第67章

FEB.14.-Father has not been so well of late.It seems as if he kept up until he was relieved about those debts, and then sunk down.Iread to him a good deal, and so does mother, but his mind is still dark, and he looks forward to the hour of death with painful misgivings.He is getting a little childish about my leaving him, and clings to me exactly as if I were his own child.Martha spends a good deal of time with him, and fusses over him in a way that I wonder she does not see is annoying to him.He wants to be read to, to hear a hymn sung or a verse repeated, and to be left otherwise in perfect quiet.But she is continually pulling out and shaking up his pillows, bathing his head in hot vinegar and soaking his feet.It looks so odd to see her in one of the elegant silk dresses old.Mr.Underhill makes her wear, with her sleeves rolled up, the skirt hid away under a large apron, rubbing away at poor father till it seems as if his tired soul would fly out of him.

FEB.20.-Father grows weaker every day.Ernest has sent for his other children, John and Helen.Martha is no longer able to come here; her husband is very sick with a fever, and cannot be left alone.No doubt he enjoys her bustling way of nursing, and likes to have his pillows pushed from under him every five minutes.I am afraid I feel glad that she is kept away, and that I have father all to myself.Ernest never was so fond of me as he is now.I don't know what to make of it.

FEB 22.-John and his wife and Helen have come.They stay at Martha's, where there is plenty of room.John's wife is a little soft dumpling thing, and looks up to him as a mouse would up at a steeple.He strikes me as a very selfish man.He steers straight for the best seat, leaving her standing, if need be, accepts her humble attentions with the air of one collecting his just debt and is continually snubbing and setting her right.Yet in some things he is very like Ernest, and perhaps a wife destitute of self-assertion and without much individuality would have spoiled him as Harriet has spoiled John.For I think it must be partly her fault that he dares to be so egotistical.Helen, is the dearest, prettiest creature I ever saw.

Oh, why would James take a fancy to Lucy! I feel the new delight of having a sister to love and to admire.And she will love me in time;I feel sure of it.

MARCH 1.-Father is very feeble and in great mental distress.He gropes about in the dark, and shudders at the approach of death.We can do nothing but pray for him.And the cloud will be lifted when he leaves this world, if not before.For I know he is a good, yes, a saintly man, dear to and dear to Christ.

MARCH 4.-Dear father has gone.We were all kneeling and praying and weeping around him, when suddenly he called me to come to him.I went and let him lean his head on my breast, as he loved to do.Sometimes I have stood so by the hour together ready to sink with fatigue, and only kept up with the thought that if this were my own precious father's bruised head I could stand and hold it forever.

"Daughter Katherine," he said, in his faint, tremulous way, "you have come with me to the very brink of the river.I thank God for all your cheering words and ways.I thank God for giving you to be a helpmeet to my son.Farewell, now," he added, in a low, firm voice, "I feel the bottom, and it is good!"He lay back on his pillow looking upward with an expression of seraphic peace and joy on his worn, meagre face, and so his life passed gently away.

Oh, the affluence of God's payments! What a recompense for the poor love I had given my husband's father, and the poor little services Ihad rendered him! Oh, that I had never been impatient with him, never smiled at his peculiarities, never in my secret heart felt him unwelcome to my home! And how wholly I overlooked, in my blind selfishness, what he must have suffered in feeling himself, homeless, dwelling with us on sufferance, but master and head nowhere on earth!

May God carry the lessons home to my heart of hearts, and make the cloud of mingled remorse and shame which now envelops me to descend in showers of love and benediction on every human soul that mine can bless!