Rodens Corner | Page 4

enough, as one who, having passed through evil days, sees the end of them at last.
Von Holzen made no answer. He went to the window and opened it, letting in the air laden with the clean scent of burning peat, which makes the atmosphere of The Hague unlike that of any other town; for here is a city with the smell of a village in its busy streets. The German scientist stood looking out, and into the room came again that strange silence. It was an odd room in which to die, for every article in it was what is known as an antiquity; and although some of these relics of the past had been carefully manufactured in a back shop in Bezem Straat, others were really of ancient date. The very glass from which the dying man drank his milk dated from the glorious days of Holland when William the Silent pitted his Northern stubbornness and deep diplomacy against the fire and fanaticism of Alva. Many objects in the room had a story, had been in the daily use of hands long since vanished, could tell the history of half a dozen human lives lived out and now forgotten. The air itself smelt of age and mouldering memories.
Von Holzen came towards the bed without speaking, and stood looking down. Never a talkative man, he was now further silenced by the shadow that lay over the stricken face of his companion. The sick man was breathing very slowly. He glanced at Von Holzen for a moment, and then returned to the dull contemplation of the opposite wall. Quite suddenly his breath caught. There were long pauses during which he seemed to cease to breathe. Then at length followed a pause which merged itself gently into eternity.
Von Holzen waited a few minutes, and then bent over the bed and softly unclasped the dead man's hand, taking from it the crumpled notes. Mechanically he counted them, twelve hundred gulden in all, and restored them to the pocket from which he had taken them half an hour earlier.
He walked to the window and waited. When at length the district doctor arrived, Von Holzen turned to greet him with a stiff bow.
"I am afraid, Herr Doctor," he said, in German, "You are too late."
CHAPTER II
WORK OR PLAY?
"Get work, get work; Be sure 'tis better than what you work to get."
Two men were driving in a hansom cab westward through Cockspur Street. One, a large individual of a bovine placidity, wore the Queen's uniform, and carried himself with a solid dignity faintly suggestive of a lighthouse. The other, a narrower man, with a keen, fair face and eyes that had an habitual smile, wore another uniform--that of society. He was well dressed, and, what is rarer carried his fine clothes with such assurance that their fineness seemed not only natural but indispensable.
"Sic transit the glory of this world," he was saying. At this moment three men on the pavement--the usual men on the pavement at such times--turned and looked into the cab.
"'Ere's White!" cried one of them. "White--dash his eyes! Brayvo! brayvo, White!"
And all three raised a shout which seemed to be taken up vaguely in various parts of Trafalgar Square, and finally died away in the distance.
"That is it," said the young man in the frock-coat; "that is the glory of this world. Listen to it passing away. There is a policeman touching his helmet. Ah, what a thing it is to be Major White--to-day! To morrow--bonjour la gloire"
Major White, who had dropped his single eye-glass a minute earlier, sat squarely looking out upon the world with a mild surprise. The eye from which the glass had fallen was even more surprised than the other. But this, it seemed, was a man upon whom the passing world made, as a rule, but a passing impression. His attitude towards it was one of dense tolerance. He was, in fact, one of those men who usually allow their neighbours to live in a fool's-paradise, based upon the assumption of a blindness or a stupidity or an indifference, which may or may not be justified by subsequent events.
This was, as Tony Cornish, his companion, had hinted, the White of the moment. Just as the reader may be the Jones or the Tomkins of the moment if his soul thirst for glory. Crime and novel-writing are the two broad roads to notoriety, but Major White had practiced neither felony nor fiction. He had merely attended to his own and his country's business in a solid, common-sense way in one of those obscure and tight places into which the British officer frequently finds himself forced by the unwieldiness of the empire or the indiscretion of an effervescent press.
That he had extricated himself and his command from the tight place,