I was sitting beside her in the afternoon, trying to be cheerful, trying to cheer her with those futile subterfuges we are forced to, trying to get it all clear in my own troubled mind, when she smiled whimsically at me and begged me to spare myself such pain.
"A nurse is the last person to need such talk, dear Mr. Jerrolds," she whispered to me, and as the good deaconess who had been her first helper in her chosen work burst into tears and stumbled from the room, she put out her hand and I took it silently.
"What you have been--what you have been, Harriet!" I muttered unsteadily, and then her eyes met mine.
"What have I been?" her lips barely formed the words, "do you know?"
There in her soft brown eyes I saw at last--at once. God knows I never guessed before. They met mine so calmly, so honestly, so fearlessly--alas, they could be fearless now!
"And I have been such a fool--such a brute!"
"Hush! you never knew," she whispered, "you could not help it, my dear. It was so from the very first--when you saw my diary."
"O no," she said quietly, "there was no chance for me, of course. I never dreamed of it, my dear. But--but I wanted you to know it. There has never been anybody but you."
I tried to speak, but could not, and again, but the words dried on my lips. Then I saw that she was sleeping--from exhaustion, probably, and sat by her in silence till the deaconess came back, red-eyed, and sent me away. I bent over her and kissed her cheek, before I left, and I am sure that her lips moved and that the hand I had held while she slept pressed mine faintly. But she did not open her eyes, and in the morning the message came that she had drifted easily away, in that same sleep before dawn.
Gone--and I never knew, never faintly surmised, never considered!
Gone--and there had never been anybody but me!
Ah, Peggy, there had need be _Someone_ that knows, to make good the pity of it, the cruelty of it, the senseless waste of it!
But we three, whom she gave so generously to each other, whom, in turn, she tended back to life, into whose lives she has grown as a tree grows, can we call her love wasted?
Nor is it among us alone that her memory flourishes. No woman in all those mountain parishes she loved so well faces her dark hour of travail without blessing her name and the name of her messengers, whom, in the endowment called in memorial of her, Margarita sends to them, to tend them and the children they bear, as Harriet helped her and hers. She lies among them, a stone's throw from the corner-stone she laid nearly twenty years ago, now, and many visitors have never seen the tablet that lies along her grave--so thick the flowers are always lying there.