we ever going to face this fearful and croo-el winter? It’ll cost a thousand dollars before we’re through burying him, and I don’t know where the money’s to come from.” He wept affectedly with sniffling sobs.
“Hush! hush!” cried Helen, rushing at him. In her furious anger, she seized him and shook him. “You damned old man you, I could kill you! How dare you talk like that when your son’s dying? I’ve wasted six years of my life nursing you, and you’ll be the last one to go!” In her blazing anger, she turned accusingly on Eliza:
“You’ve done this to him. You’re the one that’s responsible. If you hadn’t pinched every penny he’d never have been like this. Yes, and Ben would be here, too!” She panted for breath for a moment. Eliza made no answer. She did not hear her.
“After this, I’m through! I’ve been looking for you to die—and Ben’s the one who has to go.” Her voice rose to a scream of exasperation. She shook Gant again. “Never again! Do you hear that, you selfish old man? You’ve had everything—Ben’s had nothing. And now he’s the one to go. I hate you!”
“Helen! Helen!” said Bessie Gant quietly. “Remember where you are.”
“Yes, that means a lot to us,” Eugene muttered bitterly.
Then, over the ugly clamor of their dissension, over the rasp and snarl of their nerves, they heard the low mutter of Ben’s expiring breath. The light had been re-shaded: he lay, like his own shadow, in all his fierce gray lonely beauty. And as they looked and saw his bright eyes already blurred with death, and saw the feeble beating flutter of his poor thin breast, the strange wonder, the dark rich miracle of his life surged over them its enormous loveliness. They grew quiet and calm, they plunged below all the splintered wreckage of their lives, they drew together in a superb communion of love and valiance, beyond horror and confusion, beyond death.
And Eugene’s eyes grew blind with love and wonder: an enormous organ-music sounded in his heart, he possessed them for a moment, he was a part of their loveliness, his life soared magnificently out of the slough and pain and ugliness. He thought:
“That was not all! That really was not all!”
