“It was the way he thought, Babs.”
“Then he might have spared me this!,” Barbara broke out. “Just one word!”
As her head fell forward, I knelt down and chafed her hands.
“He may have been too weak,” I said.
“A message, then! I can’t bear it! I didn’t think he could be so cruel.”
In furious self-scorn, I remembered telling O’Rane I could not pretend for five minutes that I had not received Eric’s letter. Very little more than five minutes had passed since Barbara and I met.
“In justice to him,” I said, “there was a message. I was paraphrasing it. He never dreamt you needed his forgiveness, he was begging for yours. He loved you as much at the end as he’d ever done. His last words—so faint I could hardly read them!—were ‘God bless you’. And we must assume that he died at peace. You’d forgiven him so often, he said, that, if God was disposed to judge him, he believed you would intercede.”
In her agony of spirit, Barbara’s thoughts were reflected as clearly as if she had spoken them. Her eyes lightened for a moment in unutterable relief; they clouded as she looked suspiciously to see if I was inventing this opportune comfort; then she stared through me and past me to Eric’s death-bed six thousand miles away.
“He . . . wrote to you?,” she enquired after a long silence.
I half nodded; but, with Barbara’s eyes on mine, I could not put a lie into words.