CHAPTER I
A pale face showed behind a window in a dimly lighted room. The features were young, but sharply marked, and the eyes had a strange, far-away look. It was as if they were peering into life from within the portals of death, or as if searching into the great unknown, striving to fathom the hereafter, longing for peace, praying for peace, yet finding none. Finding only a growing unrest, a torturing uncertainty that grew and grew, an ever-increasing agony of longing.
That is what the night saw.
But the eyes behind the window looked out over the landscape that lay spread before them in shadowy billows under the dark autumn sky, seeking to recognize something here and there. That way should be a homestead; it was there in the daylight; surely it should be visible now. But the eyes looked in vain; the gazer found himself at last imagining that the great expanse of shadow was that of a cloud on which he sailed across the sky.
There was a sort of comfort in thus letting imagination run its course. Yet unconsciously he pressed his foot to the floor, as if to make sure of being still on earth. Up in the whirling ocean of space there was no lasting foothold anywhere. And yet it was a pleasant fancy—to be sailing through the sky. Clouds were things that came and went, and melted into space under the rays of the sun. When this particular cloud on which he rode should end, and he himself be hurled through space, where would he land? Would he land anywhere at all?
He expected to see the dark shadow change its shape, but in vain. This was a check; the sameness of the outlook irritated him. Evidently both he and his cloud were shamefully dull, that they could not move better than this.
And he looked up towards the heavens, as if to call the attention of his lazy cloud to its swifter-moving fellows above.
No sooner had he done so, however, than his flight of fancy was forgotten. There were the stars—and they fascinated him in turn.
Grey clouds spread their net across the heavens, drifting rapidly from west to east, hiding and revealing the twinkling stars as they raced by.
Suddenly it seemed to him as if the clouds were standing still, and the stars themselves moved across the sky, crawling hurriedly over the meshes of the cloudy net, showing clear in a blue space one moment and vanishing the next.
So intently did he follow the fancied movement of the stars that in a little time his eyes were dazzled; it seemed as if he himself had been drawn into a dance of stars.
He closed his eyes. And, as he did so, sank into oblivion, with a disturbed yet sorely needed rest.
It was only for a moment. Abruptly he again became conscious of his surroundings. His vision returned from its wild wanderings, and crept, as it were, behind him—he saw himself—a pale face behind the window in a dimly lighted room.
The sight came as a shock; grim reality had taken the place of fancy now. And a sensation of horror came over him—he started back from the window as if he had seen a ghost.
His eyes fell upon the two open coffins, with their white draperies, that seemed to take shape as he watched them—the shape of what lay within. The dim light of the tapers helped to bring him back to the present, and even the weight of grief that came with it brought in its train a restfulness of its own.
Silently he crossed the room and sat down at the foot of the coffins, gazing at them till the white of the wrappings pained his eyes.
Then, bending forward, he fell into a fit of sobbing. A sense of utter helplessness came over him; soul and sense were dulled.