He wondered idly how soon death would come. It would be speedy, at
least, and final. And then the glory of the utter loss. His bones
whitening among the stones, the suns of summer beating on them and the
winter snowdrifts decently covering them with a white sepulchre. No man
could seek a lordlier burial. It was the death he had always craved.
From murder, fire, and sudden death, why should we call on the Lord to
deliver us? A broken neck in a hunting-field, a slip on rocky
mountains, a wounded animal at bay--such was the environment of death
for which he had ever prayed. But this--this was beyond his dreams.
And with it all a great humility fell upon him. His battles were all
unfought. His life had been careless and gay; and the noble
commonplaces of faith and duty had been things of small meaning. He had
lived within the confines of a little aristocracy of birth and wealth
and talent, and the great melancholy world scourged by the winds of God
had seemed to him but a phrase of rhetoric. His creeds and his
arguments seemed meaningless now in this solemn hour; the truth had been
his no more than his crude opponent's! Had he his days to live over
again he would look on the world with different eyes. No man any more
should call him a dreamer. It pleased him to think that, half-hearted
and sceptical as he had been, a humorist, a laughing philosopher, he was
now dying for one of the catchwords of the crowd.
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