“Despencer overwhelmed him with gratitude. His new happiness made him in love with life, and he included Maitland in the general affection. The night’s events seemed to have left their mark on the great man also. He was very quiet, forgot to be rude to anybody, and was kind to both Claire and Despencer. It is his way of acknowledging defeat, the great gentleman’s way, for, say what we like about him, he is a tremendous gentleman, one of the last of the breed …
“And then he went away—two days later. Just before he went Hugh Clanroyden and myself were talking in the library, which has a window opening on a flower-garden. Despencer was lying in an invalid’s chair under a tree and Claire was reading to him. Maitland was saying goodbye, and he asked for Despencer. We told him that he was with Claire in the garden. He smiled one of those odd scarce smiles of his, and went out to them. When I saw his broad shoulders bending over the chair and the strong face looking down at the radiant Jack with his amiable good looks, confound it, Clo, I had to contrast the pair, and admit with Shakespeare the excellent foppery of the world. Well-a-day! ‘Smooth Jacob still robs homely Esau.’ And perhaps it is a good thing, for we are most of us Jacobs, and Esau is an uncomfortable fellow in our midst.
“A week later came the surprising, the astounding news that he had taken the African Governorship. A career ruined, everyone said, the finest chance in the world flung away; and then people speculated, and the story came out in bits, and there was only one explanation. It is the right one, as I think you will agree, but it points to some hidden weakness in that iron soul that he could be moved to fling over the ambitions of years because of a girl’s choice. He will go and bury himself in the wilds, and our party will have to find another leader. Of course he will do his work well, but it is just as if I were to give up my chances of the Woolsack for a county-court judgeship. Ho will probably be killed, for he has a million enemies; he is perfectly fearless, and he does not understand the arts of compromise. It was a privilege, I shall always feel, to have known him. He was a great man, and yet intellect, power, character, were at the mercy of a girl’s caprice. As I write, I hear Claire’s happy laugh below in the garden, probably at some witticism of the fortunate Jack’s. Upon which, with my usual pride in the obvious, I am driven to reflect that the weak things in life may confound the strong, and that, after all, the world is to the young …”
VI
Sir Hugh Clanroyden to Mr. Henry Durward. Some Years Later.
“… I am writing this on board ship, as you will see from the heading, and shall post it when I get to the Cape. You have heard of my appointment, and I need not tell you how deep were my searchings of heart before I found courage to accept. Partly I felt that I had got my chance; partly I thought an inconsequent feeling that Maitland, if he had lived, would have been glad to see me in the place. But I am going to wear the Giant’s robe, and Heaven knows I have not the shoulders to fill it. Yet I am happy in thinking that I am in a small sense faithful to his memory.
“No further news, I suppose, has come of the manner of his death? Perhaps we shall never know, for it was on one of those Northern expeditions with a few men by which he held the frontier. I wonder if anyone will ever write fully the history of all that he did? It must have been a titanic work, but his methods were always so quiet that people accepted his results like a gift from Providence. He was given, one gathers, a practically free hand, and he made the country four years’ work of a man of genius. They wished to bring his body home, but he made them bury him where he fell—a characteristic last testament. And so he has gone out of the world into the world’s history.
“I am still broken by his death, but, now that he is away, I begin to see him more clearly. Most people, I think, misunderstood him. I was one of his nearest friends, and I only knew bits of the man. For one thing and I hate to use the vulgar word he was the only aristocrat I ever heard of. Our classes are three-fourths of them of yesterday’s growth, without the tradition, character, manner, or any trait of an aristocracy. And the few, who are nominally of the blood, have gone to seed in mind, or are spoilt by coarse marriages, or, worst of all, have the little trifling superior airs of incompetence. But he, he had the most transcendent breeding in mind and spirit. He had no need for self-assertion, for his most casual acquaintances put him at once in a different class from all other men. He had never a trace of a vulgar ideal; men’s opinions, worldly honour, the common pleasures of life, were merely degrees of the infinitely small. And yet he was no bloodless mystic. If race means anything, he had it to perfection. Dreams and fancies to him were the realities, while facts were the shadows which he made
