"Man that is born of a woman hath but a short time to live, and is full of misery. He cometh up and----"
He lost all that followed; with those final words came a new thought into his mind. The woman he had loved, for whom he had waited and hungered so patiently, was to sleep her last sleep in that quiet place, to sleep as calmly and as gently as she had lived. But there was something more than this, something to comfort him. God had, after all, been very merciful; so, in his simple mind, he told himself. The poor, frail woman was gone; in her place had come a little child. The words were true; he applied them at once to the baby. "He cometh up--like a flower." Surely that was true; his eyes brightened as he thought of it; the bitterness fell away from his heart; he almost longed to leave her sleeping there and to get back to the child. He scarcely seemed to have seen the child yet--to know what it was like.
As he crossed the churchyard to his house the thing was forced more clearly and strongly upon him; he saw, with the fine instinct of love, that this was what she would have wished, that the child must grow up to think well of her, and to take her place. A man of rare singleness of life and purpose, he had been capable only of single emotions; and those emotions must, of necessity, be great. His dogged patience in waiting for one woman through all the best years of his life had had in it much of heroism; that was ended, and he turned now to something else to fill his days. The child should do it; the child had been sent for that very purpose. Over and over again the words came back to him, "He cometh up--like a flower." That was very beautiful; it seemed strange that he had not thought of that before. He dreamed a dream, even as the woman had done, of all that the child was to be to him.
He went into the room where the scrap of humanity lay sleeping against the strange woman's breast; the woman glanced up at him almost resentfully as he bent over the child; just such another child had lain warm against her, and this one filled the void in her heart a little. She was a humble creature, of no subtle emotions whatever; her sense of motherhood, so recently awakened, was the strongest feeling in her.