“But I am too weak to hold it.”
And he looked too weak to hold it. She could not lift her full eyes. “I am so sorry,” was all she could speak.
“There isn’t any thing worth living for anyway; I, for one, am not thankful for my ‘creation.’ I wish I was dead and buried and out of sight forever. Sue Greyson has another offer to whisper to all Dunellen. I would not stay here, I would go back to that wretched hospital, but my engagement with her father extends through another year. Well, you won’t ride home with me?”
“Not to-day, I want to be out in this air.”
“And you don’t want to be shut in here with my growling. I don’t blame you; I’d run away from myself if I could. I’ll kill half Dunellen and all Mayfield with overdoses before another night, and then take a big dose myself. Say, Mystic, you are posted in these things, where would be the harm?”
“Take it and see.”
“Not yet awhile. I am not sure of many things, but I am sure that a man’s life in this world will stare in his face in the next. And my life has not been fit even for your eyes.”
Homely, shabby, old, worn, excited, with a sharp ring in his voice and a stoop in his shoulders. What was there in him to touch Sue Greyson? Where was the first point of sympathy?
Tessa could have taken him into her arms and cared for him as she would have cared for a child.
“I have just seen an old man die; a good old man; he was over ninety; he prayed to the last; that is his lips moved and his old wife laid his hands together; he liked to clasp his hands when he prayed, she said. She put her ear down close to his mouth, but she could not distinguish the words. I was wishing that I could go in his place, and that he could take up my life and live it through for me. He would do better with it than I shall.”