“My last grateful blessing to Penrose. And to you. May I not say it?
You have saved Arthur”—his eyes turned toward Stella—“you have been her best friend.”
He paused to recover his feeble breath; looking round the large room, without a creature in it but ourselves.
Once more the melancholy shadow of a smile passed over his face—and vanished.
I listened, nearer to him still.
“Christ took a child on His knee.
The priests call themselves ministers of Christ.
They have left me, because of this child, here on my knee.
Wrong, wrong, wrong.
Winterfield, Death is a great teacher.
I know how I have erred—what I have lost. Wife and child.
How poor and barren all the rest of it looks now!”
He was silent for a while.
Was he thinking?
No: he seemed to be listening—and yet there was no sound in the room.
Stella, anxiously watching him, saw the listening expression as I did.
Her face showed anxiety, but no surprise.
“Does it torture you still?” she asked.
“No,” he said; “I have never heard it plainly, since I left Rome.
It has grown fainter and fainter from that time.
It is not a Voice now. It is hardly a whisper: my repentance is accepted, my release is coming.—Where is Winterfield?”
She pointed to me.
“I spoke of Rome just now.
What did Rome remind me of?”
He slowly recovered the lost recollection.
“Tell Winterfield,” he whispered to Stella, “what the Nuncio said when he knew that I was going to die.
The great man reckoned up the dignities that might have been mine if I had lived.
From my place here in the Embassy—”
“Let me say it,” she gently interposed, “and spare your strength for better things.
From your place in the Embassy you would have mounted a step higher to the office of Vice-Legate.
Those duties wisely performed, another rise to the Auditorship of the Apostolic Chamber.
That office filled, a last step upward to the highest rank left, the rank of a Prince of the Church.”
“All vanity!” said the dying Romayne.
He looked at his wife and his child.
“The true happiness was waiting for me here. And I only know it now.
Too late. Too late.”
He laid his head back on the pillow and closed his weary eyes.
We thought he was composing himself to sleep.
Stella tried to relieve him of the boy.
“No,” he whispered; “I am only resting my eyes to look at him again.”
We waited.
The child stared at me, in infantine curiosity.
His mother knelt at his side, and whispered in his ear.
A bright smile irradiated his face; his clear brown eyes sparkled; he repeated the forgotten lesson of the bygone time, and called me once more, “Uncle Ber’.”
Romayne heard it.
His heavy eyelids opened again.
“No,” he said. “Not uncle. Something better and dearer.
Stella, give me your hand.”
Still kneeling, she obeyed him.
He slowly raised himself on the chair.