“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