Aaron gazes, with comic eye at the rotund, well-fed doctor, the purple of good burgundy in his full cheeks.
“If I were a doctor, now,” he retorts, “I should grant your word to be true. But I am a lawyer, and must keep myself on edge.”
Aaron’s earliest care is to write his arrival to the lustrous Theo. The reply he receives makes the world black.
“Less than a fortnight ago,” she says, “your letters would have gladdened my soul. Now there is no more joy, and life a blank. My boy is gone—forever dead and gone.”
While Aaron sits with the fatal letter in his fingers, his friend Van Ness comes in. He turns his black eyes on the visitor—eyes misty, dim, the brightness lost from them.
“What dreams were mine,” he sighs—“what dreams for my brave little boy! He is dead, and half my world has died.”
Toward the end of summer, Alston sends word that the lustrous Theo is in danger. The loss of her boy has struck at the roots of her life. Aaron, in new alarm, writes urging that she come North. He sends a physician from New York to bring her to him. Alston consents; he himself cannot come. His duties as governor tie him. The lustrous Theo, eager to meet her father with whom she parted on that tearful evening in Stone Street so many years ago, will start at once. He, Alston, shall later follow her.
Alston sees the lustrous Theo aboard the schooner Patriot, then lying in Charleston harbor. It is rough December weather when the Patriot clears for New York. The message of her sailing reaches Aaron overland, and he is on strain for the schooner’s arrival. Days come, days go; the schooner is due—overdue. Still no sign of those watched-for topsails down the lower bay! And so time passes. The days become weeks, the weeks months. Hope sickens, then dies. Aaron, face white and drawn, a ghost’s face, reads the awful truth in that long waiting. The lustrous Theo is dead—like the baby! It is then the iron of a measureless adversity enters his soul!
Aaron goes about the daily concerns of life, making no moan. He does not speak of his loss, but saves his grief for solitude. One day a friend relates a rumor that the schooner was captured by buccaneers, and the lustrous Theo lives. The broken Aaron shakes his head.
“She is dead!” says he. “Thus is severed the last tie that binds me to my kind.”