Second-rate London lodgings are not great cheerers of the human spirit, and Mike was very lonely in his first letter or two; but, as the rehearsals proceeded, it was evident that he was taking hold of his new world, and the letter which told of his first night, and of his own encouraging success in it, was buoyant with the rising tide of the future. His chief had affectionately laid his hand on his shoulder, as he came off from his scene, and, in the hearing of the whole company, prophesied a great future for him.

Mike had been born under a lucky star; and he had hardly been in London two months when accident very perceptibly brightened it. The chief comedian in the company fell ill; and though Mike had had so little experience, his chief had so much confidence in his native gift, that he cast him for the vacant part. Mike more than justified the confidence, and not only pleased him, but succeeded in individualising himself with the audience. He had only played it for a week, when one Sat.u.r.day evening the audience, after calling the manager himself three times, set up a cry for "Laflin." The obsequious attendant pretended to consider it as a fourth call for the manager, and made as if to move the curtain aside for him once more; but, with a magnanimity rare indeed in a "star"

of his magnitude, "No, no!" he said; "it is Mr. Laflin they want. Quick, lad, and take your first call."

So little Mike stepped before the curtain, and made his first bow to an affectionate burst of applause. What happy tears would have glittered in Esther's eyes had she been there to see it, and in Henry's too, and particularly, perhaps, in excitable Angel's!

Even so soon was the blossom giving promise of the fruit.

CHAPTER XL

A LEGACY MORE PRECIOUS THAN GOLD

Meanwhile, Henry plodded away at Aunt Tipping's, working sometimes on a volume of essays for the London publisher, and sometimes on his novel, now and again writing a review, and earning an odd guinea for a poem; and now and again indulging in a day of richly doing nothing. Otherwise, one day was like another, with the many exceptions of the days on which he saw Angel or Esther. With Ned, he spent many of his evenings; and he soon formed the pleasant habit of dropping in on Gerard, last thing before bed-time, for a smoke and half an hour's chat.

There is always a good deal of youth left in any one who genuinely loves youth; and Gerard always spoke of his youth as Adam, in his declining years, might have spoken of Paradise. For him life was just youth--and the rest of it death.

"After thirty," he would say, "the happiest life is only history repeating itself. I am no cynic,--far from it; but the worst of life is the monotony of the bill of fare. To do a thing once, even twice, is delightful--perhaps even a third time is successfully possible; but to do it four times, is middle age. If you think of it, what is there to do after thirty that one ought not to have achieved to perfection before?

You know the literary dictum, that the poet who hasn't written a masterpiece before he is thirty will never write any after. Of course, there are exceptions; I am speaking of the rule. In business, for example, what future is there for the man who has not already a dashing past at thirty? Of course, the bulk, the ma.s.sive trunk and the impressive foliage of his business, must come afterwards; but the tree must have been firmly rooted and stoutly branched before then, and able to go on growing on its own account. The work, in fact, must have been done.

"Take perhaps the only thing really worth doing in life," and Gerard perceptibly saddened. "That is, marrying a woman you love, or I should say _the_ woman, for you only really _love_ one woman--I'm old-fashioned enough to think that,--well, I say, marrying the woman you love, and bringing into the world that miracle of miracles,--a child that shall be something of you and all her: that certainly is something to have done before thirty, and not to be repeated, perhaps, more than once before or after. She will want a boy like you, and you will have a girl like her. That you may easily accomplish before thirty. Afterwards, however, if you go on repeating each other, what do you do but blur the individuality of the original masterpieces--though," pursued Gerard, laughing, always ready to forget his original argument in the seductiveness of an unexpected development of it, "though, after all, I admit, there might be a temptation sometimes to improve upon the originals. 'Agnes, my dear,' we might say, 'I'm not quite satisfied yet with the shade of Eva's hair. It's nearly yours, but not quite. It's an improvement on Anna's, whose eyes now are exactly yours. Eva's, unfortunately, are not so faithful. I'm afraid we'll have to try again.'

"No, but seriously," he once more began, "for a really vital and successful life there is no adequate employment of the faculties after thirty, except, of course, in the repet.i.tion of former successes. No; I even withdraw that,--not the repet.i.tion, only the conservation, the feeding, of former successes. The success is in the creation. When a world is once created, any fool can keep it spinning.

"Man's life is at least thirty years too long. Two score years is more than enough for us to say what we were sent here to say; and if you'll consider those biographies in which you are most interested, the biographies of great writers, you cannot but bear me out. What, for instance, did Keats and Sh.e.l.ley and Burns and Byron lose by dying, all of them long before they were forty,--Keats even long before he was thirty; and what did Wordsworth and Coleridge gain by living so long after? Wordsworth and Coleridge didn't even live to repeat themselves, else, of course, one would have begged them to go on living for ever; for some repet.i.tions, it is admitted, are welcome,--for instance, won't you have a little more whisky?"

Henry always agreed so completely with Gerard's talk, or at least so delighted in it, that he had little scope of opportunity to say much himself; and Gerard was too keen a talker to complain of a rapt young listener.

"How old are you?" he said, presently.

"Twenty-two next month."

"Twenty-two! How wonderful to be twenty-two! Yet I don't suppose you've realised it in the least. In your own view, you're an aged philosopher, white with a past, and bowed down with the cares of a future. Just you stay in bed all day to-morrow, and ponder on the wonderfulness of being twenty-two!

"I'm forty-two. You're beginning--I'm done with. And yet, in some ways, I believe I'm younger than you--though, perhaps, alas! what I consider the youth in me is only the wish to be young again, the will to do and enjoy, without the force and the appet.i.te. But, by the way, when I say I'm forty-two, I mean that I'm forty-two in the course of next week, next Thursday, in fact, and if you'll do me that kindness, I should be grateful if you would join me that evening in celebrating the melancholy occasion. I've got a great mind to enlist your sympathy in a little ancient history, if it won't be too great a tax upon your goodness; but I'll think it over between now and then."

Gerard's birthday had come; and the ancient history he had spoken of had proved to be a chapter of his own history, the beauty and sadness of which had made an impression upon Henry, to be rendered ineffaceable a very few days after in a sudden and terrible manner.

One early morning about four, just as it was growing light, he had suddenly awakened with a strong feeling that some one was bending over him. He opened his eyes, to see, as he thought, Gerard hastily leaving his bedside.

"Gerard!" he cried, "what's the matter?" but the figure gave no answer, faded away down the long room, and disappeared. Henry sat up in bed and struck a light, his heart beating violently. But there was no one there, and the door was closed. It had evidently been one of those dreams that persist on the eye for a moment after waking. Yet it left him uneasy; and presently he wondered if Gerard could be ill. He determined to see; so, slipping on his dressing-gown, he crossed the landing to Gerard's room, and, softly knocking, opened the door and put in his head.

"Gerard, old chap, are you all right?--Gerard--"

There was no answer, and the room seemed unaccountably still. He listened for the sound of breathing, but he couldn't hear it.

"Gerard!" he cried, again louder, but there was still no answer; and then, with the silence, a chill terror began to creep through his blood.

He had never yet seen death; and perhaps if he had the terror in his thought would not have been lessened. With a heart that had almost stopped beating, and knees that shook beneath him, he pushed open the door and walked over to the bed. It was still too dark to see more than outlines and ma.s.ses of white and black; but even so he could see that the stillness with which Gerard was lying was the stillness of death.

His next thought was to rouse Aunt Tipping; and together the two bent over the dead face.

"Yes, he's gone," said Aunt Tipping; "poor gentlemen, how beautiful he looks!" and they both gazed in silence upon the calm, smiling face.

"Well, he's better off," she said, presently, leaning over him, and softly pressing down the lids of his eyes.

Henry involuntarily drew away.

"Dear lad, there's nothing to be frightened of," said his aunt. "He's as harmless as a baby."

Then she took a handkerchief from a drawer, and spread it gently over the dead man's face. To Aunt Tipping the dead were indeed as little children, and inspired her with a strange motherly tenderness. Many had been the tired silent ones whose eyes she had closed, and whose limbs she had washed against their last resting place. They were so helpless now; they could do nothing any more for themselves.

Later in the day, Henry came again and sat long by the dead man's side.

It seemed uncompanionable to have grown thus suddenly afraid of him, to leave him thus alone in that still room. And as he sat and watched him, he gave to his memory a solemn service of faithful thought. Thus it was he went over again the words in which Gerard had made him the depository, the legatee, of his most sacred possession.

Gerard had evidently had some presentiment of his approaching end.

"I am going," he had said, "to place the greatest confidence in you one man can place in another, pay you the greatest compliment. I shall die some day, and something tells me that that divine event is not very far off. Now I have no one in the world who cares an old 'J' pen for me, and a new one is perhaps about as much as I care for any one--with one exception, and that is a woman whom I shall never see again. She is not dead, but has been worse than dead for me these ten years. I am optimist enough to believe that her old love for me still survives, making sweet the secret places of her soul. Never once in all these years to have doubted her love has been more than most marriages; but were I to live for another ten years, and still another, I would believe in it still.

But the stars were against us. We met too late. We met when she had long been engaged to a friend of her youth, a man n.o.ble and true, to whom she owed much, and whom she felt it a kind of murder to desert. It was one of those fallacious chivalries of feeling which are the danger of sensitive and imaginative minds. Religion strengthened it, as it is so apt to strengthen any form of self-destruction, short of technical suicide. There was but a month to their marriage when we met. For us it was a month of rapture and agonies, of heaven shot through with h.e.l.l. I saw further than she. I begged her at least to wait a year; but the force of my appeal was weakened by scruples similar to her own. To rob another of his happiness is an act from which we may well shrink, though we can clearly see that the happiness was really destined for us, and can never be his in any like degree. During this time I had received from her many letters, letters such as a woman only writes in the May-morning of her pa.s.sion; and one day I received the last. There was in it one sentence which when I read it I think my heart broke, 'Do you believe,' it ran, 'in a love that can lie asleep, as in a trance, in this world, to awaken again in another, a love that during centuries of silence can still be true, and be love still in a thousand years? If you do, go on loving me. For that is the only love I dare give you. I must love you no more in this world.'

"Each morning as I have risen, and each night as I have turned to sleep, those words have repeated themselves again and again in my heart, for ten years. It was so I became the Ashton Gerard you know to-day. Since that day, we have never met or written to each other. All I know is that she is still alive, and still with him, and never would I disturb their peace. When I die, I would not have her know it. If love _is_ immortal, we shall meet again--when I am worthier to meet her. Such reunions are either mere dreams, or they are realities to which the strongest forces of the universe are pledged."

Henry's only comment had been to grip Gerard's hand, and give him the sympathy of silence.

"Now," said Gerard, once more after a while, "it is about those letters I want to speak to you. They are here," and he unlocked a drawer and drew from it a little silver box. "I always keep them here. The key of the drawer is on this ring, and this little gold key is the key of the box itself. I tell you this, because I have what you may regard as a strange request to make.

"I suppose most men would consider it their duty either to burn these letters, or leave instructions for them to be buried with them. That is a gruesome form of sentiment in which I have too much imagination to indulge. Both my ideas of duty and sentiment take a different form. The surname of the writer of these letters is nowhere revealed in them, nor are there any references in them by which she could ever be identified.

Therefore the menace to her fair fame in their preservation is not a question involved. Now when the simplest woman is in love, she writes wonderfully; but when a woman of imagination and intellect is caught by the fire of pa.s.sion, she becomes a poet. Once in her life, every such woman is an artist; once, for some one man's unworthy sake, she becomes inspired, and out of the fulness of her heart writes him letters warm and real as the love-cries of Sappho. Such are the letters in this little box. They are the cla.s.sic of a month's pa.s.sion, written as no man has ever yet been able to write his love. Do you think it strange then that I should shrink from destroying them? I would as soon burn the songs of Sh.e.l.ley. They are living things. Shall I selfishly bury the beating heart of them in the silence of the grave?

"So, Mesurier," he continued, affectionately, "when I met you and understood something of your nature, I thought that in you I had found one who was worthy to guard this treasure for me, and perhaps pa.s.s it on again to some other chosen spirit--so that these beautiful words of a n.o.ble woman's heart shall not die--for when a man loves a woman, Mesurier, as you yourself must know, he is insatiable to hear her praise, and it is agony for him to think that her memory may suffer extinction. Therefore, Mesurier,--Henry, let me call you,--I want to give the memory of my love into your hands. I want you to love it for me, when perhaps I can love it no more. I want you sometimes to open this box, and read in these letters, as if they were your own; I want you sometimes to speak softly the name of 'Helen,' when my lips can speak it no more."

Such was the beautiful legacy of which Henry found himself the possessor by Gerard's death. Early on that day he had remembered his promise to his dead friend, and had found the silver box, and locked it away among his own most sacred things. Some day, in an hour and place upon which none might break, he would open the little box and read Helen's letters, as Gerard had wished. Already one sentence was fixed unforgettably upon his mind, and he said it over softly to himself as he sat by Gerard's silent bed: "Do you believe in a love that can lie asleep, as in a trance in this world, to awaken again in another,--a love that during centuries of silence can still be true, and be love still in a thousand years? If you do, go on loving me. For that is the only love I dare give you; I must love you no more in this world."

Strange dreams of the indomitable dust! Already another man's love was growing dear to him. Already his soul said the name of "Helen" softly for Gerard's sake.

CHAPTER XLI

LABORIOUS DAYS

With Gerard's death, Henry began to find Aunt Tipping's too sad a place to go on living in. It had become haunted; and when new people moved into Gerard's rooms, it became still more painful for him. It was as though Gerard had been dispossessed and driven out. So he cast about for some new shelter; and, one day, chance having taken him to the shipping end of the city, he came upon some old offices which seemed full of anxiety to be let. Inquiring of a chatty little housekeeper's wife, he discovered, away at the echoing top of the building, a big, well-lighted room, for which she thought the owner would be glad to take ten pounds a year. That whole storey was deserted. Henry made up his mind at once, and broke the news to Aunt Tipping that evening. It was the withering of one of her few rays of poetry, and she struggled to keep him; but when she saw how it was, the good woman insisted that he should take something from her towards furnishing. Receiving was nothing like so blessed as giving for Aunt Tipping. That old desk,--yes, she had bought it for him,--that he must certainly take, and think of his old aunt sometimes as he wrote his great books on it; and some bed-linen she could well afford. She would take no denial.

Angel and Esther were then called in to help him in the purchase of a carpet, a folding-bed, an old sofa, and a few chairs. A carpenter got to work on the bookshelves, and in a fortnight's time still another habitation had been built for the Muse,--a habitation from which she was not destined to remove again, till she and Angel and Henry all moved into one house together,--a removal which was, as yet, too far off to be included in this history.