“What! Oh, yes, yes, go on boy. What was it you were saying?” His father roused himself to listen.
“She made me promise to tell you my lesson.”
“Yes! Go on!”
“About the seventy times seven, you remember.”
“Seventy times seven?” The man was broad awake.
“Yes, you know, seventy times seven in one day. That’s four hundred and ninety times in one day we must forgive. And she said, ‘Be sure, be very sure to tell Daddy that.’ She said you would be awful glad to hear that. Why, Daddy? And she said it was the lesson she loved best in all the Bible. I don’t think so, do you Daddy?”
“Seventy times seven! She said that. Oh, my God, my God! Seventy times seven! Seventy times seven!” Convulsive, mighty sobs shook his great body. The boy was terrified, too terrified to speak. His father’s eyes fell upon the stained bit of paper, lying where it had fallen from his fingers. Shuddering, he picked it up. There in poor wandering letters he read:
“My dear, dear love—I want you so—oh—I want you so. I want to ask you to forgive—to tell you—oh, I want you—with me—now—dear heart——” Then one desperate trailing scrawl as if death were clutching at her fingers. “Remember—70 X 7——” Then a poor faltering “X” and the marks of blood. “She pit her dyin’ lips till it,” old Jinny had said.
With an agonising cry he put the boy from him, scrambled up the steps, staggered through the living room, felt his way blindly into the bedroom where she lay. One glance he gave at the white still face touched with the calm dignity of death. Then with a bitter cry he fell on his knees at the bedside, gathered the quiet form in his arms, and there drank slowly, drop by drop, to the last dregs, the cup of his Gethsemane.
Terrified, petrified with his terror, his little son stood behind him, his limbs shaking under him, impotent of motion, desperately longing but unable to escape from the room, till at length, overcome by the tumultuous tide of his emotions, with a sobbing cry, “Oh, Daddy, I’m afraid,” he flung himself on his knees at his father’s side and there clung to him.