“Dear Heart [it ran],—Judith, your sister, will have told you all; how we two have come together and how she has helped me. I had dreamed of noble women in the past, and now I have found one of my own flesh and blood and crown and all. Judith is wonderful; were she a queen, I could die for her as easily as I could fall asleep.
“Of my father I need write nothing, save that he is dead.
“Oh, my own, I stretch out my arms to you, and my heart is full. Yet must I stay here in exile, even as you must wait for what God shall give to us. I have great joy and faith in Judith, for like an angel she seems to press the clouds back from the world.
“Gabriel, good-night. There is a spirit in me that bids me hope.”
The man sat a long while in the silent room, while the night came down and the gloom increased. Out of the dusk, under the shadow of fruit-trees, within beck of a red rose, Gabriel beheld two women standing, fair women whose faces seemed to cleanse the world. Horror and despair seemed to faint away like black waters ebbing from before their feet. For in either hand there was a lamp, golden-tongued and stately, Faith out of Heaven.
The singing had ceased in the room below, and over the myriad roofs rose the solemn arch of the moon. Gabriel watched it climb the sky, till it seemed to hang like a mighty halo behind the iron cross of a church.
XLII
THEY buried Zeus Gildersedge in Saltire churchyard, Mr. Mince officiating, bleating through the burial service with his usual sentimental unction.
“Earth to earth, and dust to dust.”
Good gold also to the greedy, and the dead man’s store consecrated to strangers and to hirelings. Thus Zeus Gildersedge, who had never given a penny away gladly in his life, went to his last resting-place, and, Lazarus-like, lay in Charity’s bosom, while his child was barred out from before the gates of “the worthy.”