Page:The venture; an annual of art and literature.djvu/174

 A cold bleak day, the first of days which were all bleak and cold: a line of dark shapes clustering close in the gloomy hall, grouped, circle-wise, about one central shadow deeper than the rest, over which heavy drapery was thrown. Upon this unknown object, the eyes of all were fixed; child as he was, Richard shrank back from it instinctively. And presently strange men appeared, a long line of figures formed up, led by one which for the first time struck utter terror into his soul—his mother's. And then they were no more, and Richard was left alone, forgotten, in a silence that frightened him so greatly that he could neither cry out nor move—a silence that seemed to catch hold of him with invisible fingers and tighten its grip upon his throat, as the outer door clanged upon him and left the four year old child in the room where a dishonoured death had lately held grim revel.

His nurse remembered him and ran back, perhaps five minutes later. But that five minutes of solitary anguish had done its work, spelling eternity to Richard, an eternity which the weekly sermons of the Forbeggie minister, dilating under fifteen or sixteen headings, on "The God of Wrath," and the torments of sinners, such as "The worm of the damned that dieth not," and "The fire that shall never be quenched," continually kept alive in him, but scarcely made more palatable.

But the years that followed brought Richard his compensations. "Fide et Fortitudine" was the motto of his race; he had learned its lessons early. He loved the lash of his inheritance, nor grudged one of the supperless occasions which

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