One Way of Love (Lee)/Chapter 15
XV.
Derring found Seth watching for his coming, and saw at a glance that he was very ill. Even a less practised eye could not have mistaken the signs. The hands that lay outside the faded patchwork cover were yellow and wrinkled; the veins stood out, a network of cords, across the backs. They were the hands of an old man. Richard noted their feebleness as they closed eagerly around his own strong, firm fingers. Seth seemed to him to have aged twenty years since he saw him last.
“I am glad you have come, Dick. I was afraid you would not get here. I wanted to see you again. My life has been a failure. It's hard to say that when you come to die,” he rambled on. “Yours won't be a failure, Dick. And I helped to make it. I thought perhaps I should die easier if I could look at you again and see something that I had helped to do in the world.”
After this first greeting he said no more of the comfort of Richard's presence. But it was evident in the glance of his eyes as they followed the young man about the room and in his restlessness when Richard was absent for a time.
Richard saw that his place was here as long as Seth needed him, and he quietly made arrangements to stay for an indefinite time. He established himself as caretaker and nurse. Young as he was, his experience of life had been deep enough for him to understand that it is not often that one man can do for another what his mere presence did for Seth.
The old man did not speak again of himself or of approaching death. But he questioned Richard eagerly about his work and the life he led. Every detail of it interested him. It was as if he were listening to the story of what his own life might have been. And Richard, understanding by a subtle sympathy what it meant to him, gave a minute account of the office and the men, the hurry and rush of the city, and the haste and true hospitality of the social life.
A stranger looking into the room would not have guessed that it was soon to be the chamber of death. Laughter often interrupted the recital. Richard had often fancied that when he came to die he should not want the humor of life taken from him. And the account of his Chicago life was not dehumorized for a dying man. Seth, listening, seemed to gain a quiet strength of soul as his physical strength failed.
The story of Helen and his love for her was too closely interwoven with the life of the year to be omitted, even had Richard cared to do so. Little by little he had told it all. Seth listened eagerly and questioned Dick closely. He made him describe her minutely—her personal appearance, her characteristics, her likes and dislikes, her work—everything that concerned her. As Richard talked of her, the older man would watch his face—seeking something. Then a smile of content would cross his face and he would close his eyes as if asleep. But when Richard stopped he would say, “I'm listening.”
One day when they had been talking of her he asked Richard to open a leather trunk that stood at the foot of the bed and hand him a box that he would find there.
As he lifted the lid of the trunk the young man knew that he was looking into the grave of Seth's love. It was filled with letters and old-fashioned trifles, evidently keep-sakes. A long-wristed glove and a riding-whip lay across the top of a small box. Carefully Richard lifted it from its place and put it in Seth's hands. Then he turned away to the window and stood looking out while the old man opened it. Richard's eyes were full of tears for a love dead fifty years. But Seth's were clear and tender as he called him to his side.
“Here, Dick, I want her to have this. You must put it on her finger. Tell her it does not bind her to any promise”—for Richard had told him. “It is from me. She is a woman. She will understand that I should like her to wear it,” he mused.
It was a diamond in an old-fashioned setting, the stone large and beautifully cut. Richard held it in his hand, surprised by its beauty.
“How dared you keep anything so valuable here?”
“There was no danger. No one would look for brilliants in such a setting.” The words were marked by a quiet smile of irony and a glance at the room.
Richard's glance followed his. The bare pine floor with its one strip of carpeting, the few rough chairs, the kitchen stove at one end of the room, and the bed, with its faded quilt, at the other. No, there had been no danger. Only the rows of books, piled two and three deep on the shelves, told that the occupant of the room was other than a rough farmer. A bowl of trailing partridge-berries that Richard had brought from the woods yesterday stood on the western sill. The setting sun fell across them and they lightened the room, giving it a touch of refinement. Otherwise it was unchanged from the room in which Richard had received the Greek grammar six years ago.
Then it had been to him a plain, rough room with a certain homely comfort. Now it was the picturesque setting of a lonely life. The furniture was rough; but the roughness had artistic charm. Seth must have had, consciously or unconsciously, an artist's appreciation of the beautiful. As Richard looked about the room, his sense of the pathos of the life that was passing away here deepened to a feeling of kinship and sympathy. The long years of loneliness that were drawing to a close were his own.
It was Seth who broke the silence—low and half-musingly. “You do well to love her, Dick. And she will be worthy of it. But if she is not—you must not stop loving. Love something—someone—any- one. Never stop loving—for your soul's sake. That was my mistake. One woman refused to love me. I shut myself off from all love. That was my mistake. Mistake?” he said slowly. “I wonder if there are such things? Well, it spoiled my life. I didn't know then that the human heart must love—or die. He that would save his life must lose it—in loving.”
The twilight settled down upon the room. The old man did not speak again. He lay with half-closed eyes looking across the shining red berries to the western sky.
Richard sat quietly by his side. He did not undress or lie down. He knew, by a subtle intuition, that a guest would come before the morning, and he waited for his coming. But so gentle was his step when he came across the floor in the early dawn, that Richard only knew by a slight tremble of the thin fingers resting in his that he had come and gone, bearing with him an immortal soul.
Was it immortal? He stepped out into the cold light of the early morning. He turned to the east, where a faint flush of red was touching the gray sky. “He that would save his life must lose it—in loving,” he repeated softly.