The prey of pity and terror, Dodson averted his gaze helplessly.
“You have brought the verdict, faithful one?” said the poet; and the young man understood, even in the pass to which he himself was come, how greatly the noble voice transcended in its quality all that had ever sounded in his ears.
“I have, old boy,” said Dodson defiantly, yet his own voice was like the croak of a raven.
“Begin, O my father,” said the dying poet.
With an automatic obedience which neither sought to comprehend nor to control, Dodson’s hands dived into the recesses of his overcoat. Therefrom they produced a reporter’s notebook, half-full of a hasty and clumsy pencil scrawl. This he gave to the old man.
“It begins here,” he said, indicating the place in an urgent whisper. “It is not very clear, but I hadn’t much time. Can you make it out? Read it as quickly as ever you can, and then perhaps he will not notice that it is not all that it might be.”
“Begin, O my father!” said the gentle voice of the dying man.
Immediately the thin, high, quavering tones of the old man began to read. At his first words the figure beside the hearth seemed to uplift his head, and to strain all his senses; the glazed and sightless eyes were enkindled; a strange rapture played about the parted lips.
Dodson listened in a kind of dull terror. He dared not look at the face of the poet, nor yet at that of him who read. As he sat in impotence midway between the two, with fire and ice in his veins, he could not follow the words that proceeded from the old man’s lips.
At last it was borne in upon him that a miracle had been wrought. The white-haired, feeble, half-blind old creature was not crooning his own crude pencilled phrases, which he knew to be so inept that he felt them to be a blasphemous mockery.