“I believe in God now,” she said solemnly, and moving her almost sightless eyes toward him. “I believe in everything. Oh,” with a sudden great and bitter cry, and straining her gaze in Stargarde’s direction, “what a wrong I have done her!”
Stargarde held one of her mother’s hands in her own. At her despairing words she seized the other and folded them both between her strong, fair palms with a consoling clasp.
“I wish to go to heaven because she will be there,” said the woman, starting up in bed with a last exertion of strength. “I cast her off when she was a baby, and she kisses me!”
Camperdown hastily pushed more pillows behind her and moistened her lips with drops of a stimulant beside him.
“I can see plainly now,” she went on, opening wide her blue eyes with their strange and touching expression. “Zeb, mind what she says and don’t vex her. Take good care of her, you,” she continued, addressing Camperdown. “I forgive you now; I could have killed you before. I hated every man. I forgive all”—brokenly—"as I hope to be forgiven—even him."
Her breath fluttered convulsively for a few minutes, then she sprang forward: “I hear them—the song of triumph they sing upon that shore. Jesus hath redeemed us—to suffer nevermore,” she added. “O Jesus, do not despise me—I am sorry.”
Her last words were spoken. She fell back in Camperdown’s arms and he laid her head on the pillows.
Stargarde’s face was shining like that of an angel. For many days he had seen her kneeling by that sick-bed, had heard her pleading voice, “O God, give me this soul; save my mother and take her to heaven.” Now her heart’s desire was gratified, and he feared that after the long weeks of watching and confinement to the house a collapse would come; but there was no sign of it yet. Very calmly she asked Zilla if she would care to stay in the room while Camperdown left it. Zilla remained; and Stargarde, while performing the last tender offices for her mother in which she would receive only a small amount of assistance from her friend of the Salvation Army, talked sweetly to the child of the triumphant entry of their mother’s spirit into heaven, and of the putting away of the deserted body under the grass and the flowers where it would lie till the joyful resurrection.
Death had before this been connected with all that was squalid and mysterious and unlovely in the child’s mind—not a thing to be feared among people who led reckless lives, but rather to be hated and shunned.
When she at last left the Pavilion and put her hand in Camperdown’s for him to take her home, she remarked sagely, “I shall not mind dying, now that I am rich.”