Matthew opened his eyes and met his son's gaze wistfully.
“Don't we all? If the stainless like you suffer, what of us poor sinners who struggle towards the light! Think of the agony of that pure and delicate soul who bore you, my son. Pray for all poor souls, Syl.”
His voice had grown singularly faint. The tears leaped to Sylvester's eyes. He tried to speak, but his throat was clogged with unaccustomed sobs. With instinctive ashamedness he buried his face in the pillow next to his father, still holding his hand. He lay there a long time, his heart aching with the returning love as a limb to which the tourniquet has been applied aches with the returning blood. Once the old man whispered a prayer for the son's forgiveness, and when Sylvester pressed his hand, relapsed into his half-sleep as if reassured. Time went by. Presently Sylvester heard him murmuring in a scarcely audible voice. Gradually the sense of the words came to him. The old man was repeating scraps of verse:--
Mais priez Dieu que tous nous vueille absouldre!”
There was a great pathos in the broad English accent with which he murmured the old French words, and for the first time in all his life Sylvester understood them. He raised his head and saw his father's lips moving dumbly. After a little the voice came again, broken and faint, and only by a word here and there could he gather the meaning. It was from Swinburne's “Garden of Proserpine:”
He repeated the couplet two or three times. He had never been a great reader of poetry, but of some half-dozen poems he was particularly fond, and had made them his own, and had woven them into the texture of his life. Among them were such dissimilar things as Villon's “Ballade,” Macaulay's “Battle of Ivry,” Tennyson's “Brook,” “The Ancient Mariner,” and Sylvester had often smiled indulgently at this little anthology, his father's simple spiritual equipment. Especially had he wondered at his assimilation of this poem of Swinburne's, so remote in feeling from his steadfast outlook upon life, and his intolerance of cowardly shrinking from its responsibilities.
But now he comprehended that his father was a weary, weary man, and that one of the most beautiful of all utterances to the weary man's heart had brought him comfort.