How Mercy's heart must have been touched, and also her fine and pathetic sense of humor, if her freed spirit hovered still in that little low-roofed room! This cast-off garment of hers, so carefully honored, so curiously considered and speculated upon by these simple-minded people! There was something rarely dramatic in all the surroundings of these last hours. Among the guests in the house was one, a woman, herself a poet, who toward the end of the second day came into the chamber, bringing long trailing vines of the sweet Linnea, which was then in full bloom. Her poet's heart was moved to the depths by the thought of this unknown, dead woman lying there, tended by strangers' hands. She gazed with an inexplicable feeling of affection upon Mercy's placid brow. She lifted the lifeless hands and laid them down again in a less constrained position. She, too, noted the broad gold ring, and said,--
"She has been loved then. I wonder if he is alive!" The door was closed, and no one was in the room. With a strange impulse she could not account for to herself, she said, "I will kiss her for him," and bent and kissed the cold forehead. Then she laid the fragrant vines around the face and across the bosom, and went away, feeling an inexplicable sense of nearness to the woman she had kissed. When the next morning she knew that it was Mercy Philbrick, the poet, in whose lifeless presence she had stood, she exclaimed with a burst of tears, "Oh, I might have known that there was some subtile bond which made me kiss her! I have always loved her verses so."
On the day after Lizzy Hunter returned from Mercy's funeral, Stephen White called at her house and asked to speak to her. She had almost forgotten his existence, though she knew that he was living in the Jacobs house. Their paths never crossed, and Lizzy had long ago forgotten her passing suspicion of Mercy's regard for him. The haggard and bowed man who met her now was so unlike the Stephen White she recollected, that Lizzy involuntarily exclaimed. Stephen took no notice of her exclamation.
"No, thank you, I will not sit down," he said, as with almost solicitude in her face she offered him a chair. "I merely wish to give you something of"--he hesitated--"Mrs. Philbrick's."
He drew from his breast a small package of papers, yellow, creased, old. He unfolded one of these and handed it to Lizzy, saying,--
"This is a sonnet of hers which has never been printed. She gave it to me when,"--he hesitated again,--"when she was living in my house. She said at that time that she would like to have it put on her tombstone. I did not know any other friend of hers to go to but you. Will you see that it is done?"
Lizzy took the paper and began to read the sonnet. Stephen stood leaning heavily on the back of a chair; his breath was short, and his face much flushed.
"Oh, pray sit down, Mr. White! You are ill," exclaimed Lizzy.
"No, I am not ill. I would rather stand," replied Stephen. His eyes were fixed on the spot where thirty years before Mercy had stood when she said, "I can't, Stephen."
Lizzy read the sonnet with tears rolling down her cheeks.