A NEWPORT LANDSCAPE (The Artist’s Last Work)
Reproduced from the original painting through the courtesy of Frank L. Babbott, Esq.
Over those final days, I have not the heart to linger. In all ways, they were inexpressibly painful. In August of the following year, a growth in his throat made its appearance. Although it never caused him intense physical anguish until a few days before his death, when it seemed to have made its way to the brain, it caused him great discomfort. So long as hope remained that it was not malignant and might be removed, he felt and expressed an irritation which, under the precise circumstances, was only natural. But when, late in October, about the time of his sixtieth birthday, the specialist who was attending him pronounced it cancerous, his mood changed. Certain thoughts, certain memories, certain injustices of which he had felt himself the victim, would still move him to indignation when the recollection of them recurred, but he bore his physical trials with wonderful and unalterable patience. A Unitarian clergyman in the neighborhood began calling on him in the early winter and contributed much to his entertainment in some of my unavoidable absences. But, as Christmas was approaching, my husband asked me to request the Reverend Doctor Shields, now Professor of Psychology in the Catholic University at Washington, D. C., to pay him a visit. Said he: “L⸺ is a good fellow; he thinks just as I do about the tariff and the civil service, and he likes good books. But, what all that has to do with his profession, considered as a profession, I do not clearly see.” Therefore I preferred his request to Dr. Shields, who might reasonably have refused it, as he was not doing parish duty but employed in laboratory work at the Ecclesiastical Seminary in St. Paul. He came, nevertheless, a number of times, paying his last visit on the Saturday evening before Homer died. And then, before leaving, he said to me: “There is not the ghost of a hope that your husband will do just exactly what you wish him to do. And, for my part, I am content to leave him in the hands of God just as he is. He is absolutely honest. If he could take another step forward, he would do it.” And, on his part, Homer said to me, “Father Shields has the clearest mind of any man I ever met. I wish I had known him three years ago. But now my head is in such anguish that I can no longer keep three or four threads of argument in my mind at the same time.”
One day in Honfleur, Homer broke a protracted silence by saying, “I hope that I shall die before you do.” To which I answered, “I hope so too.” “You think that you could get along better without me than I could without you?” he asked, and I said, “I know I could.” And now, two days before he died, he said, “I am glad that I am going first”; adding a few more words which it pleases me to remember, but which I shall not repeat. And again I told him that I was glad also. Later still, he asked me what I meant to do when he was gone, and when I said I hoped to enter a convent, he replied, “That is just what I supposed. Well, it is a beautiful life.”