There was a strangling bitterness in her throat that broke forth in a harsh laugh. The placid room seemed to swim round with her; when she came to herself the servant was holding her hands once more. Her voice was falling into her ears with a measured soothing cadence:
"Not here. There is no death in this house. Don't you feel it, ma'am? It's not death that is here. Why, her that is gone, she passed from me there, in that bed, as the night passes into day. That is not death. Not an hour before the summons came for her she was wandering—as the doctor called it. I knew better. She saw him and was speaking to him. 'Ah, Harry,' she says, joyful, 'I knew you were not dead.' And then she turns to me. 'He is not dead, Mary,' she says, 'it was all a mistake.'"
Rosamond listened, her pale lips apart, her gaze dark and wondering.
"Why, ma'am," went on old Mary. "Haven't you felt it yourself, this night; didn't you feel his sweet company the minute you set foot in the house? I think it was my lady's great love that brought him back here. And now that she is gone, he's still here. And it's strange, he's here more than she is. She does not come as he does."
Her eyes became fixed on far-off things. Still clasping Rosamond's hand she seemed to transmit a glow, a warmth that reached to the heart. Rosamond's sick and cowering soul felt at rest as upon a strength greater than her own.
His company! Was that not what she had felt? Was it not that to which she had awakened? Ay, the old woman was right: it was sweet!
"There is no death," asserted old Mary, once again, "no death unless we make it. It's our fault if our dead do not live for us; it's our earthly bodies that won't acknowledge the spirit. It's we who make our dead dead, who bury them, who make corpses of them and coffins for them, to hide them away in the cold earth."
Rosamond wrenched her hands from the wrinkled grasp. She sprang to her feet, seized by a sudden anguish that was actual physical pain.
"Go, go!" she cried wildly. She was caught up as in a whirlwind of unimaginable terror. What had she done? Had she laid Harry English in the grave? Was he dead to her through her own deed, he that had lived on for his mother? Had she in her cowardice hammered him into his coffin, and would he always be a corpse to her because she had made him dead?
Through the inarticulate voices of her torment, she heard the door close and felt she was alone. And then she found herself upon her knees before the shrine, the photograph case still clenched between her fingers, praying blindly, madly, inarticulately—to what? she knew not. To the white Christ on the cross, who had risen from the dead? Or to the strong soldier whose image she held, and for whom there could be no rising again?