Jenkin to restrain her husband from too
frequent visits; but here was one of those clear-cut, indubitable
duties for which Fleeming lived, and he could not pardon even the
suggestion of neglect.
And now, after death had so long visibly but still innocuously
hovered above the family, it began at last to strike and its blows
fell thick and heavy. The first to go was uncle John Jenkin, taken
at last from his Mexican dwelling and the lost tribes of Israel;
and nothing in this remarkable old gentleman's life, became him
like the leaving of it. His sterling, jovial acquiescence in man's
destiny was a delight to Fleeming. 'My visit to Stowting has been
a very strange but not at all a painful one,' he wrote. 'In case
you ever wish to make a person die as he ought to die in a novel,'
he said to me, 'I must tell you all about my old uncle.' He was to
see a nearer instance before long; for this family of Jenkin, if
they were not very aptly fitted to live, had the art of manly
dying. Uncle John was but an outsider after all; he had dropped
out of hail of his nephew's way of life and station in society, and
was more like some shrewd, old, humble friend who should have kept
a lodge; yet he led the procession of becoming deaths, and began in
the mind of Fleeming that train of tender and grateful thought,
which was like a preparation for his own.
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