The lock of hair trembled, turned, and clung the closer to the living hand. She pressed it to her lips with the passion of desolation.
“But, Mother,” I cried once more, “I am here.” I flung my arms about her and kissed her again and again. I called and entreated her by every dear name that household love had taught us. I besought her to turn, to see, to hear, to believe, to be comforted. I told her how blest was I, how bountiful was death.
“I am alive,” I said. “I am alive! I see you, I touch you, hear you, love you, hold you!” I tried argument and severity; I tried tenderness and ridicule.
She turned at this: it seemed to me that she regarded me. She stretched her arms out; her aged hands groped to and fro as if she felt for something and found it not; she shook her head, her dim eyes gazed blankly into mine. She sighed patiently, and rose as if to leave the room, but hesitated,—covered the face of the dead body—caressed it once or twice as if it had been a living infant—and then, taking up her Bible, which had been upon the chair beside her, dropped upon her knees, and holding the book against her sunken cheek, abandoned herself to silent prayer.
This was more than I could bear just then, and, thinking to collect myself by a few moments’ solitude, I left her. But as I stood in the dark hall, uncertain and unquiet, I noticed a long, narrow line of light at my feet, and, following it confusedly, found that it came from the crack in the closed, but unlatched door of another well-remembered room. I pushed the door open hurriedly and closed it behind me.
My brother sat in this room alone. His fire was blazing cheerfully and, flashing, revealed the deer’s-head from the Adirondacks, the stuffed rose-curlew from Florida, the gull’s wing from Cape Ann, the gun and rifle and bamboo fish-pole, the class photographs over the mantel, the feminine features on porcelain in velvet frames, all the little trappings with which I was familiar. Tom had been trying to study, but his Homer lay pushed away, with crumpled leaves, upon the table. Buried in his lexicon—one strong elbow intervening—down, like a hero thrown, the boy’s face had gone.
“Tom,” I said quietly—I always spoke quietly to Tom, who had a constitutional fear of what he called “emotions”—“Tom, you’d better be studying your Greek. I’d much rather see you. Come, I’ll help you.”
He did not move, poor fellow, and as I came nearer, I saw, to my heart-break, that our Tom was crying. Sobs shook his huge frame, and down between the iron fingers, toughened by base-ball matches, tears had streamed upon the pages of the Odyssey.
“Tom, Tom, old fellow, don’t!” I cried, and, hungry as love, I took the boy. I got upon the arm of the smoking chair, as I used to, and so had my hands about his neck, and my cheek upon his curly hair, and would have soothed him. Indeed, he did grow calm, and calmer, as if he yielded to my touch; and presently he lifted his wet face, and looked about the room, half ashamed, half defiant, as if to ask who saw that.
“Come, Tom,” I tried again. “It really isn’t so bad as you think. And there is Mother catching cold in that room. Go and get her away from the body. It is no place for her. She’ll get sick. Nobody can manage her as well as you.”