“Sophistry, my boy. It’s out of the kindness of your heart, but it’s sophistry. Better to die shrieking under the knife than to live to be a hopeless, disfigured cripple. Look at me lying here. What heritage of virtue, what example of endurance, shall I leave to my children?”
“You have never complained.”
“No comfort, Renalt—none. I nursed my resentment from base fear only that by revealing it, it would dissipate. With such a belief I have to face the Supreme Court up there; and”—he looked at me earnestly—“before very long, I think.”
I shook my head in silence. I could find no word to say.
“Am I afraid?” he went on, still intently regarding me. “I think not—at present. Yet I have some bitter charges to answer.”
“This rest will restore you again, dad.”
He did not seem to hear me. His eyes left my face and he continued in a murmuring voice:
“The last dispossession the old suffer is sleep, it seems. Balm in Gilead—balm in Gilead!”
“What little breath will keep the spark alive,” I thought as I sat and watched the worn quiet figure. The face looked as if molded out of wax and so moved me that presently I must rise and bend over it, thinking the end had actually come while I watched.
With my rising, however, a sigh broke from it, and a little stir of the limbs, so that my heart that had fallen leaped up again with gladness. Then he looked up at me standing above him, and a smile passed like a gleam of sunlight over his features.