You’ll pass without speaking.”
“No,” he said.
“I’ll never forget you, Louise.
So long as I live.”
Their hearts were filled with the lonely thunder of the sea.
She kissed him.
They were hill-born.
He returned in late September.
In October, Gant, with Ben and Helen, departed for Baltimore.
The operation, too long deferred, was now inevitable.
His disease had grown steadily worse.
He had gone through a period of incessant pain.
He was enfeebled.
He was frightened.
Rising at night, he would rouse the sleeping house with his cries, commanding terror with his old magnificence.
“I see it!
I see it!
The knife! The knife! . . .
Do you see its shadow? . . . There!
There!
There!”
With Boothian gusto he recoiled, pointing to invulnerable nothings.
“Do you see him standing there in the shadows?
So you’ve come at last to take the old man with you? . . .
There he stands — the Grim Reaper — as I always knew he would.
Jesus, have mercy on my soul!”
Gant lay in a long cot in the Urological Institute at Johns Hopkins.
Every day a cheerful little man came briskly in and looked at his chart.
He talked happily and went away.
He was one of the greatest surgeons in the country.
“Don’t worry,” said the nurse encouragingly, “the mortality’s only four per cent.
It used to be thirty.
He’s reduced it.”
Gant groaned, and slipped his big hand into his daughter’s vital grasp.
“Don’t worry, old boy!” she said, “you’re going to be as good as you ever were, after this.”
She fed him with her life, her hope, her love.
He was almost tranquil when they wheeled him in to his operation.
But the little gray-haired man looked, shook his head regretfully, and trimmed deftly.
“All right!” he said, four minutes later, to his assistant.
“Close the wound.”
Gant was dying of cancer.
Gant sat in a wheeled chair upon the high fifth-floor veranda, looking out through bright October air at the city spread far into the haze before him.
He looked very clean, almost fragile.
A faint grin of happiness and relief hovered about his thin mouth.
He smoked a long cigar, with fresh-awakened senses.
“There,” he said pointing, “is where I spent part of my boyhood.
Old Jeff Streeter’s hotel stood about there,” he pointed.
“Dig down!” said Helen, grinning.
Gant thought of the years between, and the vexed pattern of fate.
His life seemed strange to him.