The March of the White Guard | Page 7

of childhood; of a house beside a

swift-flowing river, where a gentle widowed mother braced her heart
against misfortune and denied herself and slaved that her son might be
educated. He had said to her that some day he would be a great man,
and she would be paid back a hundredfold. And he had worked hard at
school, very hard. But one cold day of spring a message came to the
school, and he sped homewards to the house beside the dark river down
which the ice was floating,--he would remember that floating ice to his
last day, and entered a quiet room where a white-faced woman was
breathing away her life. And he fell at her side and kissed her hand and
called to her; and she waked for a moment only and smiled on him, and
said: "Be good, my boy, and God will make you great." Then she said
she was cold, and some one felt her feet--a kind old soul who shook her
head sadly at him; and a voice, rising out of a strange smiling languor,
murmured: "I'll away, I'll away to the Promised Land--to the Promised
Land. . . . It is cold--so cold--God keep my boy!" Then the voice ceased,
and the kind old soul who had looked at him, pityingly folded her arms
about him, and drawing his brown head to her breast, kissed him with
flowing eyes and whispered: "Come away, laddie, come away."
But he came back in the night and sat beside her, and remained there
till the sun grew bright, and then through another day and night, until
they bore her out of the little house by the river to the frozen hill-side.
Sitting here in this winter desolation Jaspar Hume once more beheld
these scenes of twenty years before and followed himself, a poor
dispensing clerk in a doctor's office, working for that dream of
achievement in which his mother believed; for which she hoped. And
following further the boy that was himself, he saw a friendless
first-year man at college, soon, however, to make a friend of Clive
Lepage, and to see always the best of that friend, being himself so true.
At last the day came when they both graduated together in science, a
bright and happy day, succeeded by one still brighter, when they both
entered a great firm as junior partners. Afterwards befell the meeting
with Rose Varcoe; and he thought of how he praised his friend Lepage
to her, and brought him to be introduced to her. He recalled all those
visions that came to him when, his professional triumphs achieved, he
should have a happy home, and happy faces by his fireside. And the

face was to be that of Rose Varcoe, and the others, faces of those who
should be like her and like himself. He saw, or rather felt, that face
clouded and anxious when he went away ill and blind for health's sake.
He did not write to her. The doctors forbade him that. He did not ask
her to write, for his was so steadfast a nature that he did not need letters
to keep him true; and he thought she must be the same. He did not
understand a woman's heart, how it needs remembrances, and needs to
give remembrances.
Hume's face in the light of this fire seemed calm and cold, yet behind it
was an agony of memory--the memory of the day when he discovered
that Lepage was married to Rose, and that the trusted friend had grown
famous and well-to-do on the offspring of his brain. His first thought
had been one of fierce determination to expose this man who had
falsified all trust. But then came the thought of the girl, and, most of all,
there came the words of his dying mother, "Be good, my boy, and God
will make you great"; and for his mother's sake he had compassion on
the girl, and sought no restitution from her husband. And now, ten
years later, he did not regret that he had stayed his hand. The world had
ceased to call Lepage a genius. He had not fulfilled the hope once held
of him. Hume knew this from occasional references in scientific
journals.
And now he was making this journey to save, if he could, Lepage's life.
Though just on the verge of a new era in his career--to give to the world
the fruit of ten years' thought and labour, he had set all behind him, that
he might be true to the friendship of his youth, that he might be clear of
the strokes of conscience to the last hour of his life.
Looking round him now, the debating look came again into his eyes.
He placed his hand in