It comes from the churchyard.
Mamma sent it to you with her love."
The doctor, deeply touched, sat up suddenly, grasped the child's hand
that held out the rose to him and tried to draw the boy towards him in
order to embrace him. But Zeno, instead of answering the loving words
addressed to him, struggled and cried out sharply, for the strong
pressure of his father's hand had driven a big thorn into his finger,
and the blood from the wound was running down onto his light blue dress.
The doctor was distracted. He had hurt the one creature for whose future
greatness he had sacrificed his waning strength.
There flowed the blood of his son who had come as messenger from his wife
On her he had lavished the one great love of his life and the white rose
that she had sent him lay at his feet!
As his gaze fell upon the flower that she had loved better than all
others, and then rested upon the crying child, a great tenderness filled
his soul and for the first time he felt deep remorse that he had not
dedicated his whole life to his love. To devote the remainder of his
time on earth, which he felt would be but short, to the child who stood
there crying, seemed to him at that moment his holiest duty; yet the
passion of the investigator within him could not be subdued, for as he
looked about in search of a cloth to stanch the blood that flowed from
the boy's finger his eyes fell upon the bottle of elixir on the table,
and then on the rose at his feet and the thought flashed across him that
Bianca who had sent him the rose might have indicated to him by the hand
of their offspring the substance which he needed to achieve the object of
his life.
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