The clock had just struck three, when I heard Robert start suddenly to his feet and cry, “Yes, sir!” Then smiting his hands together as if in distress, he cried out still loudly, “Yes, sir! I am coming!” The doctor rose and went to him. “Barr,” he asked, “what is the matter?” for Robert was weeping as men seldom weep—long moaning sobs, that were the very language of heart-breaking despair. “What is the trouble, my friend?” the doctor asked again, and Robert answered,
“My father called me twice, and I—I answered him. He has been dead thirty-two years.”
“Well then, your father would only come for your relief and help.”
“He came for me, Doctor; the summons was inexorable, and sure.”
“Let us go to the child. He is very ill.”
I heard these words, and I felt at the same moment a tighter clasp of the small hand round my ankle, and Robert’s kiss upon my cheek. Then the hours went slowly and cruelly by, and in the afternoon the beginning of the end commenced. But just before it, the child had another attack similar to the one he and his brother had shared on the train coming in to Galveston. He was quite unconscious, even of his physical agony, his eyes firmly fixed their vision far, far beyond any earthly horizon. His father sat like a stone gazing at him, and I could not have moved a finger, or spoken a word, no, not to have saved his life.
The trance lasted only a few minutes, but he came out of it 281 sighing, and then asked in a voice of awe and wonder, “Who is that man waiting for me, Papa?” He was assured there was no one waiting, but he replied, “Yes, there is a man waiting for me. He is in the next room.” Then his father noticed that his eyes had a new, deep look in them, as if some veil had been rent, and he with open face had beheld things wonderful and secret.
About seven o’clock they took him away from me into the next room. He clung to my feet, and begged to stay with me, and I—Oh, I strove as mortals strive with the impossible to speak, to plead, that he might remain! But it could not be. His father lifted him in his arms, and through the next five awful hours he held him there. No! no! It is not writable, unless one could write with blood and tears. At midnight it was over. But as his father laid down the little boy, Mrs. Lee went to him, and said,
“Calvin is very ill. Go and speak to him, while you can.”
He went at once and put his arm under the sweet child, and spoke to him. And the first words the dying boy uttered were, “Papa, what is the matter with my brother?”