“Promise,” she repeated, and the tone brought back the memory of her prayers that morning. “I am dying—dying; and yet I cannot die. Night and day I prayed it: ‘Gain thyself that soul, my Jesus. By thy Cross, thy Mother, thy broken Heart, gain thyself that soul.’ I prayed and prayed it; I am worn out with the praying, and yet I cannot die. Promise me to be there.”
The sweat stood on his forehead in great drops. “You do not know what you ask,” he cried. “There are sins enough upon me without adding that of a broken vow to you, and here. There is no saving a soul like mine.”
She did not answer him. She lifted up her eyes, away from him, away from earth, to God.
“Sacred Heart of my Jesus,” she prayed in agony, “win this soul, and let me die.”
For weeks he had kept himself sober and decent for her sake; now he had thought to rush out from her presence, to drown his grief in viler sin than ever; and, lo! she was still holding him, was binding eternal chains upon him, to draw him away from corruption unto God. As a physician he knew that it was a case where a mighty will alone was keeping life in a body nearly dead; it would have been an awful sight to see, even had he had no interest in it. She was living only to win him unto immortal life. Angels and devils may well have stood still before that struggle, where one
dauntless soul at the point of death held Satan’s power at bay.
“I promise,” he said at last, as if the words were wrung from him. “But pray for me always.”
“The Mother of God prays for you,” she said with strange emphasis. “Call upon Jesus and Mary night and day. You will not need me.”
And then he saw that she needed him no longer, thought of him no longer, and he went away.
Reuben Armstrong shut and locked the door behind him. There was no more that science or skill could do. Now, for one brief hour, Esther was his alone. The eyes which the Doctor had seen grow dim to him lit up with untired affection as Reuben drew near the bed; a look of rest came over her, and she signed to him to lay her baby on her arm.