“It was heart failure, Mrs. Jessamine. Your husband had strained his heart by overwork and overanxiety for you. His big heart just broke. That bottle had nothin’ to do with it.” He sniffed it again. “It’s only an adulteration anyway. You can’t even buy honest poison nowadays. That’s just bitters and water—wouldn’t harm a fly. Grand old man, Mr. Jessamine. They don’t make merchants like him any more. It wa’n’t his fault he wa’n’t the biggest man in New York. He fought hard and died like a soldier. And now you get some sleep or I’ll give you some real sleeping drops.” He began to bluster again and they were grateful to be bullied. RoBards regarded him with awe, this great strong man breaking the withes of truth for the rescue of others. Dr. Matson made out a certificate of heart failure, and nobody questioned it. When Dr. Chirnside came up to preach the funeral sermon, he said that the Lord had called a good man home to well-earned rest. This old preacher was better than his creed. He would have lied, too, if he had known the truth; for human sympathy is so much more divine than the acrid theologies men concoct, that he would have told the sweetest falsehoods he could frame above the white body of his parishioner, for the sake of the aching hearts that still lived. And this is the saving grace and glory of humanity at its best: that in a crisis of agony it proves false to the false gods and inhuman creeds it has invented in colder moods. CHAPTER XXX The old man joined his two little grandchildren in the cluster of young tulip trees, and RoBards later built a fence about the knoll to make it sacred ground. The New York papers published encomiums upon Mr. Jessamine and called him one of the merchant princes who had made New York the metropolis of the New World. A stranger reading them would have imagined him a giant striding through a great long day to a rich sunset. But RoBards remembered him as one whose toil had been rewarded with unmerited burlesque. And for nights and nights afterward he was wakened by Patty strangling with sobs: “Poor papa! I was so mean to him. The last word he had from me was a scolding. He was afraid of life like a baby in the dark. Poor little papa! I was so mean to you! and you asked me to forgive you!”