Catharine’s side of the house was soon in utter darkness, and a dry-eyed figure clad in black sat in a sepulchral room refusing herself to those who came to sympathize. As the morning lengthened, she crossed the hallway and went upstairs, pausing with an exclamation of horror upon her lips before the open door of the great room. There her father lay upon his bed, across which the sun streamed, a smile upon his lips as if in sleep, while upon the counterpane and scattered all about were flowers. Clad in a soft white gown that had belonged to summer, Rosalind was garlanding the slender rails at top and foot of bed; yet as Catharine looked, the words of reproof she meant to say, halted and remained unuttered, and she crept down the stairs again, realizing for the first time in her life the loneliness of heart that was hers.
While daylight stayed, Rosalind never faltered, and a sort of exaltation took the place of tears. “How do you keepers of the faith reconcile the going of those whose lives are not lived out?” she suddenly asked the Anglican Catholic priest, who had been the family friend since before her father’s first marriage, an ecclesiastic of the type more often found in cathedral than in New England towns, a quiet man and very human.
“What others think, I do not know,” he replied; “for myself, I believe that each one of us is taken at the time, best, not for those that he leaves behind, but for himself, and this has been my experience.”
“But my mother was young and had all life before her,” said Rosalind, in doubt.
“She had tasted all the bliss of love and loving, and she left it before one bitter drop had entered the draught.”
“But father was still happy in spite of past sorrow; why was it best for him?”
“Because he had reached the summit of his life and work; is it a good thing to find one’s self groping backward?”
“Why do I stay behind then?” she pleaded with outstretched hands.
“Because your work of love begun must find its culmination;” and when he had gone, Rosalind sat with hands clasped in her lap, lost in wonder.
With night came tears. Ah, for one word, a sign or token; if any one could send a word back, surely it would be the father to his “heart child.”