Borne on our shoulders.
Hilda Wade, standing beside me, with an awestruck air, added a stanza from the same great poem:
Lofty designs must close in like effects:
Loftily lying,
Leave him—still loftier than the world suspects,
Living and dying.
I gazed at her with admiration. “And it is you, Hilda, who pay him this generous tribute!” I cried, “you, of all women!”
“Yes, it is I,” she answered. “He was a great man, after all, Hubert. Not good, but great. And greatness by itself extorts our unwilling homage.”
“Hilda,” I cried, “you are a great woman; and a good woman, too. It makes me proud to think you will soon be my wife. For there is now no longer any just cause or impediment.”
Beside the dead master, she laid her hand solemnly and calmly in mine. “No impediment,” she answered. “I have vindicated and cleared my father’s memory. And now, I can live. ‘Actual life comes next.’ We have much to do, Hubert.”
THE BLACK BAG LEFT ON A DOOR-STEP, by Catherine Louisa Pirkis
“It’s a big thing,” said Loveday Brooke, addressing Ebenezer Dyer, chief of the well-known detective agency in Lynch Court, Fleet Street; “Lady Cathrow has lost £30,000 worth of jewellery, if the newspaper accounts are to be trusted.”
“They are fairly accurate this time. The robbery differs in few respects from the usual run of country-house robberies. The time chosen, of course, was the dinner-hour, when the family and guests were at table and the servants not on duty were amusing themselves in their own quarters. The fact of its being Christmas Eve would also of necessity add to the business and consequent distraction of the household. The entry to the house, however, in this case was not effected in the usual manner by a ladder to the dressing-room window, but through the window of a room on the ground floor—a small room with one window and two doors, one of which opens into the hall, and the other into a passage that leads by the back stairs to the bedroom floor. It is used, I believe, as a sort of hat and coat room by the gentlemen of the house.”
“It was, I suppose, the weak point of the house?”
“Quite so. A very weak point indeed. Craigen Court, the residence of Sir George and Lady Cathrow, is an oddly-built old place, jutting out in all directions, and as this window looked out upon a blank wall, it was filled in with stained glass, kept fastened by a strong brass catch, and never opened, day or night, ventilation being obtained by means of a glass ventilator fitted in the upper panes. It seems absurd to think that this window, being only about four feet from the ground, should have had neither iron bars nor shutters added to it; such, however, was the case. On the night of the robbery, someone within the house must have deliberately, and of intention, unfastened its only protection, the brass catch, and thus given the thieves easy entrance to the house.”
“Your suspicions, I suppose, centre upon the servants?”
“Undoubtedly; and it is in the servants’ hall that your services will be required. The thieves, whoever they were, were perfectly cognizant of the ways of the house. Lady Cathrow’s jewellery was kept in a safe in her dressing-room, and as the dressing-room was over the dining-room, Sir George was in the habit of saying that it was the ‘safest’ room in the house. (Note the pun, please; Sir George is rather proud of it.) By his orders the window of the dining-room immediately under the dressing-room window was always left unshuttered and without blind during dinner, and as a full stream of light thus fell through it on to the outside terrace, it would have been impossible for anyone to have placed a ladder there unseen.”