“If they were all like you—more like you—well, I might. I’m very fond of you, Katharine. You know it, don’t you? Yes. That’s why I sent for you. I don’t believe I’m going to die—I told Routh so half an hour ago. But I might—I may. I didn’t want to go over without having had my talk out with you. That’s it. I want to have my talk out with you. I should be sorry to slip away without seeing you. There are things—things that come into my head when I’m alone—and I’ve been alone a great deal in my life. Oh, I could have married, if I had liked. Queens would have married me—queer, little, divorced queens from out-of-the-way little kingdoms, you know. But I didn’t want to be married for my money, and there were no Katharine Lauderdales when I was young.”
Again, with an unsteady, laboured movement, the old hand caressed the young one as it lay on the soft, white, knitted Shetland shawl which covered the bed, and again Katharine smiled affectionately and laughed gently at the flattery. Then all was quiet. She leaned back in her chair, thinking—the aged head rested on the white pillow, thinking.
“Katharine,”—the eyes opened again,—“what does it all mean, child?”
“What?” asked the young girl, meeting him again out of her reverie.
“Life.”
“Ah—if I knew that—”
“You’re at the beginning of it—I’m at the end—almost, or quite, it doesn’t matter. What’s the meaning of all those things I’ve done, and which you’re going to do? They must mean something. I ought to have got at the meaning in so many years.”
Katharine was silent. Of late, she, too, had heard the great question asked, which rattles in the throat of the dying century, and is to-day in the ears of all, whether they desire to hear it or not. And no man has answered it yet. A year earlier Katharine would have said but one word in reply. She could not say it now.
In the still, white room she sat by the old man’s side and bowed her head silently.
“It’s puzzled me a great deal,” he said, at last, in his familiar speech. “So long as I cared for things,—money, principally, I suppose,—it didn’t puzzle me at all. It all seemed quite natural. But when I got worn out inside—used up with the wear and tear of having too much—well, then I couldn’t care for things any more, and I began to think. And it’s all a puzzle, Katharine. It’s all a puzzle. We find it all in bits when we come, taken to pieces by the people who have just gone. We spend all our lives in trying to put the thing together on some theory of our own, and in the end we give it up, and go to sleep—‘perchance to dream’—that’s Hamlet, isn’t it? But I never dreamt much. If it’s anything, it isn’t a dream. Well, then, what is it?”