"Yes, Mounchere, yes, I understand,"—sopping his face and bald head with his handkerchief. "My good men, had you not better go out a moment? We need air here. He only meant," gently, when they were gone, "that she is at rest; our pain cannot pain her now."
"When I do suffer, she will suffer with me," muttered Jacobus. "You don't know," after a pause, "how together we have been, or that you could not say. Is it that I should go back to that den in New York alone? That I live there for days,—for years? That I hunger and work as before, and she not heed nor care,—my wife? Ah! you do not know Lotty!" touching the closed white lids with an inexpressibly tender smile. "I call her 'Sharley,' when we are alone together,"—going on in his simple, monotonous fashion; "and when she sleeps the heaviest, she have never forgot to hear that name. She never will,"—looking up quietly.
"But your wife is dead now," said Lufflin, almost impatiently; "and you yourself thank God that she will never waken to her old loves and hates and fancies."
"I?" gasped Jacobus.
There was a long silence; as his old creed came back to him, the blood rushed thick and cold about his heart.
"God's world, and all His creatures," persisted Lufflin, "are foul with sin. You blessed Him that for them and it death was an eternal sleep."
"I did not remember her love for me," pleaded Jacobus, humbly. "It could not sleep. Why! you man, Lufflin," starting to his feet, and drawing up his full height, "if that could be, would I stand to look at her here? Could I live, if she were truly gone?—she, that has been strength and hope and hands for me these many years? I'm not a strong man, like—like you, Captain," with a sudden weak giving way. "God gave me Sharley. Death cannot take her away."
Lufflin took up her hand.
"So soft it used to be!" he said. "It's been hard-worked since then. It would be well for Lotty, if death were a long sleep: she needs it."
Jacobus made no reply. He sat down and held his dead in his arms; she was his own; so were those years of hard work which had worn her hands rough, and left these sharp lines in her face. He only knew what they had been: in the long silence that followed, while the daylight broadened bluer and colder about him, he lived them over again; and he knew then, by every day of griping poverty, which it wrung the clammy drops out of his face to remember,—by all her patient tenderness,—by the happiness they had hoped for, but which never came,—by the true love they had borne to each other, and to little Tom, which knew so little comfort, he knew that the recompense would come, that the end was not yet She had shaken off the hunger and the pain, and had gone into the world where only the love endured and found its comfort and its late reward. There was such a world—somewhere. He put back the grayed hair from the forehead; little Tom had such a brow,—broad, quiet, melancholy.