“As Thou hast found me ready to Thy call,
Which stationed me to watch the outer wall,
And, quitting joys and hopes that once were mine,
To pace with patient steps this narrow line
Oh! may it be that, coming soon or late,
Thou still shalt find Thy soldier at the gate,
Who then may follow Thee till sight needs not to prove,
And faith will be dissolved in knowledge of Thy love.”
G. J. Romanes.
|It was in July, while Macneillie was spending his summer holiday at
Callander, that his mother’s sudden death made him more than ever alone
in the world. They had passed together a particularly happy fortnight,
and though he could see that she was gradually getting more infirm she
had never known a day’s illness, and her loss came as a terrible shock
to him.
Ralph and Evereld were able to come down to the funeral, for the London
season was just over and he was glad to have them with him for ten days
before he started once more on tour. He was thinking of selling the
house and furniture, but Ralph who knew what pains he had spent in
building it, and how sad the dispersal of all his old home belongings
must be, persuaded him to leave things much as they were and content
himself with letting it as a furnished house for the summer months.
For a time the presence of the Denmeads cheered him a good deal. He
enjoyed hearing every detail of their life in London, and he insisted
on taking them to the Pass of Leny that he might show Evereld the exact
spot where he had first come across her husband. Each morning, too, they
used to tramp up the road leading to the well and Ralph would read
aloud from “Marius the Epicurean,” while Evereld made a sketch which
Macneillie had long desired:--the rough moorland road in the foreground
leading to the crest of the hill; on either side a stretch of purple
heather; the hint of a valley down below where Callander lay hidden and,
in the distance, a range of blue Scottish mountains which he said would
make him breathe “caller” air only to look at.
“I shall take it with me wherever I go,” he said. “There is no reason
why wayfaring men shouldn’t have a few possessions of their own. Besides
I have foresworn the travelling clock. It is no good to me since you
have gone, for I can never remember to wind it, so there is one thing
less to pack.”
“It was here in this identical place that you coached me that summer
after I was ill,” said Ralph. “I connect it with Florizel, and Claudio,
and Fabian, and with that Scotch play Miss Greville was acting in at
Edinburgh.”
“Yes, and taking him altogether he was a very amenable pupil,” said
Macneillie smiling at Evereld. “I wish I could say as much for his
successor.”
But unfortunately a second Ralph Denmead proved hard to find. And
Macneillie had a very discouraging time of it all through August and
September. The weather was unusually hot and even in the watering-places
that they visited the audiences were seldom good. Then came a spell of
very wet weather, but the houses were still poor, and it seemed that no
one cared for Shakspere, that old English Comedy ceased to attract and
that the restless spirits of modern people required something much more
highly seasoned.
Nourished on skimmed newspaper, hashed review articles, minced magazines
in the form of summaries, and short stories of dubious morality, was
it likely that their brains could be in a condition to receive good
wholesome literary food?
Macneillie had long been aware that a wave of evil tendency was passing
over literature and the drama, he had struggled on, never allowing it
to influence his choice of plays, sure that in time the “evil on itself
would back recoil,” and faithful to his own conviction of what was a
manager’s duty. But he began now to think that, before the force of this
wave of uncleanness had spent itself, it would altogether submerge his
fortune and leave him a ruined man.
One of the things that tried him most severely was the timidity of
those who should have been his best supporters. The clergy with a few
noteworthy exceptions fulminated against the evil plays but failed
to support the good. He knew that hundreds of them would troop to
Washington’s theatre when they went to London, but they were generally
conspicuous by their absence from the theatres in their own towns
where their presence might really have done much good. Personally they
respected him and spoke of him in warm terms, but very few of them
at all understood how hard a fight this man was making in a time of
exceptional difficulty, or how bitter it was to him when those, from
whom he reasonably expected much, held aloof.
It was quite the end of September when the Macneillie Company found
themselves once more at Liverpool. They were giving the plays they
had performed at Stratford during the Memorial week, and this made
Macneillie feel the loss of Ralph more acutely than ever. To turn
straight from a pupil who had been extraordinarily receptive, always
good-humoured, always ready to study, and grudging no pains in the
effort to please his instructor and conquer his own faults, to a man of
exactly the opposite type, was hard indeed. It was all the more annoying
to Macneillie because Ralph’s successor had excellent abilities but
was cursed with the conviction that he already knew everything a little
better than the Manager; he had moreover been born with one of those
touchy and wayward natures that are so hard to deal with. He lived in
a perpetual state of taking offence, and though Macneillie apparently
ignored this and went quietly on his way, it nevertheless chafed him a
good deal.
Then, too, all the many vicissitudes of a travelling company--the
illness of one, the quarrels of another--seemed to worry him more now
that he was alone and had no one to discuss things with. The very rooms
he occupied in Seymour Street were full of memories to him; he had
stayed there more than once with Ralph and Evereld, it had been there
that they had first come to him after their marriage, and the place
looked horribly blank without them.
By the Thursday morning of their stay he was in the lowest spirits. For
three nights they had played to wretchedly bad houses owing to counter
attractions elsewhere; his old trouble of sleeplessness was returning
and he felt ill and horribly depressed as he walked down through the wet
dingy streets to the Shakspere Theatre. There was a rehearsal of Romeo
and Juliet, and the insolent manner and insufferable conceit of the
Juvenile Lead proved just the last straw. After going through some great
agony in life, and going through it well and bravely we are sadly apt to
break down under some quite trifling strain. A petty thing will irritate
us absurdly in the reaction after great distress, and Macneillie lost
his temper now and scolded the offending actor right royally. When an
habitually quiet, self-restrained man does lose his temper he usually
does it with great thoroughness. Romeo was impressed as he might have
been by a sudden thunder storm on a winter’s day, but those who really
knew the Manager were troubled at such an unwonted scene, and Ivy
glanced at him with the conviction that his health was again breaking
down.
It was an uncomfortable rehearsal and Macneillie went back to Seymour
Street doubly depressed. His thoughts turned to that April afternoon at
Stratford on the river. He had been strong then, but
“It is very good for strength
To know that someone needs you to be strong.”
Christine’s presence, though in one sense it had been his most severe
trial, had been in another an incentive to endure. To-day, in his
lonely room with food before him which he could not touch, with a
brain exhausted by want of rest, and harassed by a hundred cares and
annoyances, he came perilously near to yielding. For that was the worst
of it. The struggle was not one to be gone through once and for all,
it was constantly recurring. And always he had the consciousness that
Christine’s reverence for law was weaker than his own, that she would
quickly yield to his lightest word. It was moreover so fatally easy to
go to her, so hard to be loyal to that shamefully unfair law of the land
which should be reformed.
To check his thoughts he took up one of the London papers. The first
thing that met his eye was the announcement that Sir Matthew Mactavish
had died in the distant place of refuge which he had succeeded in
gaining. And almost immediately afterwards he noticed a paragraph in
which was a brief account of the marriage of the Honourable Herbert
Vane-Ffoulkes to Lady Dunlop-Tyars, widow of the late Sir John
Dunlop-Tyars, Bart.
He smiled a little over the memories evoked by those names, but the dark
cloud soon stole over him once more.
“Villains can die,” he thought to himself, “and empty-headed fools can
marry, but I must still drag on this death in life!”
Then fiends’ voices began to urge him to give up: mocking fiends who
jeered at his obsolete notions of right and wrong: practical fiends
who would have had him cease a vain endeavor to keep up an impossible
standard of morality, and from thenceforth pander to the depraved taste
of the public; shrewd fiends who argued plausibly enough that his health
was breaking down and that it was high time to yield.
Macneillie with an effort roused himself and for a while baffled them by
taking a brisk walk; it was cold and wet and dreary but the exercise
was a relief and by the time he had reached the Seaforth Sands he
had regained his composure. The struggle was for the time over, but
existence looked to him as wretched, as cheerless, as that wild desolate
country at the entrance to the Mersey. The rain too began to come
down remorselessly, and he made his way to the station of the electric
railway and returned by the docks to the city. As he was walking along
Church Street he chanced to come across Ralph’s friend George Mowbray.
“I am just going to the Art Gallery,” he observed. “Bicycling is
hopeless to-day, the tires do nothing but slip.”
“I’ll come with you,” said Macneillie, not because he cared in the least
to see the pictures, but from sheer dread of having spare time on his
hands.
He had never before contrived to see the Walker Art Gallery and as
he wandered drearily round the place, seeing yet hardly heeding the
treasures it contains, his attention was at length arrested by Poynter’s
well-known picture “Faithful unto Death.” He was of course familiar
with the story of the sentinel of Pompeii whose skeleton was discovered,
hundreds of years later, standing on guard at his gate. But he never
realised till he saw that picture how awful must have been the man’s
temptation to escape and save himself as all the rest were doing. Behind
him were only two or three flying figures, most of the citizens must
already have fled; but before him, and drawing very near, was the awful
lurid glow which meant certain death. The sentinel stood facing it, he
was perfectly upright, perfectly calm, only in the strong tension of the
muscles of the hand one could see how instinctively he gripped the sword
which could now avail him nothing. In his dilated eyes there was no
abject terror but a great awe, an intensely human look of dread of
the swiftly approaching fiery foe. It would have been an easy thing to
desert his post and disobey orders. Had it ever come into his mind as
he gazed across the campagna to Vesuvius that self preservation was
permissible under such circumstances? That a soldier need not always
obey his captain’s orders? Perhaps it had, but nevertheless he had stood
firm and had died in what no doubt seemed a useless fashion, out of
reverence to mere law, never dreaming that his example would give
courage and strength to millions of people in the ages to come.
Macneillie turned away thoughtfully, his mind at work on that old, old
problem of evil and suffering, of the possible gain to others through
the inexplicable pain of the world.
The thought of it haunted him as he wrote business letters in his lonely
room, as he went about his work that night at the theatre, as he looked
with a sense of dull disappointment and depression at the rows of empty
stalls, and reflected how much hard toil and careful preparation had
been thrown away on an enterprise by which he was daily losing money.
Someone brought an evening paper into the green room, he glanced
hurriedly at an account of the new play shortly to be produced by Barry
Sterne; he read a few lines as to the part Christine was to take, and
was pleased by a brief allusion to the success Ralph had had in the
summer. But as he went back to his rooms a weary distaste for his work
in the provinces came over him, he longed as he had never longed before
to be back in London, to be working once more with his old comrades.
The dismal rain still fell in a drizzle, the flaring lights in the
public house at the corner of Wild Street were reflected garishly in the
wet pavement. A little further on as he crossed London Road he came upon
a small crowd grouped about a tram car, and paused listlessly to see
what was wrong. The horses were vainly struggling to make good their
footing on the slippery road; they stumbled and plunged and strained,
but the uphill way was too much for them, the car slipped back and for a
minute the passengers seemed in some peril.
Macneillie drew nearer and spoke to the conductor who was at the horses’
heads doing his utmost to urge them on.
“Is the load too heavy for them?” said Macneillie.
“Bless you, no sir,” said the man, “they’ve done it scores of times, but
it’s a strain on ’em when the road’s slippery, and this ’ere roan ’e’es
afraid of coming down. It’s just panic sir, nothing more, ’e can do it
fast enough.”
Macneillie stroked the neck of the frightened horse, he had a fellow
feeling for it.
“We can’t have the line blocked or the passengers upset,” said the
driver, with an oath which appeared to refresh him greatly. “Come on
mate, he must do it. Take the whip and keep alongside of him thrashing
him as we go.”
At last with much ado the car was in motion once more, and the poor
roan, kicking and plunging, was dragged and flogged up the hill.
“Oh, how could you let them be so cruel, Mr. Macneillie!” said Ivy who,
on her way back to her rooms with Helen Orme, had witnessed the same
scene.
“Well my dear, I liked it as little as you did,” said the Manager. “But
what was to be done? The load was not too great, it was merely that the
horse was frightened, and there was no persuading it that it would not
come to grief. Like the rest of us it would insist on thinking of the
hill in front of it, instead of concentrating its mind on the next
step. You see while you anathematised the driver I, like the melancholy
Jaques, did ‘moralize this spectacle.’”
They laughed and bade him good night, but Ivy looked rather anxiously
after him as, having seen them to their door, he recrossed Seymour
Street to his lodgings a little further up.
“Nell,” she said to her companion, “how very ill Mr. Macneillie looks
to-night. I think he will break down altogether.”
“Oh, I hope not,” said Helen Orme. “I think he is only depressed. He has
lost his mother lately you see, and besides I’m sure there is plenty to
account for depression with such houses as we have had lately.”
Meanwhile Macneillie had reached his desolate rooms. He had been
thinking of the Stratford performances, of Ralph’s brilliant success, of
the crowded theatre;--it seemed to him that he ought now to have found a
sweet-faced little housekeeper sitting by the fire and making toast, that
there ought to have been a welcoming glance from Evereld’s truthful
blue eyes. Instead there was an empty room and a fireless grate and
a solitary meal awaiting him. He sat down and ate dutifully but quite
without appetite. He forced himself to remember how much better it was
that Ralph and Evereld should be near Christine; but the more he thought
the more that horrible craving to be there too assailed him.
And presently, for the first time in his life, a feeling of deadly
faintness came over him; he staggered into his bedroom. The gas was
turned low, the window which was at the back of the house had been left
wide open, he breathed more freely and leant for some minutes against
the shutter, vaguely conscious of the night sky and of the dark outline
of the neighbouring buildings. In his eyes there was the same look
of awe--of a great human dread--which makes the eyes of the Pompeian
sentinel so pathetic. He had endured long and patiently, had thought
little of the effect on himself, but now the dread of an utter failure
of health seized him, and he knew that it was no idle fancy but a very
real peril which must be bravely faced.
And yet better, a thousand times better, the wreck of body and mind than
the failure to be a law-abiding citizen. Better this cruel absence from
the woman he loved than faithlessness to what he knew to be right.
“There is not a pin to choose between me and that tram-car horse!”
he reflected, pulling down the blind and turning up the gas with a
humourous smile flickering even then about his pale lips. “The way is
slippery and there’s a hill to be climbed,--it is collar work, but a
step at a time may do it safely after all. Anyhow I will put ‘a stiff
back to a stubborn brae.’”
He paused for a minute to look at Evereld’s water colour sketch of the
moorland road, and to breathe “caller” air as he glanced at the heather
and at the blue mountains beyond the hidden valley.
He would go on patiently as a wayfaring man should do; and perchance in
time--oh, how he longed and prayed for that time!--the unjust law would
be reformed, and he and Christine might find rest and a home in that
hidden valley of the future. In any case no one could rob them of their
inheritance beyond.
Not, however, until he turned the picture over and read the quotation
from “Marius the Epicurean” which he had written at Callander on the
back of it, did his usual look of quiet strength return to him.
The words were these:--“Must not the whole world around have faded away
from him altogether, had he been left for one moment really alone in it?
In his deepest apparent solitude there had been rich entertainment. It
was as if there were not one only, but two wayfarers, side by side.”
THE END