Then he turned on me with a sorrowful smile, and, speaking slowly; “Here I am!” he said.

“Here I am!” he repeated, “and my chance has gone from me.  Three times in one year the door has been offered me—­the door that goes into peace, into delight, into a beauty beyond dreaming, a kindness no man on earth can know.  And I have rejected it, Redmond, and it has gone—­”

“How do you know?”

“I know.  I know.  I am left now to work it out, to stick to the tasks that held me so strongly when my moments came.  You say, I have success—­this vulgar, tawdry, irksome, envied thing.  I have it.”  He had a walnut in his big hand.  “If that was my success,” he said, and crushed it, and held it out for me to see.

“Let me tell you something, Redmond.  This loss is destroying me.  For two months, for ten weeks nearly now, I have done no work at all, except the most necessary and urgent duties.  My soul is full of inappeasable regrets.  At nights—­when it is less likely I shall be recognised—­I go out.  I wander.  Yes.  I wonder what people would think of that if they knew.  A Cabinet Minister, the responsible head of that most vital of all departments, wandering alone—­grieving—­sometimes near audibly lamenting—­for a door, for a garden!”

IV

I can see now his rather pallid face, and the unfamiliar sombre fire that had come into his eyes.  I see him very vividly to-night.  I sit recalling his words, his tones, and last evening’s Westminster Gazette still lies on my sofa, containing the notice of his death.  At lunch to-day the club was busy with him and the strange riddle of his fate.

They found his body very early yesterday morning in a deep excavation near East Kensington Station.  It is one of two shafts that have been made in connection with an extension of the railway southward.  It is protected from the intrusion of the public by a hoarding upon the high road, in which a small doorway has been cut for the convenience of some of the workmen who live in that direction.  The doorway was left unfastened through a misunderstanding between two gangers, and through it he made his way . . . . .

My mind is darkened with questions and riddles.

It would seem he walked all the way from the House that night—­he has frequently walked home during the past Session—­and so it is I figure his dark form coming along the late and empty streets, wrapped up, intent.  And then did the pale electric lights near the station cheat the rough planking into a semblance of white?  Did that fatal unfastened door awaken some memory?

Was there, after all, ever any green door in the wall at all?