And then I can hear her little whisper of consolation—
“Maybe they’ll be safe till then. They’re sturdy plants.” At which I can see him turning over in his bed and passing into one of those short hours of sleep into which Nature so gently divides the night for the old people.
Then think of the long and weary silences through which he must have endured before he grew accustomed to the absence of his bed-fellow. For there seem to me few things more pathetic yet more beautiful than two old people who have long passed the passions of youth, sharing their bed together, with the simplicity and innocence of little children. I can, too, so readily conceive how dread the terror of the night becomes when one of them is taken and the other left. I can hear the sounds at night that frighten, the storms that rattle the tiles on the old roof making the one who is left behind stretch out his groping hand for the trembling touch of another hand in vain.
Yet through all this he survived. Cruelly though his heart had been dealt with, he still retained the whole spirit of courage in his soul. With all its chill winds and bitter frosts, he braved out that winter and two years have passed now since his wife died.
I see him nearly every day in his garden, walking up and down the paths, picking out a weed here, a weed there. Two walking-sticks he has to help him on his journeys. They are called simply, number one and number two. And when it is a fine morning, with the sun riding fiercely in a cloudless sky, his daughter will say to him—
“You need only take number one to-day.”
So he takes number one and a look comes into those child’s eyes of his as though he would say—
“Ah—you see I’m not done for yet. There’s many an old fellow of eighty can’t get along without two sticks to help him.”
One day, too, this summer, I found him working with a bill-hook in his garden. The grass had grown up high under the quick-set hedge on one of the paths. He was clearing it all away.
“Must keep the little place tidy, sir,” he said, with a bright twinkle in his eye. “They grasses do grow up so quick there’d be no seeing the path at all.” Then with little suppressed grunts of his breath to every swing of the bill-hook, he went on steadily with his work, leaning heavily upon number one with the other hand.