Page:The Soft Side (New York, The Macmillan Company, 1900).djvu/160

152 made his way on your back. You put it candidly to others—"What in the world was his gift?" And others are such gaping idiots that they too haven't the least idea. You were his gift!'

'And you're mine, my dear!' her husband, pressing her to him, more resignedly laughed. He went down the next day by 'special' to the interment, which took place on the great man's own property, in the great man's own church. But he went alone—that is, in a numerous and distinguished party, the flower of the unanimous, gregarious demonstration; his wife had no wish to accompany him, though she was anxious while he was absent. She passed the time uneasily, watching the weather and fearing the cold; she roamed from room to room, pausing vaguely at dull windows, and before he came back she had thought of many things. It was as if, while he saw the great man buried, she also, by herself, in the contracted home of their later years, stood before an open grave. She lowered into it, with her weak hands, the heavy past and all their common dead dreams and accumulated ashes. The pomp surrounding Lord Northmore's extinction made her feel more than ever that it was not Warren who had made anything pay. He had been always what he was still, the cleverest man and the hardest worker she knew; but what was there, at fifty-seven, as the vulgar said, to show for it all but his wasted genius, his ruined health, and his paltry pension? It was the term of comparison conveniently given her by his happy rival's now foreshortened splendour that fixed these things in her eye. It was as happy rivals to their own flat union that she always had thought of the Northmore pair; the two men, at least, having started together, after the University, shoulder to shoulder and with—superficially speaking—much the same outfit of preparation, ambition, and opportunity. They had begun at the same point and wanting the same things—only wanting them in such different ways. Well, the dead man had wanted them in the way that got