A Poor Gentleman

by Mrs. Oliphant

There was something like reviving life; there was reconciliation, reunion, in the way his dull fingers closed upon hers. Had a shadow of doubt come over the dying mind? He breathed a long sobbing sigh, which was half satisfaction and half the prolonged effort of dying. “To do something,” he murmured, “for the boy.”

Here Rochford broke in, becoming accustomed to the solemnity of the scene, and recovering the instinct of business and a sense of the necessity of completing what he had in hand. “But,” he said, “this is not the business for which I was summoned. Everything is ready; there are only the deeds to sign; there is only the signature—”

Alicia gave him a warning look to stop him, and Russell Penton put forth his hand with an impressive “hush!” Perhaps it was the new voice that caught the attention of Sir Walter. He opened his eyes again, but half, showing only a sightless whiteness under the heavy lids. “Eh?” he said, “was some one speaking? I can’t hear any more. Alicia—what? what?—was it—about the boy—”

“It was—our own business, father: but not to trouble you. It shall trouble you,” she said firmly, but with an indescribable tone that said much, “no more, no more.”

A faint grateful smile came upon his face, the faintest, almost imperceptible, pressure of her hands. And then in a moment sleep came over the aged pilgrim so near the end of his career. They all stood in the silence of awe about the bed, watching, unable to believe that it was only sleep and not death. The one was almost more awful than the other would have been. That the common repose which refreshes all living things should come in the middle of dying seemed almost an unnatural break. Even love itself in such circumstances can not endure delays, and would fain push the bark of the soul out into the eternal sea. Mrs. Russell Penton sat down by the bed, holding her father’s hand still in hers. And for some time her cousin stood beside her, silent, absorbed, standing mechanically with his eyes fixed upon the still face on the pillow. Edward Penton was scarcely sensible of what was passing round him. It seemed all to be going on in a dream, in which he saw and heard plainly enough, yet attached little meaning to anything that occurred. He had come to conclude his bargain, touched, deeply touched by the condition of his old relation, his former protector and friend, but yet more occupied by the importance of the event to himself and to his wife and children, who were nearer to him still. But when he had entered the sick-room he had stepped into a dream—everything had changed. His business had sunk away, as it were, into the chaos of abortive projects. Nothing was required of him except to stand and look on reverently while the shadows of death gathered. His heart was deeply touched; it had seemed to him natural, only natural and fitting that he should stand by Alicia at this solemn moment. He was the nearest of her kin; he was the oldest of her friends; he had loved her in his time; even now there were no two people in the world who had the same hold upon his imagination and his memories as these two, the father and daughter. It was his right to be here more than Russell Penton’s; nearer than anyone else living he had a right to stand by her, to give her the support of an affection as old and almost as natural as her own. Though he had not seen Sir Walter for years, there was no one so nearly Sir Walter’s son as he. What was said about the boy perplexed him, almost made him impatient. The boy—what boy? He did not understand. He himself was the last of the three boys, the survivor, whose surviving had seemed a wound and injury, but which yet gave him rights which no one in the world, no one else could ever have as he.

The entrance of the doctor, who came in softly, and looked, with the gravity which dying commands from all, upon the sleeper, disturbed the group. The gentlemen withdrew to leave him free for his examination, and for the whispered directions which were necessary, carrying away the writing-table with all its useless arrangements. When he left the bedside they surrounded him with questions. Was it possible that there might be a period of revived strength? was it likely that he could attend to business still? Important business remained to be settled. The doctor shook his head. He gave them certain low-toned explanations which for the moment seemed to make everything clear, but in reality left them as little informed as ever; and, on the other hand, gave them a little lecture upon the folly of postponing business to such a moment. “A man of Sir Walter’s age, and in his state of health, could never be calculated upon,” he said. “I hope the business is not vital. To leave wills or settlements to the last is the greatest folly.” A statement of this kind, superfluous and absolute, is at all times so much easier to give than a little enlightment upon the immediate case. But how could the doctor tell any more than any spectator whether the old man would wake from that sleep to an interval of clearness and consciousness, or whether he would dream away the few remaining moments that lay between him and the end of his career?

And then stillness fell upon them all, a period of utter quiet, of that waiting for death which is intolerable to the living. Alicia sat by her father’s bedside alone, still holding his hand, watching his sleep, feeling nothing but the arrest of all things, the suspension of thought itself. The three men had withdrawn to the anteroom, where they waited for any movement or call. Rochford, who had no reason for any profounder feeling than that of respectful sympathy, drew near the fire in the shivering chill of the gray winter morning, and after awhile dozed and dreamed of the ball, with all its music and lights. Russell Penton seated himself close to the door, where he could see his wife at her father’s bedside. Her head was turned from him, but yet it was giving her the support of his presence to be there. Edward Penton was the only one who could not rest. He went to the window and gazed out blankly upon the cold misty morning light, now as full day as it was likely to be. All was whiteness upon the wide stretch of the landscape, the river milky and turbid under the featureless whitish vapor that covered the sky, mist hanging about the ghostly trees, cold, damp, and penetrating, stealing to the heart; within, the fire burned dimly, the lights had been put out, though from the door of Sir Walter’s room still came a stream of candle-light shining unnaturally in the gray pale suffusion of the day. Mr. Penton wandered from the window to the fire, then stood behind Russell Penton’s chair, and gazed into the hushed room where one lay dying and the other watching. He thought nothing about his business which was so strange; he had not yet awakened to the sense of those wandering injunctions about the boy. He was troubled, sad, confused in his soul, only conscious of the close neighborhood of death, and that all somehow had fallen back into a kind of chaos out of which there seemed no apparent way.

None of them knew how long the time was. It was endless, intolerable, an awful pause in their own living, in which everything was arrested, even thought. For what could the thoughts do whirling vainly about a subject on which there could be no enlightenment, beating as it were against a blank wall all round and round? In reality it was not quite an hour when Alicia rose from the bedside and made a sign to her husband. Sir Walter’s voice broke again into the silence, eager, quick, startling, “Eh! eh! What—what is it? What’s to do? What’s to do?”

They hurried in one after another, young Rochford waking up with the air of the last waltz still in his ear, hastening to the table, where all the papers were still laid out. Sir Walter had struggled up upon his bed and sat gazing out upon them, holding his daughter fast, who had hastily drawn one of his arms over her shoulder by way of support. He looked like an old prophet, with his heavy eyelids raised, his white locks streaming. “What is—to do? What am I to do—before I die?—before I—”

Rochford came forward with his deed, with the pen in his hand. “It is only a signature,” he said. “Sir Walter, your signature—here—it is all simple; your name, that is all.”