THE GREAT EVENT OF MR. TALBOT'S LIFE
I realize that any attempt henceforth to enchain the reader's interest
with church meetings, or the like enthralments, will be more than
hopeless. That is the worst of allowing love to creep into one's story.
He insists on having the stage to himself, and in that determination the
audience is entirely with him. Previously you may have been interested
in all kinds of peaceable, unexciting things, far more good for you, but
enter love, and all the rest is suddenly fallen tame beyond endurance.
It is of no use to urge that life's bill of the play includes many
hardly less brilliant and attractive performers. They are all well
enough in their way, till the eternal Paganini is there with his old
fiddle once more at his shoulder; then there is an end of all
seriousness, or a beginning, as you please.
Well, I'll do my best to get over the six months between March and
October as quickly as possible; and, indeed, it will not be very
difficult, after all, for very little happened, to speak of, during that
time to any of the chief actors engaged in making this history.
Perhaps it was this consideration that prompted old Mr. Talbot--O,
bother old Mr. Talbot!--that prompted old Mr. Talbot, I say, to take the
important step of dying, when, poor old man! his death would give the
least possible trouble.
There seemed as little reason for his dying as there had seemed for his
living, for as far as anyone knew there was nothing the matter with him,
except an extreme sleepiness of an evening, which was but natural in an
old weary man who still kept at his stone-masonry though he was
full seventy.
Night after night, for some weeks, he had been getting sleepier and
sleepier.
"Why, dad, I never saw such an old sleepy-head"--his wife had rallied
him good-naturedly one night, looking at him with a sudden odd
expression in her face.
"Eh, lass, but I was noddin' and no mistake," said the old man,
struggling drowsily with the heaviness, and presently succumbing
once more.
"He's off again," said Mrs. Talbot to herself, as she lifted the lid of
a pent saucepan in which some boiled onions were mightily bubbling in a
wild little world of steam.
Presently the old man sighed deeply,--so you would have thought; but
Mrs. Talbot, hurrying to him, knew that he had tried to say "Jane," and
had said it for the last time.
Yes, he had been getting sleepier and sleepier; all his life he had been
trying to sleep, and at last he slept.
To most people Mr. Talbot's death was the first intimation of his ever
having lived, and one rather resents for the old man the one day's
publicity which death enforced upon him. It was indeed well for him that
he was dead, for such unwonted excitement would surely have killed him.
This important coming and going of undertakers; this populous invasion
of friends talking like muffled drums in the front parlour, and passing
up and down and up and down the stairs, in and out and in and out of his
still room; this throng of neighbours awaiting him in the streets; these
plumed impatient horses, and these carriages of dark grandeur--"Jane,
why ever didn't you bury me by the back door?" would surely have been
the old man's pitiful complaint could he have known.
However, the day passed and the old man was safe at last, where no
front-parlour visitors should affright him more, and where no one would
trouble his old brains for speech any more; and to all, save one, his
death was but as though he had moved a little farther into the kitchen.
It seemed almost strange that even his wife should miss him. One had
thought so little of them as man and wife. One could hardly, even by
process of thinking, realise that between these rinded and wrinkled
beings love had once hung like a rosy cloud, from which one day had
sprung Jenny.
On one or two occasions, indeed, they had been surprised in an uncanny
semblance of a caress, and once in a while an almost supernatural
retrospect had lit up and vanished again in an unaccustomed tender word;
and to have been present then was to feel somehow frightened.
Ah! the gay young leaves no longer kiss across in the morning sun, but
the stern old trees have meetings you know not of far beneath the
ground. Their roots are twisted and twined in a wonderful embrace there;
there in the dark they are very close together, and shall not be
wrenched apart without groanings that cannot be uttered.
Jenny can hardly be said to have missed her father, except through her
mother, who seemed suddenly to grow a little deafer, a little more
dim-sighted, just a trifle less brisk and busy than before, and with a
touch about her of that old-age awesomeness that mutters to itself in
corners and seems to know strange things.
Yes, Jane missed her John. Her old heart knew that he was no longer
sitting in the kitchen.