But the old man answered mildly: “How, beloved friends, estimate with your own measure the wisdom of God and His mercy? A man under ground is surrounded by darkness, but he has no right to deny that above him are sky, sun, heat, and light.”
“Here is consolation,” interrupted Pan Stanislav; “a fly couldn’t live on such doctrines. And what is a mother to do, whose only and beloved child is dying?”
But the blue eyes of the professor seemed to look beyond the world. For a time he gazed straightforward persistently; then he said, like a man who sees something, but is not sure that he sees it distinctly, “It appears to me that this child has fixed herself too deeply in people’s hearts to pass away simply, and disappear without a trace. There is something in this,—something was predestined to her; she must accomplish something, and before that she will not die.”
“Mysticism,” said Bukatski.
But Pan Stanislav interrupted: “Oh, that it were so, mysticism or no mysticism! Oh, that it were so! A man in misfortune grasps even at a shadow of hope. It never found place in my head that she had to die.”
But the professor added, “Who knows? she may survive all of us.”
Polanyetski was in that phase of scepticism in which a man recognizes certainty in nothing, but considers everything possible, especially that everything which at the given time his heart yearns for; he breathed therefore more easily, and received certain consolation.
“May God have mercy on her and Pani Emilia!” said he. “I would give money for a hundred Masses if I knew they would help her.”
“Give for one, if the intention be sincere.”
“I will, I will! As to the sincerity of intention, I could not be more sincere if the question involved my own life.”