“Let me bear the sorrow with you, coward, villain that I am!”
“You did not mean to be either. You were tired of misery––men do tire. I would have tired, too, only for my baby. Oh, Roland! Roland! Roland! my love, my husband!”
Then––ah, then. No one can put into mere common words the great mystery of forgiveness. It is not in words. Heart beat against heart, eyes gazed into eyes, souls met upon clinging lips, and the sweet compact of married love was renewed in the clasping of their long-parted hands. They sat down together and spoke in soft, sad voices of the great mistakes of the past. Until the midnight hour they wept and talked together, and then Denasia said:
“In a short time a poor woman who is nursing at the Gilsey House will be here. She is on duty until twelve o’clock, but as soon as she is released she promised to come and sit with me. So you must leave me now, Roland. It is useless to explain to my neighbours our relationship. They would look at you and me and think evilly. I would not blame them if they did. When all is over I will come to you; until then I will remain alone. It is best so.”
Nevertheless Roland lingered and pleaded, and when he finally consented to her wish, he left all the money he had in her hands. She looked at the bills with a sad despair. “All these!” she whispered, “all these for a grave and a coffin! There was nothing at all to help him to live.”
“Nothing could have saved him, Denasia. He was born under sentence of death. He has been ill all his poor little life. My darling, believe that it is well with him now.”
Yet her words and tears troubled him, and he bade her good-night, and then returned so often that 265 the woman Denasia had spoken of passed him in the narrow entry, and he paused and watched her go to his wife’s room. Even then he did not hurry to his own home. He went down the side street, and stood looking at the glimmering lamp in the sorrowful place of death until he became painfully aware of the terribly damp, cold wind searching out and chilling life, even to the very marrow of the bones. Then he remembered that he had come out in his dress boots, consequently his feet were wet and numb, and he had a fierce pain under his shoulder. A sudden, uncontrollable fear went to his heart like a death-doom.
He had to walk a long way before he found any vehicle, and when, after what seemed a never-ending period of torture, he reached his room, he knew that he was seriously ill. But the house had settled for the night; he had a reluctance to awaken the servants; he hoped the warmth would give him ease; he was, in fact, quite unacquainted with the terrible malady which had seized him. In the morning he did not appear, and after a short delay Mr. Lanhearne sent him a message.
Roland was, however, by this time in high fever and delirious. The news caused a momentary hesitation and then a positive decision. The hesitation was a natural one––“Should not the young man be sent to the hospital?” The decision came from the cultivated humanity of a good heart––“No. Roland was ‘the stranger within the gates,’ he was a countryman, he was more than that, he was a Cornishman.” In a few moments Mr. Lanhearne had sent 266 for his own physician and a trained nurse, and he went himself to the side of the sick man until help arrived.