Hidden Creek

E-text prepared by Rick Niles, Mary Meehan, and the Project Gutenberg
Online Distributed Proofreading Team
1920
Just before his death, Marcus Arundel, artist and father of Sheila, bore witness to his faith in God and man. He had been lying apparently unconscious, his slow, difficult breath drawn at longer and longer intervals. Sheila was huddled on the floor beside his bed, her hand pressing his urgently in the pitiful attempt, common to human love, to hold back the resolute soul from the next step in its adventure. The nurse, who came in by the day, had left a paper of instructions on the table. Here a candle burned under a yellow shade, throwing a circle of warm, unsteady light on the head of the girl, on the two hands, on the rumpled coverlet, on the dying face. This circle of light seemed to collect these things, to choose them, as though for the expression of some meaning. It felt for them as an artist feels for his composition and gave to them a symbolic value. The two hands were in the center of the glow—the long, pale, slack one, the small, desperate, clinging one. The conscious and the unconscious, life and death, humanity and God—all that is mysterious and tragic seemed to find expression there in the two hands.
So they had been for six hours, and it would soon be morning. The large, bare room, however, was still possessed by night, and the city outside was at its lowest ebb of life, almost soundless. Against the skylight the winter stars seemed to be pressing; the sky was laid across the panes of glass like a purple cloth in which sparks burned.
Suddenly and with strength Arundel sat up. Sheila rose with him, drawing up his hand in hers to her heart.
Keep looking at the stars, Sheila, he said with thrilling emphasis, and widened his eyes at the visible host of them. Then he looked down at her; his eyes shone as though they had caught a reflection from the myriad lights. It is a good old world, he said heartily in a warm and human voice, and he smiled his smile of everyday good-fellowship.