“Seppi, I daresay the angels are here. I daresay it was they who helped Moor to find me and bring me; but that doesn’t matter. The Lord Jesus is here Himself, and I think you will see Him soon. Never mind anything else. He is coming.”
Seppi’s eyes filled suddenly with strange light, and then the lids closed, and the quick panting breathing grew very slow—and then stopped.
“Jesus has come!” said Squib in his heart, and he turned by a sudden impulse and put his arms round the neck of the weeping woman on her knees beside him.
“Seppi is not lame any more,” said Squib softly.
CHAPTER XIII.
GOING HOME.
It was the last day at the chalet. On the morrow Colonel Rutland and his party were to start for England and home.
Squib stood holding his father’s hand beside a little newly-made grave in the quaint little burying-ground of the little church on the hillside, just where it began to slope gently down towards the wider end of the valley where the small township lay.
Squib held in his hands a wooden cross about three feet high. He had spent the last days of his stay in Switzerland in carving that cross, and in striving to put into it some of the many imaginings which crowded his busy brain. For a child’s handiwork it was very creditable. There was a lily carved upon the upright bar, standing out in bold relief, and the greatest pains had been taken with the shape and veining of every leaf and petal. At the very top of the cross the word “SEPPI” was cut in small capitals, and that was all. The lower end of the upright bar was pointed, and as Squib stood at the little grave looking very seriously upon it, he gave a questioning look up into his father’s face, and on receiving a nod of assent he moved forward and drove his cross into the ground just at the head of the little grave. The earth, having recently been loosened, gave no great resistance. With the aid of his father the boy fixed his little memento safely in its place, and, having done this, he hung upon it a wreath of Alpine flowers which he carried on his arm, and stood looking at the result with a smile on his lips and a tear in his eye.
Colonel Rutland, standing bare-headed at the grave, bent his keen gaze on the face of the child beside him. The death of little Seppi was Squib’s first real acquaintance with death (for he had been too little to understand or remember the loss of his baby brother), and it had produced a considerable effect upon the child, as his parents had observed. His presence at the deathbed could not have failed to leave an impression on a mind so thoughtful and sensitive as Squib’s; and it had been plain to those about him that the boy had thought of little else ever since his return from the peasant’s chalet with news of Seppi’s sudden death, and the way in which he had been summoned.
“I think they will know whose doing that is,” said the Colonel, and the boy looked up with a smile. Although grave, and sometimes tearful, Squib had not been sorrowful during these intervening days, and there was a look of gladness in his face now as he surveyed his handiwork.