"Will you take anything before you go? A glass of port? It is the only wine I happen to have.""Not a drop, thank you. I seldom taste anything stronger than water.""I like that. But I like a glass of port too. Come then."And Falconer rose--and a great rising it was; for, as I have said, he was two or three inches taller than Hugh, and much broader across the shoulders; and Hugh was no stripling now. He could not help thinking again of his old friend, David Elginbrod, to whom he had to look up to find the living eyes of him, just as now he looked up to find Falconer's. But there was a great difference between those organs in the two men. David's had been of an ordinary size, pure keen blue, sparkling out of cerulean depths of peace and hope, full of lambent gleams when he was loving any one, and ever ready to be dimmed with the mists of rising emotion. All that Hugh could yet discover of Falconer's eyes was, that they were large, and black as night, and set so far back in his head, that each gleamed out of its caverned arch like the reversed torch of the Greek Genius of Death, just before going out in night. Either the frontal sinus was very large, or his observant faculties were peculiarly developed.
They went out, and walked for some distance in silence. Hugh ventured to say at length:
"You said you had spent the day strangely: may I ask how?""In a condemned cell in Newgate," answered Falconer. "I am not in the habit of going to such places, but the man wanted to see me, and I went."As Falconer said no more, and as Hugh was afraid of showing anything like vulgar curiosity, this thread of conversation broke. Nothing worth recording passed until they entered a narrow court in Somers Town.
"Are you afraid of infection?" Falconer said.
"Not in the least, if there be any reason for exposing myself to it.""That is right.--And I need not ask if you are in good health.""I am in perfect health."
"Then I need not mind asking you to wait for me till I come out of this house. There is typhus in it.""I will wait with pleasure. I will go with you if I can be of any use.""There is no occasion. It is not your business this time."So saying, Falconer opened the door, and walked in.
Said Hugh to himself: "I must tell this man the whole story; and with it all my own."In a few minutes Falconer rejoined him, looking solemn, but with a kind of relieved expression on his face.
"The poor fellow is gone," said he.
"Ah!"
"What a thing it must be, Mr. Sutherland, for a man to break out of the choke-damp of a typhus fever into the clear air of the life beyond!""Yes," said Hugh; adding, after a slight hesitation, "if he be at all prepared for the change.""Where a change belongs to the natural order of things," said Falconer, "and arrives inevitably at some hour, there must always be more or less preparedness for it. Besides, I think a man is generally prepared for a breath of fresh air."Hugh did not reply, for he felt that he did not fully comprehend his new acquaintance. But he had a strong suspicion that it was because he moved in a higher region than himself.
"If you will still accompany me," resumed Falconer, who had not yet adverted to Hugh's object in seeking his acquaintance, "you will, Ithink, be soon compelled to believe that, at whatever time death may arrive, or in whatever condition the man may be at the time, it comes as the best and only good that can at that moment reach him.
We are, perhaps, too much in the habit of thinking of death as the culmination of disease, which, regarded only in itself, is an evil, and a terrible evil. But I think rather of death as the first pulse of the new strength, shaking itself free from the old mouldy remnants of earth-garments, that it may begin in freedom the new life that grows out of the old. The caterpillar dies into the butterfly. Who knows but disease may be the coming, the keener life, breaking into this, and beginning to destroy like fire the inferior modes or garments of the present? And then disease would be but the sign of the salvation of fire; of the agony of the greater life to lift us to itself, out of that wherein we are failing and sinning. And so we praise the consuming fire of life.""But surely all cannot fare alike in the new life.""Far from it. According to the condition. But what would be hell to one, will be quietness, and hope, and progress to another;because he has left worse behind him, and in this the life asserts itself, and is.--But perhaps you are not interested in such subjects, Mr. Sutherland, and I weary you.""If I have not been interested in them hitherto, I am ready to become so now. Let me go with you.""With pleasure."
As I have attempted to tell a great deal about Robert Falconer and his pursuits elsewhere, I will not here relate the particulars of their walk through some of the most wretched parts of London.
Suffice it to say that, if Hugh, as he walked home, was not yet prepared to receive and understand the half of what Falconer had said about death, and had not yet that faith in God that gives as perfect a peace for the future of our brothers and sisters, who, alas! have as yet been fed with husks, as for that of ourselves, who have eaten bread of the finest of the wheat, and have been but a little thankful,--he yet felt at least that it was a blessed thing that these men and women would all die--must all die. That spectre from which men shrink, as if it would take from them the last shivering remnant of existence, he turned to for some consolation even for them. He was prepared to believe that they could not be going to worse in the end, though some of the rich and respectable and educated might have to receive their evil things first in the other world; and he was ready to understand that great saying of Schiller--full of a faith evident enough to him who can look far enough into the saying:
"Death cannot be an evil, for it is universal."