he rescuing boat say that his face
showed a strange bewilderment, but no refusal of their efforts; he did
not mean to drown. There must have been, said the ship's doctor, some
lesion of the heart.

Much as I know of the reality of his life (and it ended not so long
ago), it never seems to me to belong to this actual world, this "city
by the sea." For me, its mirror lies, strangely enough, in another life
of noble ends and uncompleted action: Beauchamp's Career. There is your
only parallel, even to the splendid futility of its close. Read this
from Meredith's novel, which is, after all, nothing less than vivid
biography, and fit it to the end of Francis Hume.

"An old man volunteered the information. 'That's the boy. That boy was
in his father's boat out there, with two of his brothers, larking; and
he and another, older than him, fell overboard; and just then Commander
Beauchamp was rowing by, and I saw him from off here, where I stood,
jump up and dive, and he swam to his boat with one of them, and got him
in safe: that boy; and he dived again after the other, and was down a
long time. Either he burst a vessel or he got cramp, for he'd been
rowing himself from the schooner grounded down at the river-mouth, and
must have been hot when he jumped in; either way, he fetched the second
up, and sank with him. Down he went.'

"A fisherman said: ... 'Do you hear that voice thundering? That's the
great Lord Romfrey. He's been directing the dragging since five o' the
evening, and will till he drops or drowns, or up comes the body.'

"'O God, let's find the body!' the woman with the little boy called
out.

"'... My lord! my lord!' sobbed the woman, and dropped on her knees.

"'What's this?' the earl said, drawing his hand away from the woman's
clutch at it.

"'She's the mother, my lord,' several explained to him.

"'Mother of what?'

"'My boy,' the woman cried, and dragged the urchin to Lord Romfrey's
feet, cleaning her boy's face with her apron.

"'It's the boy Commander Beauchamp drowned to save,' said a man.

"All the lights of the ring were turned on the head of the boy.... The
boy struck out both arms to get his fists against his eyelids.

"This is what we have in exchange for Beauchamp.

"It was not uttered, but it was visible in the blank stare at one
another of the two men who loved Beauchamp, after they had examined the
insignificant bit of mud-bank life remaining in this world in the place
of him."