“I get what you’re driving at. I guess I can fix it.”
RoBards explained: “You see, the blow of his death is enough for his poor wife and my poor wife, and the—the disgrace would be too much for them to bear.”
This did not please the doctor so well:
“Disgrace, did you say? Well, I suppose it would be, in the eyes of the damned fools that folks are. But I say the old man did the brave thing—the right thing. He died like a Roman. But it’s the fashion to call such courage cowardice or crime, so I’ll fix it up. Down in the city now, the undertakers have blank certificates already signed by the doctors so the undertakers can fill in the favorite form of death—anything their customers ask for. We ought to do as well up here. All the modern conveniences!”
His sardonic cackle made RoBards shudder, but when the harsh brute stood by the bedside and by laying on of hands verified the permanent retirement of the old merchant he spoke with a strange gentleness:
“It was heart failure, Mrs. Jessamine. Your husband had strained his heart by overwork and overanxiety for you. His big heart just broke. That bottle had nothin’ to do with it.” He sniffed it again. “It’s only an adulteration anyway. You can’t even buy honest poison nowadays. That’s just bitters and water—wouldn’t harm a fly. Grand old man, Mr. Jessamine. They don’t make merchants like him any more. It wa’n’t his fault he wa’n’t the biggest man in New York. He fought hard and died like a soldier. And now you get some sleep or I’ll give you some real sleeping drops.”
He began to bluster again and they were grateful to be bullied. RoBards regarded him with awe, this great strong man breaking the withes of truth for the rescue of others.
Dr. Matson made out a certificate of heart failure, and nobody questioned it. When Dr. Chirnside came up to preach the funeral sermon, he said that the Lord had called a good man home to well-earned rest. This old preacher was better than his creed. He would have lied, too, if he had known the truth; for human sympathy is so much more divine than the acrid theologies men concoct, that he would have told the sweetest falsehoods he could frame above the white body of his parishioner, for the sake of the aching hearts that still lived.
And this is the saving grace and glory of humanity at its best: that in a crisis of agony it proves false to the false gods and inhuman creeds it has invented in colder moods.