Somewhat after midday, when Clara was by him, he roused up and took her hand, and seemed to speak with less effort.
“Good-by,” he said, and Dr. Quintard, who was standing near, thought he added: “If we meet”—but the words were very faint. He looked at her for a little while, without speaking, then he sank into a doze, and from it passed into a deeper slumber, and did not heed us any more.
Through that peaceful spring afternoon the life-wave ebbed lower and lower. It was about half past six, and the sun lay just on the horizon when Dr. Quintard noticed that the breathing, which had gradually become more subdued, broke a little. There was no suggestion of any struggle. The noble head turned a little to one side, there was a fluttering sigh, and the breath that had been unceasing through seventy-four tumultuous years had stopped forever.
He had entered into the estate envied so long. In his own words—the words of one of his latest memoranda:
“He had arrived at the dignity of death—the only earthly dignity that is not artificial—the only safe one. The others are traps that can beguile to humiliation.
“Death—the only immortal who treats us all alike, whose pity and whose peace and whose refuge are for all—the soiled and the pure—the rich and the poor—the loved and the unloved.”
CCXCIV. THE LAST RITES
It is not often that a whole world mourns. Nations have often mourned a hero—and races—but perhaps never before had the entire world really united in tender sorrow for the death of any man.
In one of his aphorisms he wrote: “Let us endeavor so to live that when we come to die even the undertaker will be sorry.” And it was thus that Mark Twain himself had lived.