His appeal sounded desperate—tortured from him.
“How can you leave me, boy? You are part of me, Jack Cabot. Don’t you realize that? You are all that I have. Don’t go yet awhile, my son—little crushed bone of my bone!”
Perhaps Jack heard. Perhaps he should have preferred to wait, if only for the “while” that his man-god craved. But his eyes did not lower from the blinding light or his head relax from its listening slant. Any courteous desire which he may have had to stay was overruled by the authoritative command that had reached him. In a last effort to reassure the beloved two he must leave behind, he tried to smile—was able to whisper:
“I am not—afraid.... I see—the way.... The light——”
Through the numbness that made one pain of her heart and her head, Dolores remembered sometime afterward that unprecedented midnight twittering which had disturbed the boy. Softly, so as not to awaken the great surgeon, she crossed the living-room to the window. The canary greeted her with no flutter of wings. She lifted the cage off its hook, carried it into the bedroom and placed it beside the night lamp.
She and John Cabot stood in the utter silence which seemed to fill the world, looking through the wires at the fluffed, yellow body that lay upon the floor of the cage. Indeed Dick had taken it “hard.” Jack’s wish for the small creature whose large love had made him “ashamed” was fulfilled. His bird, too, had gone—set free.
CHAPTER XV
In justice to John Cabot, the spirit-girl Dolores related next an interview between the financier and his wife of which she was told afterward. So she explained to her demon audience when able to proceed.
Three days had passed since that incomprehensible thing misnamed on Earth as “life” had departed the unsightly physical of the young heir. The great surgeon, after having established—to his own satisfaction at least—that the patient had died of “nerve shock” and not of an operation which he pronounced successful in all details, had departed with his check. The servants were recovering from the emotional debauch of the last offices and beginning to think consciously, rather than subconsciously, in terms of tasks.