rhododendrons, a lonely and neglected clergyman.
It was then that, under the starry heavens, the keen wind whistling about my ears, the boughs of the leafless trees shrieking, as if they were in pain, and the sea moaning its eternal dull chant in the distance, that my life was mirrored before me, as it must and ever shall be, until time ends, to the drowning or the dying man.
All my days at Oxford, their wild hopes and ambitions, all my trials of athleticism and strength, in the old days when port and sherry wine at the University were thought more of than any Olympian games.
Flash! flash! flash! went the memories across my brain.
The day, oh! memorable day of days, when I was stroke of the Oxford eight, and we beat Cambridge with seven oars.
The day when I won the silver sculls, and helped to win the silver pair oars, that rest under a glass case in my East Anglian rectory.
The day when I determined, God willing, to devote my life to the poor, and found that a dandified Christ Church student, who wore his long hair in a net—as they did in those days—was changed into an East-end curate with two daily services to attend to, several sermons to write, and loathsome, unventilated hovels to visit day by day.
The day when I fell in love, and the day when love’s paradise was closed to me for ever. That one supremely delicious moment, in years gone by, when with tears in her eyes she came across the room, where we were alone together, and kissing me purely on the forehead, looked into my eyes and whispered “Be a friend to me!”
The day—ah! nefasti dies—when in my arms she breathed her last, and trying to divide her crucifix with me, that we might part in soul no more for ever, she whispered, “Love, be good!” and I was alone for evermore.
The day when, distracted with grief, hungry and eager for work, I became a prison chaplain, in order to bury my grief in comforting others in their hour of sorrow.