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Parmalee became immediately absorbed by the hosts of dead-and-gone Kingslands looking down from the oak-paneled walls. Miss Silver fluently gave him names, and dates, and histories. "Seems to me," said Mr. Parmalee, "those old fellows didn't die in their beds many of 'em. What with battles, and duels, and high treason, and sich, they all came to unpleasant ends. Where's the present Kingsland's?"
The walls were panelled with oak and hung with portraits of dead-and-gone Heathcotes. A high oriel window threw good light upon the pictures, some of which were dark and dim with age. Francis sat down on the window-seat and looked round him. "Well, I can't call them a good-looking lot," he said, smiling. "What is the name of the man in the corner there in a flowing wig, Phil?
And thus delivering himself, gruff Uncle Abner took a fresh chew of tobacco, and let his eyes wander aimlessly among those dead-and-gone relatives hanging on the walls. Anywhere indeed but at the two rosy, eager faces before him; for the sisters, Margaret and Elizabeth, sat watching and listening to this, the first hint of difficulty in the easy-going of their pampered lives. Margaret spoke.
But he felt in elation that this was likely to be of the slightest; the miller evidently found himself hampered rather than helped by the employment of the boy; and as to the moonshiner's sentimental partisanship, for the sake of an old attachment to the dead-and-gone mountain girl, there was hardly anything in the universe so tenuous as to bear comparison with its fragility.
For you see, that although one may be beautiful enough to compete successfully against dead-and-gone saints, against worn out miracles, and wonders in stone, human nature, when it is alive, is human nature still. It is the curse of success, the world over, to arouse jealousy; and we all have lived long enough to know that jealousy's evil-browed offspring are named Hate and Competition.
"Probably the cat," he said, with the patient air of a man arguing with an unreasonable woman. "Of course," he added we were passing the churchyard then, dominated by what the village called the Benton "mosolem" "there's a chance that those dead-and-gone Bentons resent anything as modern as a telephone. It might be interesting to see what they would do to a victrola."
I stepped ashore with the feeling of one who returns out of a dead-and-gone generation. I had a sort of realizing sense of what the Bastille prisoners must have felt when they used to come out and look upon Paris after years of captivity, and note how curiously the familiar and the strange were mixed together before them.
He was on jolly-good-fellow-ish terms with the dead-and-gone grocer's son already, and had the tone of a man who had been his friend and boon companion. "Mat Haygarth is our man. But how are we to ferret out his doings in London? A man who was born in 1720 is rather a remote kind of animal."
The patrons of a neighboring hotel overflowed into the roadway; the brooding peace of the dead-and-gone monks had fled before this invasion; instead of memories of mitered abbots and cowled friars there were the realities of loud-voiced grooms and porkpie-eating excursionists. "Please drive on," whispered Cynthia. "I must see Tintern another time."
And again there came nights when doctors shook their heads and nurses looked grave; nights when it was understood that before another dawn had come creeping through the windows little Billy Garrison would have crossed the Big Divide; nights when the shibboleths of a dead-and-gone life were even fluttering on his lips; nights when names but not identities fought with one another for existence; fought for birth, for supremacy, and "Sue" always won; nights when he sat up in bed as he had sat up in Bellevue long ago, and with tense hands and blazing eyes fought out victory on the stretch.
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