_Wherein the Major takes to his Bed_
The winter dawdled late in the city.
Saint Valentine went out into the darkness of the night, with silent
feet muffled in a heavy fall of snow.
And Major Modeyne went with him.
They brought him home in the early morning, dead and icy cold, and laid
him upon his bed; and when they were gone Betty sat by the still figure
and stroked the chill hand that had done intentional ill to none;
in such strange manner she tasted for the first time the bitterness
of death--in such sorry fashion the poor tattered remains of her
childhood fell from her, sitting there, listening for the deep mystic
significance of the eternal slaying that is a part of the eternal
life....
Betty, as by pronounced habit, was to suffer for it.
A jury had to sit upon the tragedy; and the coroner, embarrassedly
enough, had to rake up the details that were called the life of the
poor broken man that lay silent in death, unheeding and unprotesting
and unashamed. Modeyne’s hand had always fallen heaviest upon the small
child from whom his thin will would have the most flinched as to the
giving of pain. His death, that should have closed the book of the
record of the child’s struggles against the public washing of the linen
of his sordid details of life, was instead a new whip wherewith she
was scourged--the manner of it was the very event that compelled the
uncovering of all those little tragedies which the proud child had so
courageously hushed under the dignity of her silence.
It was made clear by the sworn evidence that the Major had wandered to
the great flight of steps on which he was found, that he had taken off
his boots to prevent the waking of his landlady, that he had climbed
a few of the steps in the darkness, and lain down, under the delusion
that he was in bed, and had slept into death, the white snow weaving
his winding-sheet.
Then it came out that he had sat late at a festive orgy in the rooms
of _The Cock and Bull_ tavern in Fleet Street, and had left the place,
like most of the others, somewhat vague as to his destination.
It also came out that he was some sort of agent for the tavern, which
had wine-merchandise in its connection; but this seems to have become,
in the Major’s case, but a sleeping partnership--his chief office
having been an ornate one--to attract the city loungers to the place by
the exercise of his genial and ready fancy and his pleasant friendship,
which was wholly untainted with the ignoble thing called snobbery. The
very waiters felt in him a personal loss. Yet he had not had the means
to be prodigal of anything but his whimsical tongue.
It was also hinted that the dead man was highly connected--but the
magnificent in their high places kept a frigid silence that showed a
dogged decision to bear their loss unflinchingly.
Indeed, on the evening of the day on which the dead man was put to his
rest for the last time by the silent girl and the handsome youth who
had so often shared the task in the small hours of the morning when
the unknowing world snored and slept, it was, truth to say, a somewhat
vulgar little knot of city men that sat round the table of _The Cock
and Bull_ tavern and passed a silk hat round about to collect the
little sum that one of them was deputed to take to the girl herself
with a vote of their respect and affection for a dead friend and as
true a gentleman as any into whom the good God had put good wine.