On another occasion, he said, speaking to Catherine of the squire and of Meyrick's account of his last year of life—
'How selfish one is, always—when one least thinks it! How could I have forgotten him so completely as I did during all that New Brotherhood time? Where, what is he now? Ah! if somewhere, somehow, one could——'
He did not finish the sentence, but the painful yearning of his look finished it for him.
But the days passed on, and the voice grew rarer, the strength feebler. By the beginning of March all coming downstairs was over. He was entirely confined to his room, almost to his bed. Then there came a horrible week, when no narcotics took effect, when every night was a wrestle for life, which it seemed must be the last. They had a good nurse, but Flaxman and Catherine mostly shared the watching between them.
One morning he had just dropped into a fevered sleep. Catherine was sitting by the window gazing out into a dawn-world of sun which reminded her of the summer sunrises at Petites Dalles. She looked the shadow of herself. Spiritually, too, she was the shadow of herself. Her life was no longer her own: she lived in him—in every look of those eyes—in every movement of that wasted frame.
As she sat there, her Bible on her knee, her strained unseeing gaze resting on the garden and the sea, a sort of hallucination took possession of her. It seemed to her that she saw the form of the Son of man passing over the misty slope in front of her, that the dim majestic figure turned and beckoned. In her half-dream she fell on her knees. 'Master!' she cried in agony, 'I cannot leave him! Call me not! My life is here. I have no heart—it beats in his.'
And the figure passed on, the beckoning hand dropping at its side. She followed it with a sort of anguish, but it seemed to her as though mind and body were alike incapable of moving—that she would not if she could. Then suddenly a sound from behind startled her. She turned, her trance shaken off in an instant, and saw Robert sitting up in bed.
For a moment her lover, her husband, of the early days was before her—as she ran to him. But he did not see her.
An ecstasy of joy was on his face; the whole man bent forward listening.
'The child's cry!—thank God! Oh! Meyrick—Catherine—thank God!'