Sister Dolorosa and Posthumous Fame Part 10

"This," he murmured fondly, without looking up, "is the complete collection of my poems."

"Indeed!" exclaimed Nicholas, with deep compa.s.sion.

"Yes, my complete collection. I have written a great deal more, and should have liked to publish all that I have written. But it was necessary to select, and I have included here only what it was intolerable to see wasted. There is nothing I value more than a group of elegiac poems, which every single member of my large family--who are fine critics--and all my friends, p.r.o.nounce very beautiful. I think it would be a good idea to inscribe a selection from one on my monument, since those who read the selection would wish to read the entire poem, and those who read the entire poem would wish to read the entire collection. I shall now favour you with these elegies."

"I should be happy to hear them; but my time!" said Nicholas courteously. "The living are too impatient to wait on me; the dead too patient to be defrauded."

"Surely you would not refuse to hear one of them," exclaimed the poet, his eyes flashing.

"Read _one_, by all means." Nicholas seated himself on a monumental lamb.

The poet pa.s.sed one hand gently across his forehead, as though to brush away the stroke of rudeness; then, fixing upon Nicholas a look of infinite remoteness, he read as follows:--

"He suffered, but he murmured not; To every storm he bared his breast; He asked but for the common lot-- To be a man among the rest.

"Here lies he now----"

"If you ask but for the common lot," interrupted Nicholas, "you should rest content to be forgotten."

But before the poet could reply, a loud knock caused him to flap the leaves of the "Complete Collection" together with one hand, while with the other he gathered the tails of his long coat about him, as though preparing to pa.s.s through some difficult aperture. The exaltation of his mood, however, still showed itself in the look and tone of proud condescension with which he said to Nicholas--

"Permit me to retire at once by some private pa.s.sway."

Nicholas led him to a door in the rear of the shop, and there, with a smile and a tear, stood for a moment watching the precipitate figure of the retreating bard, who suddenly paused when disappearing and tore open the breast of his coat to a.s.sure himself that his beloved elegies were resting safe across his heart.

The second visitor was of another sort. He hobbled on a cork leg, but inexorably disciplined the fleshly one into old-time firmness and precision. A faded military cloak draped his stalwart figure. Part of one bushy grey eyebrow had been chipped away by the same sword-cut that left its scar across his battle-beaten face.

"I have come to speak with you about my monument," he said, in a gruff voice that seemed to issue from the mouth of a rusty cannon. "Those of my old comrades that did not fall at my side are dead. My wife died long ago, and my little children. I am old and forgotten. It is a time of peace. There's not a boy who will now listen to me while I tell of my campaigns. I live alone. Were I to die to-morrow my grave might not have so much as a head-stone. It might be taken for that of a coward. Make me a monument for a true soldier."

"Your grateful country will do that," said Nicholas.

"Ha!" exclaimed the veteran, whom the shock of battle had made deaf long ago.

"Your country," shouted Nicholas, close to his ear, "your country--will erect a monument--to your memory."

"My country!" The words were shot out with a reverberating, melancholy boom. "My country will do no such a thing. How many millions of soldiers have fallen on her battle-fields! Where are their monuments? They would make her one vast cemetery."

"But is it not enough for you to have been a true soldier? Why wish to be known and remembered for it?"

"I know I do not wish to be forgotten," he replied simply. "I know I take pleasure in the thought that long after I am forgotten there will be a tongue in my monument to cry out to every pa.s.sing stranger, 'Here lies the body of a true soldier.' It is a great thing to be brave!"

"Is, then, this monument to be erected in honour of bravery, or of yourself?"

"There is no difference," said the veteran bluntly. "Bravery _is_ myself."

"It is bravery," he continued, in husky tones, and with, a mist gathering in his eyes that made him wink as though he were trying to see through the smoke of battle--"it is bravery that I see most clearly in the character of G.o.d. What would become of us if He were a coward? I serve Him as my brave Commander; and though I am stationed far from Him and may be faint and sorely wounded, I know that He is somewhere on the battle-field, and that I shall see Him at last, approaching me as He moves up and down among the ranks."

"But you say that your country does not notice you--that you have no friends; do you, then, feel no resentment?"

"None, none," he answered quickly, though his head dropped on his bosom.

"And you wish to be remembered by a world that is willing to forget you?"

He lifted his head proudly. "There are many true men in the world," he said, "and it has much to think of. I owe it all I can give, all I can bequeath; and I can bequeath it nothing but the memory of a true man."

One day, not long after this, there came into the workshop of Nicholas a venerable man of the gravest, sweetest, and most scholarly aspect, who spoke not a word until he had led Nicholas to the front window and pointed a trembling finger at a distant church spire.

"You see yon spire?" he said. "It almost pierces the clouds. In the church beneath I have preached to men and women for nearly fifty years.

Many that I have christened at the font I have married at the altar; many of these I have sprinkled with dust. What have I not done for them in sorrow and want! How have I not toiled to set them in the way of purer pleasures and to anchor their tempest-tossed hopes! And yet how soon they will forget me! Already many say I am too old to preach. Too old! I preach better than I ever did in my life. Yet it may be my lot to wander down into the deep valley, an idle shepherd with an idle crook. I have just come from the writing of my next sermon, in which I exhort my people to strive that their names be not written on earthly monuments or human hearts, but in the Book of Life. It is my sublimest theme. If I am ever eloquent, if I am ever persuasive, if I ever for one moment draw aside to spiritual eyes the veil that discloses the calm, enrapturing vistas of eternity, it is when I measure my finite strength against this mighty task. But why? Because they are the sermons of my own aspiration.

I preach them to my own soul. Face to face with that naked soul I pen those sermons--pen them when all are asleep save the sleepless Eye that is upon me. Even in the light of that Eye do I recoil from the thought of being forgotten. How clearly I foresee it! Ashes to ashes, dust to dust! Where then will be my doctrines, my prayers, my sermons?"

"Is it not enough for you to have scattered your handful of good broadcast, to ripen as endlessly as the gra.s.s? What if they that gather know naught of him that sowed?"

"It is not enough. I should like the memory of _me_ to live on and on in the world, inseparable from the good I may have done. What am I but the good that is in me? 'Tis this that links me to the infinite and the perfect. Does not the Perfect One wish His goodness to be a.s.sociated with His name? No! No! I do not wish to be forgotten!"

"It is mere vanity."

"Not vanity," said the aged servitor meekly. "Wait until you are old, till the grave is at your helpless feet: it is the love of life."

But some years later there befell Nicholas an event that transcended all past experiences, and left its impress on his whole subsequent life.

II.

The hour had pa.s.sed when any one was likely to enter his shop. A few rays of pale sunlight, straggling in through crevices of the door, rested like a dying halo on the heads of the monumental figures grouped around. Shadows, creeping upward from the ground, shrouded all else in thin, penetrable half-gloom, through which the stark grey emblems of mortality sent forth more solemn suggestions. A sudden sense of the earthly tragedy overwhelmed him. The chisel and the hammer dropped from his hands, and, resting his head on the block he had been carving, he gave himself up to that mood of dim, distant reverie in which the soul seems to soar and float far above the shock and din of the world's disturbing nearness. On his all but oblivious ear, like the faint washings of some remote sea, beat the waves of the city's tide-driven life in the streets outside. The room itself seemed hushed to the awful stillness of the high aerial s.p.a.ces. Then all at once this stillness was broken by a voice, low, clear, and tremulous, saying close to his ear--

"Are you the maker of gravestones?"

"That is my sad calling," he cried bitterly, starting up with instinctive forebodings.

He saw before him a veiled figure. To support herself, she rested one hand on the block he had been carving, while she pressed the other against her heart, as though to stifle pain.

"Whose monument is this?"

"A neglected poet's who died not long ago. Soon, perhaps, I shall be making one for an old soldier, and one for a holy man, whose soul, I hear, is about to be dismissed."

"Are not some monuments sadder to make than others?"

"Ay, truly."

"What is the saddest you ever made?"

"The saddest monument I ever made was one for a poor mother who had lost her only son. One day a woman came in who had no sooner entered than she sat down and gave way to a pa.s.sionate outburst of grief.

"'My good woman,' I said, 'why do you weep so bitterly?'