Other means must be taken to reassure him and make him amenable to my guidance. Remembering an action of Edgar’s which I had lately seen, I drew the old man’s arm about my shoulder and led him back into his room. He yielded easily. He had passed the limit of acute perception and all his desire was for rest. With simple, little soothing touches, I got him to his bed and saw his head sink gratefully into his pillow.
Much relieved and believing the paroxysm quite past, I was turning softly away when he reached out his hand and, grasping me by the arm, said with an authority as great as I had ever seen him display even on important occasions:
“Another log, Edgar. The fire is low; it mustn’t go out. Whatever happens, it must never go out.”
And he, burning up with fever!
Though this desire for heat or the cheer of the leaping blaze might be regarded as one of the eccentricities of illness, it was with a strange and doubtful feeling that I turned to obey him—a feeling which did not leave me in the watchful hour which followed. Though I had much to brood over of a more serious character than the mending or keeping up of a fire, the sense of something lying back of this constant desire for heat would come again and again to my mind mingling with the great theme now filling my breast with turmoil and shaping out new channels for my course in life. Mystery, though of the smallest, has a persistent prick. We want to know, even if the matter is inconsequent.
I had no further sleep that night, but Uncle did not move again till late morning. When he did and saw me standing over him, he mentioned my name and smiled almost with pleasure and gave me the welcoming hand.
He had forgotten what had passed, or regarded it, if it came to his mind at all, as a dream to be ignored or cherished according to his mood, which varied now, as it had before, from one extreme to the other.
But my mood had no ups and downs. It had been given me to penetrate the depths of my uncle’s heart and mind. I knew his passionate wish—it was one in which I had little part—but nothing must ever make me forget it.
However, I uttered no promises myself. I would wait till my judgment sanctioned them; and the time for that had not yet come.