I found my father very grave. He spoke tenderly of Elsie; but he did not know how I had loved her, and I could not make much response. I think, too, that he said less than he otherwise would, from the fear of calling back to my mind too vivid a memory of how ill I had once behaved to her. It was, indeed, my first thought the moment he uttered her name, but it soon passed, for much had come between.
In the evening I went up to the farm to look for Turkey, who had not been at church morning or afternoon. He was the only one I could talk to about Elsie. I found him in one of the cow-houses, bedding the cows. His back was towards me when I entered.
He looked round with a slow mechanical motion, as if with a conscious effort of the will. His face was so white, and wore such a look of loss, that it almost terrified me like the presence of something awful. I stood speechless. He looked at me for a moment, and then came slowly up to me, and laid his hand on my shoulder.
“Ranald,” he said, “we were to have been married next year.”
Before the grief of the man, mighty in its silence, my whole being was humbled. I knew my love was not so great as his. It grew in my eyes a pale and feeble thing; and I felt worthless in the presence of her dead, whom alive I had loved with peaceful gladness. Elsie belonged to Turkey, and he had lost her, and his heart was breaking. I threw my arms round him, and wept for him, not for myself. It was thus I ceased to be a boy.
Here, therefore, my story ends. Before I returned to the university, Turkey had enlisted and left the place.
My father’s half-prophecy concerning him is now fulfilled. He is a general. I will not tell his name. For some reason or other he had taken his mother’s, and by that he is well known. I have never seen him, or heard from him, since he left my father’s service; but I am confident that if ever we meet, it will be as old and true friends.
End of Project Gutenberg’s Ranald Bannerman’s Boyhood, by George MacDonald