Adam Johnstones Son | Page 2

of the few trinkets and
bits of jewellery she possesses. That was Clare Bowring's case. She
could remember everything and everybody in her life. But her father
was not in her memories, and there was a little motionless grey cloud in
the place where he should have been. He had been a soldier, and had
been killed in an obscure skirmish with black men, in one of England's
obscure but expensive little wars. Death is always very much the same
thing, and it seems unfair that the guns of Balaclava should still roar
"glory" while the black man's quick spear-thrust only spells "dead,"
without comment. But glory in death is even more a matter of luck than
fame in life. At all events, Captain Bowring, as brave a gentleman as
ever faced fire, had perished like so many other brave gentlemen of his
kind, in a quiet way, without any fuss, beyond killing half a dozen or so
of his assailants, and had left his widow the glory of receiving a small
pension in return for his blood, and that was all. Some day, when the
dead are reckoned, and the manner of their death noted, poor Bowring
may count for more than some of his friends who died at home from a
constitutional inability to enjoy all the good things fortune set before
them, complicated by a disposition incapable of being satisfied with
only a part of the feast. But at the time of this tale they counted for
more than he; for they had been constrained to leave behind them what
they could not consume, while he, poor man, had left very little besides
the aforesaid interest in the investment of his blood, in the form of a
pension to his widow, and the small grey cloud in the memory of his
girl-child, in the place where he should have been. For he had been
killed when she had been a baby.

The mother and daughter were lonely, if not alone in the world; for
when one has no money to speak of, and no relations at all, the world is
a lonely place, regarded from the ordinary point of view--which is, of
course, the true one. They had no home in England, and they generally
lived abroad, more or less, in one or another of the places of society's
departed spirits, such as Florence. They had not, however, entered into
Limbo without hope, since they were able to return to the social earth
when they pleased, and to be alive again, and the people they met
abroad sometimes asked them to stop with them at home, recognising
the fact that they were still socially living and casting shadows. They
were sure of half a hundred friendly faces in London and of half a
dozen hospitable houses in the country; and that is not little for people
who have nothing wherewith to buy smiles and pay for invitations.
Clare had more than once met women of her mother's age and older,
who had looked at her rather thoughtfully and longer than had seemed
quite natural, saying very quietly that her father had been "a great
friend of theirs." But those were not the women whom her mother liked
best, and Clare sometimes wondered whether the little grey cloud in her
memory, which represented her father, might not be there to hide away
something more human than an ideal. Her mother spoke of him,
sometimes gravely, sometimes with a far-away smile, but never
tenderly. The smile did not mean much, Clare thought. People often
spoke of dead people with a sort of faint look of uncertain
beatitude--the same which many think appropriate to the singing of
hymns. The absence of anything like tenderness meant more. The
gravity was only natural and decent.
"Your father was a brave man," Mrs. Bowring sometimes said. "Your
father was very handsome," she would say. "He was very
quick-tempered," she perhaps added.
But that was all. Clare had a friend whose husband had died young and
suddenly, and her friend's heart was broken. She did not speak as Mrs.
Bowring did. When the latter said that her past life seemed to be
written in a foreign language, Clare did not understand, but she knew
that the something of which the translation was lost, as it were,
belonged to her father. She always felt an instinctive desire to defend

him, and to make her mother feel more sympathy for his memory. Yet,
at the same time, she loved her mother in such a way as made her feel
that if there had been any trouble, her father must have been in the
wrong. Then she was quite sure that she did not understand, and she
held her tongue, and smiled vaguely, and waited a moment before she