Half a Hero Part 48

One swift glance told him she heard, then her eyes fixed themselves on the advancing crowd, and the burden the men carried.

They halted a moment. The table was lowered; a man--apparently a doctor--had ridden up. He looked at the burden they bore, then he spread the rough coat again over the body and signed to them to go on. d.i.c.k stepped forward and asked a question. Returning, he said briefly,

"He's dead."

Alicia swayed heavily against Eleanor Scaife. Eleanor threw her arm round her waist, and answered the moan she heard with--"Hush, darling!"

while Alicia, with parted lips and straining eyes, watched him carried by.

As they had escorted him home on the day when he first became their ruler, so they took him to his home now, the throng of mourners ever growing as the people poured out of the town to meet them, until they reached his house and halted before his door, waiting for some one who should dare to carry the news to the fair-haired girl who had met him in triumph when he came before.

In Kirton the name of "Jimmy Medland" is still remembered, and his grave does not lack continual flowers. In far-off England few remember him, and his name is seldom spoken, save when a very old white-haired man comes to stay with a lady in one of the Midland s.h.i.+res. Then, when they are alone, when her husband has gone hunting and the children are away, and there is no other ear to listen, Alicia will sometimes talk to Sir John of Mr. Medland, what he was and was not, what he did and dreamed, how he lived and died, and how the men of Kirton love his memory.

"It all seems like a dream now," she says, "but it's a dream I can never forget."

And Sir John presses her hand, for perhaps he guesses what she has not told him.

His daughter wrote on his tomb nothing except his name; but a wandering Englishman, who heard his story, and recollected the grave of another who died with his work undone, has rudely scratched at the base, near the ground, where the gra.s.s half hides it, an epitaph for him--_Plura moliebatur_. And he told Big Todd, whom he chanced to find smoking his evening pipe hard by, that it meant "He had more work in hand."

"Ay, trust old Jimmy!" said Big Todd, with a curious wave of his great hand towards the grave. Had such a thing been at all in his way, one might have thought it was a benediction.

THE END.