With an agonized cry he fell to his knees at the bedside, and taking her cold little hand, he rubbed it and kissed it caressingly. "Pert, my darling," he moaned, "come back to me! Don't leave me, Pert, my precious one—tell me you won't dear—tell me you hear me!—" But only the sound of Sadie's convulsive sobbing answered him as she stumbled from the room.
The long threatened storm now suddenly broke in all its fury. The rain blew fiercely in at a window near him, and drenched him through and through with the flying spray; but he heeded it not. Kneeling at the bedside, his face above the little hand clasped in both of his, he uttered mingled incoherent prayers to Pert to come back, and to God to take him too.
Judge Martin noiselessly entered the room and closed the window. Gently he put a hand under each of Checkers' arms, and raised him up. "Come, my boy," he said kindly, but firmly, "you must not stay here in this condition. Try to bear up. It's an awful blow that has come upon us; but God, in his inscrutable wisdom, has thought it best to take her—"
Again, with a sudden burst of anguish, as though his very heart had broken within him, Checkers threw himself to his knees by the bedside, and burying his face between his outstretched arms, poured out in bitter, choking sobs, his utter hopeless, despairing misery. So terrible a strain, however, brought about, in the end, its own results. Beneficent nature intervened, and toward the morning hours Judge Martin and Arthur gently lifted the grief-stricken boy from the kneeling position in which he had fallen asleep, and put him comfortably upon a bed in another room, without his awakening.
Details of this sort are harrowing at best, but nothing imaginable could have been sadder than was the funeral two days later. The rain, which had never intermitted, fell with dismal hopelessness. Mrs. Barlow had not been able to leave her bed since the shock, and, never strong, her life was now almost despaired of.
Checkers stood uncovered in the down-pouring rain, beside the open grave, his clear-cut face as hard and white as marble. In spite of the draggling wet and clinging mud, the country people were out in force; but their gapes, their nudges and whispers, were as little to him as the falling rain. He was dead to everything but the sense of his utter, hopeless desolation.
What made it all even sadder, if possible, was that a dreadful breach had come between him and Sadie and Arthur.
On the morning following that first awful night, he had suddenly confronted them with the box of powders crushed in his hand, and in his eyes a tragic, questioning look which spoke, while he stood sternly silent.
"Oh, Checkers," cried Sadie, falling to her knees and holding out her hands entreatingly, "forgive us—we did n't know—we didn't know! Forgive us; please forgive us!"
But his face only grew the harder. "Forgive you," he said, as he raised his clenched hand to heaven, invokingly; "may God eternally—" but he faltered, and his voice grew suddenly soft, "forgive you," he added, dropping his arm and lowering his voice contritely. "But I," he began again, in measured passionless words—"I can never forgive you. I never want to see you—either of you—again." And from that hour he never spoke to them, nor looked at them, any more than as though they were not.