He was back in an incredibly short space of time.
“I saw your mother,” Jerome reported. (Great heavens! in her poke-berry homespun, without a doubt!) “Your father is quite sick, but not dangerously so. He only fancied seeing you, but can wait until to-morrow.”
While the old man waited, Mell had her pretty face photographed for Rube.
He drove her home in the buggy the next morning. Coming in sight of the quiet and shade of the old farm-house and recalling, as a forgotten dream, its honest industry, its homely manners, its sweet simplicity, Mell marvelled at her own sensations. Could it be gladness, this feeling that swept over her at sight of the old home? Yes, it was gladness. Perplexed in mind, heavy at heart, and fretted to the lowest depths of her soul by this struggle within her, which seemed to be never ending, Mell was glad to get back into the quietude of the old farm house after the continuous strain and excitement of the past few weeks. The flowers in the little garden stirred gently in the breeze; there was a gleam of blue sky above the low roof; birds chirped softly in 306 the euonymus hedge under the window of her own little room, and the tranquillity and serenity and staidness of the spot soothed her feverish mind and calmed her feverish spirit. It was lonely, desolate, mean, and poor, but none the less a refuge from the storms of a higher region; from the weariness of pleasure and the burden of empty enjoyment; from the tiresomeness of being amused, and the troublesomeness of seeming to be amused without being; from an ecstasy of suffering and an agony of transport; in short, a hoped-for refuge from herself and Jerome.
“Hurry up, Mell! Hurry up! He’s mos’ gone!”
“What, mother! You don’t mean—?”
“Yes, I does, Mell. He was tuck wuss in the night. He won’t know ye, I’m ’fraid.”
But he did, and opening his eyes he smiled faintly, as she hung over his ugly face—uglier now, after the ravages of disease, than ever before; dried up by scorching fevers to a semblance of those parched-up things we see in archæological museums; deeply lined and seamed and furrowed, as if old Time had never had any other occupation since he was a boy but to make marks upon it; uglier than ever, but with an expression upon it which had never been there before—that solemn dignity which Death gives to the homeliest features.
“Father! father!” sobbed Mell, “don’t die! Don’t leave your little Mell! Don’t leave me now, when I’ve just begun to love you as I ought!”
Ha, Mell! Just begun! He has reached a good old age, and you are a woman grown, and you have just begun to love your father! It is too late, Mell. He does not need your love now. He is trying to tell you that, or something else. Put your ear a little closer.