“Are you going to see him?” he asked.
“Yes,” she said
By the bedside the children already stood in a weeping group.
“Oh, mother!” cried the daughters, almost in hysterics, weeping loudly.
But the mother went forward. The dead man lay in repose, as if gently asleep, so gently, so peacefully, like a young man sleeping in purity. He was still warm. She stood looking at him in gloomy, heavy silence, for some time.
“Ay,” she said bitterly, at length, speaking as if to the unseen witnesses of the air. “You’re dead.” She stood for some minutes in silence, looking down. “Beautiful,” she asserted, “beautiful as if life had never touched you—never touched you. God send I look different. I hope I shall look my years, when I am dead. Beautiful, beautiful,” she crooned over him. “You can see him in his teens, with his first beard on his face. A beautiful soul, beautiful—” Then there was a tearing in her voice as she cried: “None of you look like this, when you are dead! Don’t let it happen again.” It was a strange, wild command from out of the unknown. Her children moved unconsciously together, in a nearer group, at the dreadful command in her voice. The colour was flushed bright in her cheek, she looked awful and wonderful. “Blame me, blame me if you like, that he lies there like a lad in his teens, with his first beard on his face. Blame me if you like. But you none of you know.” She was silent in intense silence.
Then there came, in a low, tense voice: “If I thought that the children I bore would lie looking like that in death, I’d strangle them when they were infants, yes—”
“No, mother,” came the strange, clarion voice of Gerald from the background, “we are different, we don’t blame you.”
She turned and looked full in his eyes. Then she lifted her hands in a strange half-gesture of mad despair.
“Pray!” she said strongly. “Pray for yourselves to God, for there’s no help for you from your parents.”