'But the man is dead, cousin.'
'Then he shall at least have one kind friendly glance before he is carried to his grave,' answered Ermine quietly.
In a short time we set out in the darkness, and dearly did we have to pay for the night-ride; no one could understand the motive of our going, but money was money, and we could pay for all peculiarities. It was a dark night, and the ride seemed endless as the oxen moved slowly on through the red-clay mire. At last we reached the turn and saw the little lonely house with its upper room brightly lighted.
'He is in the studio,' said Ermine; and so it proved. He was not dead, but dying; not maimed but poisoned by the gas of the mine, and rescued too late for recovery. They had placed him upon the floor on a couch of blankets and the dull-eyed Community doctor stood at his side. 'No good, no good,' he said; 'he must die.' And then, hearing of the returning cart, he left us, and we could hear the tramp of the oxen over the little bridge, on their way back to the village.
The dying man's head lay upon his wife's breast, and her arms supported him; she did not speak, but gazed at us with a dumb agony in her large eyes. Ermine knelt down and took the lifeless hand streaked with coal-dust in both her own. 'Solomon,' she said, in her soft, clear voice, 'do you know me?'
The closed eyes opened slowly, and fixed themselves upon her face a moment: then they turned towards the window, as if seeking something.
'It's the picter he means,' said the wife. 'He sat up most all last night a doing it.'
I lighted all the candles, and Ermine brought forward the easel; upon it stood a sketch in charcoal wonderful to behold,—the same face, the face of the faded wife, but so noble in its idealized beauty that it might have been a portrait of her glorified face in Paradise. It was a profile, with the eyes upturned,—a mere outline, but grand in conception and expression. I gazed in silent astonishment.
Ermine said, 'Yes, I knew you could do it, Solomon. It is perfect of its kind.' The shadow of a smile stole over the pallid face, and then the husband's fading gaze turned upward to meet the wild, dark eyes of the wife.
'It's you, Dorcas,' he murmured; 'that's how you looked to me, but I never could get it right before.' She bent over him, and silently we watched the coming of the shadow of death; he spoke only once, 'My rose of Sharon—' And then in a moment he was gone, the poor artist was dead.