She woke suddenly. Her eyes were fixed upon him. She had a flash of lucidity. She was dying, and her dying made her supremely important to Clement Fanner.
“Not yet. I think I’m afraid. Make me not afraid.”
He rose and lit the two candles on the altar. He took down the crucifix from the wall and stood it against the foot-rail of the bed.
She sighed. That was not what she had wanted.
“I’m not afraid of the hereafter. I suppose you get used to it. Only it may be terrible just at first.”
“Our first state will depend very much on what we are thinking of at our last hour.”
“And after it you will receive the Sacrament. Then you will have your mind fixed firmly upon God and your Redeemer.... Do you feel able to make your confession now, Sister? Everything is ready.”
Her mind went back over her past and found Oscar Wade there. She wondered: Should she confess to him about Oscar Wade? One moment she thought it was possible; the next she knew that she couldn’t. She could not. It wasn’t necessary. For twenty years he had not been part of her life. No. She wouldn’t confess about Oscar Wade. She had been guilty of other sins.
“I have cared too much for the beauty of this world.... I have failed in charity to my poor girls. Because of my intense repugnance to their sin.... I have thought, often, about—people I love, when I should have been thinking about God.”
“Now,” he said, “there is nothing to be afraid of.”
“I won’t be afraid if—if you would hold my hand.”
He held it. And she lay still a long time, with her eyes shut. Then he heard her murmuring something. He stooped close.
“This—is—dying. I thought it would be horrible. And it’s bliss.... Bliss.”
The priest’s hand slackened, as if at the bidding of some wonder. She gave a weak cry.
“Try,” he said, “to think about God. Keep on looking at the crucifix.”
“If I look,” she whispered, “you won’t let go my hand?”
He held it till it was wrenched from him in the last agony.
She lingered for some hours in the room where these things had happened.
Its aspect was familiar and yet unfamiliar, and slightly repugnant to her. The altar, the crucifix, the lighted candles, suggested some tremendous and awful experience the details of which she was not able to recall. She seemed to remember that they had been connected in some way with the sheeted body on the bed; but the nature of the connection was not clear; and she did not associate the dead body with herself. When the nurse came in and laid it out, she saw that it was the body of a middle-aged woman. Her own living body was that of a young woman of about thirty-two.