“Ah! Nannie,” replied poor Grace; “my father won't die of the gallows; but he will of a broken heart.”
“Better to be hanged,” said the maniac, whose reason, after a lapse of more than a year, was in some degree returning, precisely as life was ebbing out, “bekase, thank God, there's then an end to it.”
“I agree with you, Nannie, it might be only a long life of suffering; but I wouldn't wish to see my father hanged.”
“Do you know,” said Nannie, relapsing into a deeper mood of her mania,—“do you know that when I saw my father last he wouldn't nor didn't spake to me? The house was filled with people, and my little brother Frank—why now isn't it strange that I feel somehow as if I will never wash his face again nor comb his white head in order to prepare him for mass?—but whisper, Grace, sure then I was innocent and had not met the destroyer.”
The two unhappy girls looked at each other, and if ever there was a gaze calculated to wring the human heart with anguish and with pity, it was that gaze. Both of them were, although unconsciously, on the very eve of dissolution, and it would seem as if a kind of presentiment of death had seized upon both at the same time.
“Nannie,” said Grace, “do you know that I'm afeard we're both goin' to die?”
“And why are you afeard of it?” asked Nannie. “Many a time I would 'a given the world to die.”
“Why,” replied Grace, who saw the deep shadows of death upon her wild, pale, but still beautiful countenance,—“why Nannie, you have your wish—you are dying this moment.”
Just as Grace spoke the unfortunate girl seemed as if she had been stricken by a spasm of the heart. She gave a slight start—turned up her beautiful, but melancholy eyes to heaven, and exclaimed, as if conscious of the moment that had come,—
“Forgive me, O God!” after which she laid herself calmly down by the side of Grace and expired. Grace, by an effort, put her hand out and felt her heart, but there was no pulsation there—it did not beat, and she saw by the utter lifelessness of her features that she was dead, and had been relieved at last from all her sorrows.