"Peace within and rest."
"I have peace with God."
"The Peace of God which passeth all understanding—"
This, his last utterance, was given at about a quarter past eight. Some forty minutes later he passed away: voyaging peacefully to Heaven.
Of another death I knew only by hearsay. It was a Bonapartist intriguer who, just before the dynasty's disaster, had ratted to the Republicans, and in the struggle with the Red Commune of Paris became a spy for the Versaillais. I first saw the name and the bare fact in the French newspapers, but a fuller story reached me in another way. Of the Grand Rouquette, Red gaolers, a cage. A name on a list. One word at the foot: Condemned. A yard, a high wall covered with vines and creepers. A May morning, six priests who died like heroes, filthy insults, levelled rifles. Liberty, Equality, Fraternity. Fire! an explosion. A curled-up corpse upon the ground.
His former employer lived a few years longer, keeping Death at bay by sheer fussiness. Her last gesture, Gabrielle wrote me, was a deprecatory shrug of the shoulder; her last (recorded) utterance "Enfin—"
In another, an uglier death than any, the human creature gave way to the passion of extreme sickening fear, to fawning appeals for God's mercy, to every last licence—except the use of the first person singular. I stood outside; Aunt Martha would not let me enter the room for very shame, though I peeped in once and saw the pale face livid with fear, streaming with sweat, contorted with agony of body and soul.
"Forgive, Lord, forgive!" he was whining, "all has been done for Thy sake. One sees one's filthy sinfulness, one sees the error of one's ways—"
Not in such cowardly supplication, but in arrogant prayer, prayer as to an equal, prayer to his young friend God, died a braver, wickeder old man. They found him kneeling against his bed: heart-failure, said the doctor. His face was insolent, beautiful, serene. His soul had strolled disdainfully into Heaven, as a gentleman's should. Among his papers were found two worn photographs; one of my mother, the only one she had ever had taken, showing her in all the innocent beauty of her maidenhood, the other of myself, taken in France, which, against my will Grandmother had managed to convey to him. On the back of each of them was written, in his hand-writing:—"I have kissed this picture to shreds. They do not know. God knows."
For me, those are his Last Words.