Sandy was just going to bed, when David carried him in to her. One of her last conscious looks was for him. He was in his nightgown, with bare feet, holding his father tight round the neck, and whimpering. They bent down to her, and he kissed her on the cheek, as David told him, 'very softly.' Then he cried to go away from this still, grey mother. David gave him to the nurse and came back.
The day passed, and the night began. The doctor in his evening visit said it would be a marvel if she saw the morrow. David sat beside the bed, his head bowed on the hand he held; the nurse was in the farther corner. His whole life and hers passed before him; and in his mind there hovered perpetually the image of the potter and the wheel. He and she—the Hand so unfaltering, so divine had bound them there, through resistance and anguish unspeakable. And now, for him there was only a sense of absolute surrender and submission, which in this hour of agony and exaltation rose steadily into the ecstasy—ay, the vision of faith! In the pitying love which had absorbed his being he had known that 'best' at last whereat his craving youth had grasped; and losing himself wholly had found his God.
And for her, had not her weak life become one flame of love—a cup of the Holy Grail, beating and pulsing with the Divine Life?
The dawn came. She pulled restlessly at her white wrapper—seemed to be in pain—whispered something of 'a weight.' Then the last change came over her. She opened her eyes—but they saw no longer. Nature ceased to resist, and the soul had long since yielded itself. With a meekness and piteousness of look not to be told, never to be forgotten, Lucy Grieve passed away.
CHAPTER X
The very day after Lucy had been carried to her last rest in that most poetic of all graveyards which bends its grassy shape to the encircling Rotha and holds in trust the ashes of Wordsworth, David Grieve started for Paris.
He had that morning received a telegram from Dora: 'Louie disappeared. Have no clue. Can you come?' Two days before, the news of Cecile's death from diphtheria had reached him in a letter from poor Dora, rendered almost inarticulate by her grief for Lucy and bitter regret for her own absence from her cousin's deathbed, mingling with her pity for Louie's unfortunate child and her dread and panic with regard to Louie herself.
But so long as that white form lay shrouded in the cottage upper room, he could not move—and he could scarcely feel. The telegram broke in upon a sort of lethargy which had held him ever since Lucy's last breath. He started at once. On the way he spent two hours at Manchester. On the table in his study there still lay the medical book he had taken down from his scientific shelf on the night of Dr. Mildmay's visit; in Lucy's room her dresses hung as she had left them on the doors; a red woollen cap she had been knitting for Sandy was thrown down half finished on the dressing-table. Of the hour he spent in that room, putting away some of the little personal possessions, still warm as it were from her touch, let no more be said.
When he reached Paris he inquired for Dora at the pension in the Avenue Friedland, to which he had sent her. John, who had also written to him, and was still in Paris, was staying, he knew, at an hotel on the Quai Voltaire. But he went to Dora first.
Dora, however, was not at home. She had left for him the full address of the house in the Paris banlieue where she had found Louie, and full directions as to how to reach it. He took one of the open cabs and drove thither in the blazing July sun.