"
"Sophy!" Alicia's voice had an edge of awe. "This must have been his
room. I believe he died here, in this very bed. And afterward they
shut the room up; and it hasn't been opened until now."
We looked at the old bed, and seemed to see him there, trying to
raise himself, crying out so piteously upon dead Richard's name,
only to fall back a dead man himself. What had he wanted to tell, as
he lay there dying? His painted face in the library was not a bad
man's face. It was proud, stern, stubborn, bigoted; a dark, unhappy
face, but neither an evil nor a cruel one. What was it that really
lay between those two brothers? After more than a hundred years, we
were as much in the dark as they in whose day it had happened and
whose lives it had wrecked.
We built a fire in the long-disused chimney to take the dampness out
of the room, and forced open the windows to let in the good sun and
wind. Over in one corner, pushed in between the clothes-press and
the side wall, was, of all things, a prie-dieu; and upon it a dusty
Bible with his name on the fly-leaf. Nor was it a book kept for idle
show; it plainly had been read, perhaps wept over by a tortured
heart, for it fell open at that cry of all sad hearts, the
Fifty-first Psalm.
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