THEY all came round, gathering about his bed, Rochford stooping, drawing the papers out of his bag, Edward Penton approaching closer, looking with a revival in his bosom of all the forgotten feelings of his youth upon the severed friend, the old protector, the fatherly patron of those days that were no more. To be sundered for years, and then to come again and see the object of the filial, friendly affection of the past, the man round whom your dearest recollections center, lying, whatever chasm may in the meantime have opened between, upon his death-bed—what heart can resist that? Scarcely the most obdurate, the most prejudiced; and Edward Penton was neither one nor the other. He came slowly forward and stood by the bedside, forgetting all about the motive which brought him thither, impatient, so far as he noticed them at all, of the presence of the strangers. He came close, placing himself before Russell Penton, who had no such claim to be there as he. He did not attempt to say anything, but claimed the place, he who was the last one left of the three boys; he whom they had hated rather than loved because he was the survivor, yet who forgot that entirely now, and everything involved in it. He stood by the side of Alicia as he had stood so often. He forgot that there was any question between them. He had been brought, indeed, to sign and settle, but all that floated from him now. Russell Penton stood aside to let him pass, and the lawyer placed himself at the writing-table, which had been brought nearer, within reach of the bed, and where all the papers had been laid out. “Do you think he will be able to understand if I read them?” Rochford said, aside, to Russell Penton; “or shall we try for his signature at once?” Russell Penton made no reply, except by a slight wave of his hand toward the bed. It seemed a profanity that any one should speak or occupy the attention of the group save he who was the center of it. Sir Walter’s eyes were open, his interest fully awakened. He watched while the writing-table was drawn forward and put in order. He gave one glance of recognition to Edward Penton at his bedside, but had not time, it seemed, for greetings, his whole mind being fixed on this thing which he had to do.
“I had almost lost sight of it,” he said. “Now, thank God, I remember—while I have the time. It will be—what you call a codicil. Alicia, you always were generous; you won’t grudge it, Alicia?”
“Father!” she cried, bewildered by this preamble; then, in the rapid process of thought trying to believe that it was some further compensation to Edward which was in her father’s mind. “You know,” she said, fervently, “that I will grudge nothing that is your pleasure—nothing; you know that!”
“Yes, my love—I know; it is not money she would ever grudge. Alicia—no, no; but perhaps honor—or love. Rochford, what I want is about the boy.”
“The boy!” Mrs. Russell Penton turned quickly a searching glance on her father, to which his dim eyes made no response; then looked round with one rapid demand for explanation. She seemed to ask Heaven and earth what he meant. “Could it be this? Could this be all?”
“The boy!” Rochford echoed, with amazement; “what boy, sir?” faltering. “There was nothing about any boy;” and he too gave Russell Penton a significant look, meaning that Sir Walter’s mind was wandering, and that no settlements could be possible now.
“Gerald, you understand, tell them.”
Sir Walter turned his eyes instinctively to the one impartial. “The boy—Edward’s boy. Alicia would not see how like he was; but it was very plain to me—and a nice boy. He has the name as well, and he will have Penton. Eh, Penton? What was there about Penton?” The old man paused a moment, trying to raise his heavy brow, his drooping eyelids—and there was a great silence in the room; they all looked at each other, conscious, with something like a sense of guilt, and no one ventured to be the first to speak. It was Alicia, perhaps, who should have done it, but she felt as if her laboring bosom was bound by icy chains, and could not; or the lawyer, who gazed at her mutely, demanding whether he should say anything—what he should say. It was but a moment, breathless, precipitate. Then, as if there had been nothing in it but the break of his difficult breathing, Sir Walter resumed, “He will have Penton, in the course of nature. But we’re long-lived, it may be a long time first. Alicia,” he groped for her with the feeble hand which he could scarcely raise, moving the heavy fingers like a blind man. “Alicia, I want, as long as I can, to do something for the boy.”
She had turned half away, her hands had fallen by her side, a blank of something like despair had come over her. Not for Penton! oh, not for Penton; but because he had glided away from her into the valley of darkness, and his mind had gone beyond the reach, beyond the sphere of hers. To feel that as he did so the mind of her father, so long united to hers, as she had believed, in every thought, took another turning, and disclosed other wishes, other sentiments, overwhelmed Alicia with a wild surprise. Death was nothing to that. It made heaven and earth reel to her with the greatness of the astonishment. But that too was but for a moment. She turned round, it seemed to the spectators instantly, though to herself after a pause which was tragical in its passion, and answered the feeble groping of the blind hand by clasping it in both of hers. Then she had to summon her voice from the depths, to break the chains of ice. “Whatever,” she said, “father, whatever you wish.”
There was something like reviving life; there was reconciliation, reunion, in the way his dull fingers closed upon hers. Had a shadow of doubt come over the dying mind? He breathed a long sobbing sigh, which was half satisfaction and half the prolonged effort of dying. “To do something,” he murmured, “for the boy.”
Here Rochford broke in, becoming accustomed to the solemnity of the scene, and recovering the instinct of business and a sense of the necessity of completing what he had in hand. “But,” he said, “this is not the business for which I was summoned. Everything is ready; there are only the deeds to sign; there is only the signature—”
Alicia gave him a warning look to stop him, and Russell Penton put forth his hand with an impressive “hush!” Perhaps it was the new voice that caught the attention of Sir Walter. He opened his eyes again, but half, showing only a sightless whiteness under the heavy lids. “Eh?” he said, “was some one speaking? I can’t hear any more. Alicia—what? what?—was it—about the boy—”
“It was—our own business, father: but not to trouble you. It shall trouble you,” she said firmly, but with an indescribable tone that said much, “no more, no more.”
A faint grateful smile came upon his face, the faintest, almost imperceptible, pressure of her hands. And then in a moment sleep came over the aged pilgrim so near the end of his career. They all stood in the silence of awe about the bed, watching, unable to believe that it was only sleep and not death. The one was almost more awful than the other would have been. That the common repose which refreshes all living things should come in the middle of dying seemed almost an unnatural break. Even love itself in such circumstances can not endure delays, and would fain push the bark of the soul out into the eternal sea. Mrs. Russell Penton sat down by the bed, holding her father’s hand still in hers. And for some time her cousin stood beside her, silent, absorbed, standing mechanically with his eyes fixed upon the still face on the pillow. Edward Penton was scarcely sensible of what was passing round him. It seemed all to be going on in a dream, in which he saw and heard plainly enough, yet attached little meaning to anything that occurred. He had come to conclude his bargain, touched, deeply touched by the condition of his old relation, his former protector and friend, but yet more occupied by the importance of the event to himself and to his wife and children, who were nearer to him still. But when he had entered the sick-room he had stepped into a dream—everything had changed. His business had sunk away, as it were, into the chaos of abortive projects. Nothing was required of him except to stand and look on reverently while the shadows of death gathered. His heart was deeply touched; it had seemed to him natural, only natural and fitting that he should stand by Alicia at this solemn moment. He was the nearest of her kin; he was the oldest of her friends; he had loved her in his time; even now there were no two people in the world who had the same hold upon his imagination and his memories as these two, the father and daughter. It was his right to be here more than Russell Penton’s; nearer than anyone else living he had a right to stand by her, to give her the support of an affection as old and almost as natural as her own. Though he had not seen Sir Walter for years, there was no one so nearly Sir Walter’s son as he. What was said about the boy perplexed him, almost made him impatient. The boy—what boy? He did not understand. He himself was the last of the three boys, the survivor, whose surviving had seemed a wound and injury, but which yet gave him rights which no one in the world, no one else could ever have as he.
The entrance of the doctor, who came in softly, and looked, with the gravity which dying commands from all, upon the sleeper, disturbed the group. The gentlemen withdrew to leave him free for his examination, and for the whispered directions which were necessary, carrying away the writing-table with all its useless arrangements. When he left the bedside they surrounded him with questions. Was it possible that there might be a period of revived strength? was it likely that he could attend to business still? Important business remained to be settled. The doctor shook his head. He gave them certain low-toned explanations which for the moment seemed to make everything clear, but in reality left them as little informed as ever; and, on the other hand, gave them a little lecture upon the folly of postponing business to such a moment. “A man of Sir Walter’s age, and in his state of health, could never be calculated upon,” he said. “I hope the business is not vital. To leave wills or settlements to the last is the greatest folly.” A statement of this kind, superfluous and absolute, is at all times so much easier to give than a little enlightment upon the immediate case. But how could the doctor tell any more than any spectator whether the old man would wake from that sleep to an interval of clearness and consciousness, or whether he would dream away the few remaining moments that lay between him and the end of his career?
And then stillness fell upon them all, a period of utter quiet, of that waiting for death which is intolerable to the living. Alicia sat by her father’s bedside alone, still holding his hand, watching his sleep, feeling nothing but the arrest of all things, the suspension of thought itself. The three men had withdrawn to the anteroom, where they waited for any movement or call. Rochford, who had no reason for any profounder feeling than that of respectful sympathy, drew near the fire in the shivering chill of the gray winter morning, and after awhile dozed and dreamed of the ball, with all its music and lights. Russell Penton seated himself close to the door, where he could see his wife at her father’s bedside. Her head was turned from him, but yet it was giving her the support of his presence to be there. Edward Penton was the only one who could not rest. He went to the window and gazed out blankly upon the cold misty morning light, now as full day as it was likely to be. All was whiteness upon the wide stretch of the landscape, the river milky and turbid under the featureless whitish vapor that covered the sky, mist hanging about the ghostly trees, cold, damp, and penetrating, stealing to the heart; within, the fire burned dimly, the lights had been put out, though from the door of Sir Walter’s room still came a stream of candle-light shining unnaturally in the gray pale suffusion of the day. Mr. Penton wandered from the window to the fire, then stood behind Russell Penton’s chair, and gazed into the hushed room where one lay dying and the other watching. He thought nothing about his business which was so strange; he had not yet awakened to the sense of those wandering injunctions about the boy. He was troubled, sad, confused in his soul, only conscious of the close neighborhood of death, and that all somehow had fallen back into a kind of chaos out of which there seemed no apparent way.
None of them knew how long the time was. It was endless, intolerable, an awful pause in their own living, in which everything was arrested, even thought. For what could the thoughts do whirling vainly about a subject on which there could be no enlightenment, beating as it were against a blank wall all round and round? In reality it was not quite an hour when Alicia rose from the bedside and made a sign to her husband. Sir Walter’s voice broke again into the silence, eager, quick, startling, “Eh! eh! What—what is it? What’s to do? What’s to do?”
They hurried in one after another, young Rochford waking up with the air of the last waltz still in his ear, hastening to the table, where all the papers were still laid out. Sir Walter had struggled up upon his bed and sat gazing out upon them, holding his daughter fast, who had hastily drawn one of his arms over her shoulder by way of support. He looked like an old prophet, with his heavy eyelids raised, his white locks streaming. “What is—to do? What am I to do—before I die?—before I—”
Rochford came forward with his deed, with the pen in his hand. “It is only a signature,” he said. “Sir Walter, your signature—here—it is all simple; your name, that is all.”
No one moved to help him. He stood holding out the pen, eager as if his own interests were involved, while the rest stood motionless, saying not a word, gazing at this venerable dying figure in that last blaze in the socket. Probably the old eyes, all veiled in whiteness like the mists of the morning, no longer saw anything, though they seemed to look out with solemn intelligence—for Sir Walter made no response; his question had required no answer; his eyes flickered with a movement of the lids, as though taking one other look round, then a smile came over his face. “Alicia—will do it. Alicia—will think of—everything,” he murmured, and relapsing as it were upon himself, sunk back, to resume the thread of conscious life no more.
The night was over. The gray day dim and calm, benumbed with cold, and veiled with mists, yet full in its own occupations and labors, was in possession of earth and sky. Thus one ends while the others go on. There was no new beginning to those who were chiefly concerned. They stopped for a moment, then went on again, life sweeping back with all its requirements to the very edge of the chamber of death. When it was evident that no interval of consciousness was now to be looked for, the watchers went downstairs and found breakfast, of which indeed they had great need, and talked in subdued tones at first, and on the one sole subject which seemed possible. But presently even this bond was broken, and Russell Penton and Rochford discussed, a little gravely, the weather, the chances of frost, the state of the country.
Edward Penton did not join in this talk, but he eat his breakfast solemnly, as if it had been a serious duty, saying nothing even to Wat, who had ventured to join the grave party. Wat was more worn out than any of them. He had not been able to rest, and he had the additional fatigue of the drive, not to speak of the wearing effect of the mental struggle to which he was so entirely unaccustomed. He wanted more than anything else to go home. Ally, upstairs in her room, crying out of excitement and sympathy, and longing for her mother, had packed up all the pretty things which had served so little purpose, and was waiting very eagerly for the call to return to the Hook, which it would have been, oh! so much better had they never left. But there had been breakfast for everybody all the same, notwithstanding that the troop of servants were all very anxious, wondering what was to come of it, or rather what was to become of them, a more important question. The only evidence of this great overturn of everybody’s habits in the house was that the room in which the dancing had been remained untouched, which was a wonderful departure from the order and regularity of the household. But everything is to be excused, the housekeeper herself said, in the confusion of a death in the family, though that was a thing for which, considering Sir Walter’s great age, they should all have been prepared.