Chapter Twenty.

Farewell.

“Be the day weary or be the day long
At last it ringeth to even-song.”

There was a very serious look on the faces of all the boys as they thronged into chapel the next morning for the confirmation service. It was a beautiful sight to see the subdued yet noble air, full at once of humility and hope, wherewith many of the youthful candidates passed along the aisle, and knelt before the altar, and with clasped hands and bowed heads awaited the touch of the hands that blessed. As those young soldiers of Christ knelt meekly in their places, resolving with pure and earnest hearts to fight manfully in His service, and praying with child-like faith for the aid of which they felt their need, it was indeed a spectacle to recall the ideal of virtuous and Christian boyhood, and to force upon the minds of many the contrast it presented with the other too familiar spectacle of a boyhood coarse, defiant, brutal, ignorant yet conceited, young in years but old in disobedience, in insolence, in sin.

When the good bishop, in the course of his address, alluded to Daubeny’s death, there was throughout the chapel instantly that silence that can be felt—that deep, unbroken hush of expectation and emotion which always produces so indescribable an effect.

“There was one,” he said, “who should have been confirmed to-day, who is not here. He has passed away from us; he will never be present at an earthly confirmation; he is ‘confirmed in heaven—confirmed by God.’ I hear, and I rejoice to hear, that for that confirmation he was indeed prepared, and that he looked forward to it with some of his latest thoughts. I hear that he was pre-eminent among you for the piety, the purity, the amiability of his life and character, and his very death was caused by the intense earnestness of his desire to use aright the talents which God had entrusted to him. O! such a death of one so young yet so fit to die is far happier than the longest and most prosperous of sinful lives. Be sobered but not saddened by it. It is a proof of God’s merciful and tender love that this one of your schoolfellows was taken in the clear and quiet dawn of a noble and holy life, and not some other in the scarlet blossom of precocious and deadly sin. Be not saddened therefore at the loss, but sobered by the warning. The fair, sweet, purple flower of youth falls and fades, my young brethren, under the sweeping scythe of death, no less surely than the withered grass of age. O! be ready—be ready with the girded loins and the lighted lamp—to obey the summons of your God. Who knows for which of us next, or how soon, the bell of death may toll? Be ye therefore ready, for you know not at what day or at what hour the voice may call to you!”

The loss of a well-known companion whom all respected and many loved—the crowding memories of school-life—the still small voice of every conscience, gave strange meaning and force to the bishop’s simple words. As they listened, many wept in silence, while down the cheeks of Walter, of Power, and of Henderson, the tears fell like summer rain.

In the evening Walter was seated thoughtfully by the fire in Power’s study, while Power was writing at the table, stopping occasionally to wipe his glistening eyes.

“He was my earliest friend here,” he said to Walter, almost apologetically, as he hastily brushed off the drop which had fallen and blurred the paper before him. “But I know it is selfish to be sorry,” he added, as he pushed the paper towards Walter.

“May I read this, Power?” asked Walter.

“Yes, if you like,” and he drew his chair by his, while Walter read in Power’s small clear handwriting—

A Farewell.
 
                Never more!
Like a dream when one awaketh
    Vanishing away;
Like a billow when it breaketh
    Scattered into spray;
Like a meteor’s paling ray,
    Such is man, do all he can;—
    Nothing that is fair can stay.
Sorrow staineth, man complaineth.
 
Sin remaineth ever more;
Like a wake upon the shore
Soundeth ever from the chorus
Of the spirits gone before us,
“Ye shall meet us, ye shall greet us
In the sweet homes of earth, in the places of our birth,
Never more again, never more!”
So they sing, and sweetly dying
Faints the message of their voices,
Dying like the distant murmur, when a mighty host rejoices,
But the echoes are replying with a melancholy sighing
Never more again! never more!
 
                Far-away
Far far-away are the homes wherein they dwell,
We have lost them, and it cost them
Many a tear, and many a fear
When God forbade their stay;
But their sorrow, on the morrow
Ceased in the dawning of a lighter, brighter day;
And our bliss shall be certain, when death’s awful curtain.
Drawn from the darkness of mortal life away,
To happy souls revealeth what it darkly now concealeth,
Yielding to the glory of heaven’s eternal ray.
Far far-away are the homes wherein they dwell,
But we know that they are blest, and ever more at rest,
And we utter from our hearts, “It is well.”

“May I keep them, Power?” he asked, looking up.

“Do, Walter, as a remembrance of to-day.”

“And may I make one change, which the bishop’s sermon suggested?”

“By all means,” said Power; and Walter, taking a pencil, added after the line “Nothing that is fair can stay,” these words, which Power afterwards copied, writing at the top, “In memoriam, J.D.”

“Nothing that is fair can stay
    But while Death’s sharp scythe is sweeping,
    We remember ’mid our weeping,
    That a Father-hand is keeping
Every vernal bloom that falleth underneath its chilly sway.
    And though earthly flowers may perish
    There are buds His hand will cherish
And the things unseen Eternal—these can never pass away;
    Where the angels shout Hosanna,
    Where the ground is dewed with manna,
These remain and these await us in the homes of heaven for ay!”

The lines are in Walter’s desk; and he values them all the more for the tears which have fallen on them, and blurred the neatness of the fine clear handwriting.

On the following Tuesday our boys saw the dead body of their friend. The face of poor Daubeny looked singularly beautiful with the placid lines of death, as all innocent faces do. It was the first time they had seen a corpse; and as Walter touched the cold cheek, and placed a spray of evergreen in the rigid hand, he was almost overpowered with an awful sense of the sad sweet mystery of death.

“It is God who has taken him to Himself,” said Mrs Daubeny, as she watched their emotion. “I shall not be parted from him long. He has left you each a remembrance of himself, dear boys, and you will value them, I know, for my poor child’s sake, and for his widowed mother’s thanks to those who loved him.”

For each of them he had chosen, before he died, one of his most prized possessions. To Power he left his desk; to Henderson, his microscope; to Kenrick, a little gold pencil-case; and to Walter, a treasure which he deeply valued, a richly-bound Bible, in which he had left many memorials of the manner in which his days were spent; and in which he had marked many of the rules which were the standard of his life, and the words of hope which sustained his gentle and noble mind.

The next day he was buried; only the boys in his own house, and those who had known him best, followed him to the grave. They were standing in two lines along the court, and the plumed hearse stood at the cottage door. Just at that moment the rest of the boys began to flock out of the school, for lessons were over. Each as he came out caught sight of the hearse, the plumes waving and whispering in the sea-wind, and the double line of mourners; and each, on seeing it, stood where he was, in perfect silence. Their numbers increased each moment, till boys and masters alike were there; and all by the same sudden impulse stopped where they were standing when first they saw the hearse, and stood still without a word. The scene was the more strangely impressive because it was accidental and spontaneous. Meanwhile, the coffin was carried downstairs, and placed in the hearse, which moved off slowly across the court between the line of bareheaded and motionless mourners. It was thus that Daubeny left Saint Winifred’s, and passed under the Norman arch; and till he had passed through, the boys stood fixed to their places, like a group of statues in the usually noisy court. He was buried in the churchyard under the tower of the grand old church. It was a lovely spot; the torrent murmured near it; the shadows of the great mountains fell upon it; and as you stood there in the sacred silence of that memory-haunted field, you heard far-off the solemn monotone of the everlasting sea. There they laid him, and the stream of life, checked for a moment, flashed on again with turbulent and sparkling waves. Ah me!—yet why should we sigh at the merciful provision, which causes that the very best of us, when we die, leaves but a slight and transient ripple on the waters, which a moment after flow on as smoothly as before?

Mrs Daubeny left Saint Winifred’s that evening; her carriage looked strange with her son’s boxes and other possessions piled up in it. Who would ever use that cricket-bat or those skates again? Power and Walter shook hands with her at the door as she was about to start; and just at the last moment, Henderson came running up with something, which he put on the carriage seat without a word. It was a bird-cage, containing a little favourite canary, which he and Daubeny had often fed.