At last, one day, as I sat fanning him, while he lay on the wicker sofa on the vine-clad veranda, regarding neither lake nor mountain, and smiling wanly at my chatter of the seven birds’-nests in the honeysuckle, from which the last fledgling had been coaxed away by their parents that morning—an inspiration came to me. I laid my hand on his to make sure that he would be aroused to listen, and stooped to the ear that shared in the deadening of the rest of the body.
“What do you say to going abroad again—and very soon?”
He opened his eyes wide, lifting his head to look directly at me.
“What did you say?”
I repeated the query.
He lay back with closed lids for so long I thought he was asleep. Then an echo of his own voice, as it was in the olden time, said:
“I think, if I could once more hear the rush of the waves against the keel of the steamer, and feel the salt air on my face, it would bring me back to life. But—where’s the use of dreaming of it? I shall never be strong enough to go on board.”
“You will, and you shall! You saved my life by taking me abroad. We will try the efficacy of your own prescription.”
I think that not one of the crowd of friends who came down to the steamer to see us off, had any hope of seeing again his living face. I heard, afterward, that they said as much among themselves, when the resolutely cheerful farewells had been spoken, and they stood watching the vessel’s slow motion out of the dock, the eyes of all fixed upon one figure recumbent in a deck-chair, a thin hand responding to the fluttering handkerchiefs above the throng on the end of the pier.
Our son was there with his betrothed, who wrote to me afterward that he was “depressed to despondency.” Belle, with her husband and boys, would occupy Sunnybank while we were away. Christine had insisted that it was not kind or safe to leave to me the sole care of the invalid. In the three weeks that elapsed between the “inspiration” and our embarkation, the brave girl had wound up all affairs that would detain her in America, and made herself and two sons ready to accompany us. The party was completed by the faithful maid who had nursed her children from infancy, and who was quite competent to aid me in nursely offices to the patient for whose sake the desperate expedition was undertaken.