His generous nature forgot, too, all anger against Fenton. To the noble
soul, death, by a reasoning which is above logic, seems to settle all
accounts. He remembered the artist's brightness, his quick sympathy,
his keen imagination, and his ready adaptability. The flippancy that
had often shocked him, the treachery to principles which he held sacred
that had wounded him, his kind memory put out of sight, as one wipes
the stains from a crystal; and in the mind of the man he had wronged,
the remembrance of Arthur Fenton remained fair and gracious, and nobler
than the nature whose monument it was.
He went to see Mrs. Fenton, but when he met her he at first could say
nothing. He stammered brokenly, tears choking his voice, holding her
hand in his, and vainly striving to put into words the sympathy he
felt. Then he stooped suddenly and kissed her hand.
"Our boys,"--he said, with awkward phrasing, but with an instinct which
reached to the ground of their deepest sympathy. "It might comfort them
a little to play together."
The widow clung with both her small hands to the large strong one which
had clasped hers; and bending down over it she burst into convulsive
sobs. He stood silent a moment, his lip trembling then with grave
kindness, he said,--
"I know how hard it is; but you have the comfort of being able to tell
the boy that his father was a genius and a noble man. Do you know that
a woman who was rescued says that your husband saved her boy, a little
lad like Caldwell. Arthur knocked down the man that was trying to rob
him of his life-preserver. The Captain told her afterward who it was."
He was perfectly sincere in what he said. It was difficult for him to
think evil of the living; of the dead it was impossible.
After he had gone, Edith took Caldwell on her knee and told him the
story. It was the brightest ray of comfort in all that sad time to be
able thus to glorify his father in the eyes of her son. The incident
dwelt in her mind, and her loving fancy added to it a hundred details
and drew from it numberless deductions with which to enrich the memory
of her dead. It came in time to be the most prominent thing in her
remembrance of her husband. It was the fact which she could recall with
the most unmixed satisfaction, which needed no evasions, no mental
reservations, no warpings of belief, to appear wholly noble. In the
light of this deed, the impulse of a moment, Fenton stood in her memory
as a hero; and in viewing him thus, she was able to lose sight of
everything which she must forgive, of everything which she wished to
forget.
Edith was happily spared the harassing complications of financial
difficulty which it had seemed must inevitably result from the
condition in which her husband's affairs were left.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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