It was about 11 o’clock that, sitting in the room below, I was startled by hearing a sudden thud above me that shook the beams of the ceiling. I rushed upstairs in a panic and found him lying prostrate on the floor, uninjured apparently, but with no power of getting to his feet again.
“What’s this?” I cried. “Dad! Are you hurt?”
He looked at me a little wondering and confused, but answered no, he had only slipped and fallen when rising to don his clothes.
I lifted him up and he couldn’t stand, but sunk down on the bed again with a blank, amazed look in his face.
“Renalt,” he said, in a thin, perplexed voice, “what’s happened to the old man? The will was there, but the power’s gone.”
Gone it was, forever. From that day he walked no more—did nothing but lie on his back, calm and unconcerned for the most part, and fading quietly from life.
But in the first discovery of his enforced inertness, some peculiar trouble, unconnected with the certain approach of death, lay on him like a black jaundice. Sitting by his side after I had got him back upon the bed, I would not break the long silence that ensued with shallow words of comfort, for I thought that he was steeling his poor soul as he lay to face the inevitable prospect.
Suddenly he turned on the bed—for his face had been darkened from me—and looked at me with his lips trembling.
“What is it, dad?”
“I’m down, Renny. I shall never rise again.”