Roland smiled with pleasure at the fatherly dropping of the formal “Mr.,” but he reiterated the assertion with a more decided manner. “I am going to die. Will you see that my wife goes back to England to her father and mother?”
“I will. Is there anything else?”
“No. She knows all that is to be done. Comfort her a little when I am dead.”
“My dear Roland, we are going to Florida as soon as you are able.”
“I am going to a country much farther off. I will tell you how I know. All my life long a figure formless, veiled, and like a shadow has come to me at any crisis. When I was striving for honours at my college it whispered, ‘you will not succeed.’ When I went to my first business desk it brought me the same message. The night before I sailed for 270 America it stood at my bedside, and I heard the one word, ‘failure.’ This afternoon it told me, ‘you have come to the end of your life.’ Then my soul said, ‘Oh, my enemy, who art thou?’ And there grew out of the dimness the likeness of a face.”
For a few moments there was a silence painful and profound. Roland closed his eyes, and from under their lids stole two large tears––the last he would ever shed. And Mr. Lanhearne was so awed and troubled he could scarcely say:
“A face! Whose face, then, Roland?”
“My own! My own!” and he spoke with that patience of accepted doom which, while it carries the warrant of death, has also death’s resignation and dignity.
After this revelation there was a decided relapse, and after a few more days of suffering, of hope, and despair had passed, the end came peacefully from utter exhaustion. Mr. Lanhearne was present, but it was into Denasia’s eyes that Roland gazed until this sad earth was lost to vision, and the dark, tearless orbs, once so full of light and love, were fixed and dull for evermore.
“It is all past! It is all over!” cried Denasia, “all over, all over! Oh, Roland! Roland! My dear, dear love!” and Mr. Lanhearne led her fainting with sorrow from the place of death.