The Bird in the Box

by Mary M. Mears

"Yes, he did."

"I knew it—I knew it," he cried excitedly. "And you said you would, didn't you, Rachel?" he asked, peering at her anxiously. "Somehow I should like to feel as if it was settled," he added wistfully.

Then she understood. In spite of his cheerfulness, old David knew quite well that he was going to die; and so great was his love for her, it had triumphed over the barriers imposed by his disease. With his poor clouded faculties he was trying to make provision for her.

Unable to stand, she rested her forehead on the pillow. He touched her hair and suddenly her heart expanded. All her thought was for him now. The danger that had threatened him was averted. They could not take him away from her, they could not carry him away and place him in a spotless, terrible ward, on a little bed, to die among strangers. Instead, she would be able to care for him until the end came. It was enough. What more could she ask? And tightening her grip on his sleeve, she wept the tears which the constant, torturing thought of weeks, the unwearying, ceaseless attempts to earn money, had not wrung from her. In an ecstasy of tenderness, she received the old man back from the verge of a lonely, unattended death.

Simon Hart had dropped into a chair. His elbow was among the medicine vials; his hand over his face. Old David looked doubtfully from one to the other; after an instant, exerting himself, he caught at Simon's free hand and placed Rachel's in it. "There!" he sighed, and while they watched him, he settled back on the pillows, his lids drooping. Exhausted, he fell asleep, his parted lips giving to his face the aloof expression of death.

It was as if he had been waiting the consummation of this one hope, for after that he sank rapidly. During the anguished days that followed, Rachel never permitted herself to question the step she had taken. She expected to fulfil her promise, meanwhile she preferred not to calculate the price of her sacrifice. She thought only of her grandfather, and if she had been told to die in order to save him, she would have been dead.

Simon Hart had lost standing in his own eyes. He tried to view the situation complacently, to find in it cause for self-justification. Then came the conviction that he must release her. For the present, however, let the engagement stand. It quieted the old man's fears and left Rachel free to receive at his hands the assistance she otherwise would have hesitated to accept.

Upon his advice a trained nurse was secured and lodgings in the neighbourhood were found for Nora Gage. As the last hours of old David's existence approached, Simon began to nourish timid hopes, for Rachel appeared to regain confidence in him. In spite of the part he had played, she relied on him, and drew comfort from his eyes in which she detected so much sympathy.

The physician had made his last visit; her grandfather would scarcely last until dawn. His eyes, partly concealed by their flaccid lids, held that look which is not to be misunderstood; his head on its strained and swollen neck lay twisted to the side on the pillow; the fingers of one hand, already cold, plucked constantly at the coverlid with that melancholy, mechanical movement of the dying, as if his spirit, longing to be free, would fain rid itself of all encumbrances. The left side, instead of the right, was now stricken.

A few minutes before sunrise, there came a change. He had lain so quiet for many hours that they thought he slept, but suddenly Rachel perceived that his eyes were wide open and that he was listening intently to the wind whistling in the space between the houses. Its rushing passage produced a last flicker in the fantastic mind.