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At a whispered call we turned, and Senda, in the door, herself all tears, made eager signs for us to come. The last summons had surprised even the dying. We went in noiseless haste, and found her just relaxing on Senda’s arm. Yet she revived an instant; a quiver went through her frame like the dying shudder of a butterfly, her eyes gazed appealingly into Senda’s, then fixed, and our poor little Titania was gone.

XXIII

The story is nearly told. Before I close let me confess how heartlessly I have told it. Pardon that; and pardon, too, the self-consciousness that makes me beg not to be remembered as I seem to myself in the tale–a tiptoeing, peeping figure prowling by night after undue revelations, and using them–to the humiliation of souls cleaner than mine could ever pretend to be.

Next day, by stealth again, we buried the little rose-lady, unknown to her husband. We could not keep the fact long from the entomologist, for he was up and about the house again. Nor was there equal need. So when the last rites were over I told him, but without giving any part of her message–I couldn’t do it! I just said she had left us.

His eye did not moisten, but he paled, trembled, wiped his brow. Then I handed him the crushed moth, and he was his convalescent self again.

“Hmm!–Dot iss a pity she kit smashed; I titn’t vant to do dot.”

I thought maybe he felt more than he showed, for he fretted to be allowed to take a walk alone beyond the gate and the corner. With some misgivings his wife let him go, and when she was almost anxious enough over his tardy stay to start after him he came back looking very much better. But the next morning, when we found him in the burning fever of an unmistakable relapse, he confessed that the German keeper of an eating-stall in the neighboring market, for his hunger’s and the Fatherland’s sake, had treated him to his “whole pifshtea-ak undt glahss be-eh.”

He lived only a few days. Through all his deliriums he hunted butterflies and beetles, and died insensible to his wife’s endearments, repeating the Latin conjugations of his inconceivable boyhood.

So they both, caterpillar and rose, were gone; but the memory of them stays, green–yes, and fragrant–not alone with Fontenette, and not only with Senda besides, but with us also. How often I recall the talks on theology I had used sometimes to let myself fall into with the little unsuccessful mistress of “rose-es” who first brought the miser of knowledge into our garden, and whenever I do so I wonder, and wonder, and lose my bearings and find and lose them again, and wonder and wonder–what God has done with the entomologist.

We never had to tell Fontenette that he was widowed. We had only to be long enough silent, and when he ceased, for a time, to get better, and rather lost the strength he had been gaining, and on entering his room we found him always with his face to the wall, we saw that he knew. So for his sake I was glad when one day, without facing round to me, his hand tightened on mine in a wild tremor and he groaned, “Tell it me–tell it.”

I told it. I thought it well to give him one of her messages and withhold the rest, like the unscrupulous friend I always try to be; and when he had heard quite through–“Tell him I died loving him and blessing him for the unearned glorious love he gave me all our days”–he made as if to say the word was beyond all his deserving, turned upon his face, and soaked the pillow with his tears. But from that day he began slowly but steadily to get well.

We kept Senda with us as long as we could, and when at length she put her foot down so that you might have heard it–say like the dropping of a nut in the wood–and declared that go she must-must-must! we first laughed, then scoffed, and then grew violent, and the battle forced her backward. But when we tried to salary her to stay, she laughed, scoffed, grew violent, and retook her entrenchments. And then, when she offered the ultimatum that we must take pay for keeping her, we took our turn again at the three forms of demonstration, and a late moon rose upon a drawn battle. Since then we have learned to count it one of our dearest rights to get “put out” at Senda’s outrageous reasonableness, but she doesn’t fret, for “sare is neveh any sundeh viss se lightening.”