Adam Johnstone's Son Part 30

Brook stared at her in surprise, and the dawn of returning gladness was in his face for a moment.

"We have a right to live, whatever they did in their day," said Clare.

"There is no reason why you should go away like this, at a moment's notice."

With an older woman he would have understood the first time, but he did not dare to understand Clare, nor to guess that there was anything to be understood.

"Of course we have a right to live," he answered, in a constrained tone.

"But that does not mean that I may stay here and make your life a burden. So I'm going away. It was quite different before I knew all this. Please don't stay out here--you'll get a sunstroke. I only wanted to say good-bye."

Man-like, having his courage at the striking-point, he wished to get it all over quickly and be off. The colour sank from Clare's face again, and she stood quite still for a moment, looking at him. "Good-bye," he said, holding out his hand, and trying hard to smile a little.

Clare looked at him still, but her hand did not meet his, though he waited, holding it out to her. Her face hardened as though she were making an effort, then softened again, and still he waited.

"Won't you say good-bye to me?" he asked unsteadily.

She hesitated a moment longer.

"No!" she answered suddenly. "I--I can't!"

And here the story comes to its conclusion, as many stories out of the lives of men and women seem to end at what is only their turning-point.

For real life has no conclusion but real death, and that is a sad ending to a tale, and one which may as well be left to the imagination when it is possible.

Stories of strange things, which really occur, very rarely have what used to be called a "moral" either. All sorts of things happen to people who afterwards go on living just the same, neither much better nor much worse than they were in the beginning. The story is a slice, as it were, cut from the most interesting part of a life, generally at the point where that life most closely touches another, so that the future of the two momentarily depends upon each separately, and upon both together.

The happiness or unhappiness of both, for a long time to come, is founded upon the action of each just at those moments. And sometimes, as in the tale here told, the least promising of all the persons concerned is the one who helps matters out. The only logical thing about life is the certainty that it must end. If there were any logic at all about what goes between birth and death, men would have found it out long ago, and we should all know how to live as soon as we leave school; whereas we spend our lives under Fate's ruler, trying to understand, while she raps us over the knuckles every other minute because we cannot learn our lesson and sit up straight, and be good without being prigs, and do right without sticking it through other people's peace of mind as one sticks a pin through a b.u.t.terfly.