"Well, Margaret has been teaching me, and I think I have learned it, that death is not at all such a dreadful thing as it looks. I said to her: 'It is easy for you, Margaret, who are so far from death's door.' But she told me that she had been all but dead once, and that you had saved her life almost with your own. Oh, Hugh! she is such a dear!"Euphra smiled with ten times the fascination of any of her old smiles; for the soul of the smile was love.
"I shall never see you again, I daresay," she went on. "My heart thanks you, from its very depths, for your goodness to me. It has been a thousand times more than I deserve."Hugh kissed in silence the wasted hand held out to him in adieu, and departed. And the world itself was a sad wandering star.
Falconer had called for him. They drove to Miss Talbot's, where Hugh got his 'bag of needments,' and bade his landlady good-bye for a time. Falconer then accompanied him to the railway.
Having left him for a moment, Falconer rejoined him, saying: "I have your ticket;" and put him into a first-class carriage.
Hugh remonstrated. Falconer replied:
"I find this hulk of mine worth taking care of. You will be twice the good to your mother, if you reach her tolerably fresh."He stood by the carriage door talking to him, till the train started; walked alongside till it was fairly in motion; then, bidding him good-bye, left in his hand a little packet, which Hugh, opening it by the light of the lamp, found to consist of a few sovereigns and a few shillings folded up in a twenty-pound-note.
I ought to tell one other little fact, however. Just before the engine whistled, Falconer said to Hugh:
"Give me that fourpenny piece, you brave old fellow!""There it is," said Hugh. "What do you want it for?""I am going to make a wedding-present of it to your wife, whoever she may happen to be. I hope she will be worthy of it."Hugh instantly thought within himself:
"What a wife Margaret would make to Falconer!"The thought was followed by a pang, keen and clear.
Those who are in the habit of regarding the real and the ideal as essentially and therefore irreconcileably opposed, will remark that I cannot have drawn the representation of Falconer faithfully.
Perhaps the difficulty they will experience in recognizing its truthfulness, may spring from the fact that they themselves are un-ideal enough to belong to the not small class of strong-minded friends whose chief care, in performing the part of the rock in the weary land, is--not to shelter you imprudently. They are afraid of weakening your constitution by it, especially if it is not strong to begin with; so if they do just take off the edge of the tempest with the sharp corners of their sheltering rock for a moment, the next, they will thrust you out into the rain, to get hardy and self-denying, by being wet to the skin and well blown about.
The rich easily learn the wisdom of Solomon, but are unapt scholars of him who is greater than Solomon. It is, on the other hand, so easy for the poor to help each other, that they have little merit in it: it is no virtue--only a beauty. But there are a few rich, who, rivalling the poor in their own peculiar excellences, enter into the kingdom of heaven in spite of their riches; and then find that by means of their riches they are made rulers over many cities. She to whose memory this book is dedicated, is--I will not say was--one of the noblest of such.
There are two ways of accounting for the difficulty which a reader may find in believing in such a character: either that, not being poor, he has never needed such a friend; or that, being rich, he has never been such a friend.
Or if it be that, being poor, he has never found such a friend; his difficulty is easy to remove:--I have.