It was not the first time that Death had stirred his life, but this was a sudden and unexpected snapping of a chain that bound him with his boyhood. Always he had been subconsciously aware of his aunt's presence in the scheme of things; there had been ingrained in him a certain fear of her, that he had never quite shaken off. Behind the individuality of his own life she had lurked, a shadowy figure, yet ready to emerge from the shadows at a moment of provocation, and become real and distinct and forbidding.
And now he could scarcely realize that she was dead—that he was absolutely alone in the world, though there might be, somewhere, cousins and kinspeople whom he had never seen.
She had not been demonstratively kind to him in life. The watch and chain she left was the first present he could ever remember receiving from her. But he felt that he could not absent himself from her funeral; it would be a sad and desolate business in the Easterham churchyard, with not many people there, yet he knew that he could not pass the day in Paris without thinking of her, lowered into the grave to the eternal loneliness of death.
He sent a telegram to London, and received a reply a few hours later, giving him permission to leave Paris, and the next day he travelled to England.
The collection of papers and magazines rested unread in his lap. He looked from the window on the succession of pictures that flashed and disappeared—a blue-bloused labourer at work in the fields, or a waggoner toiling along a country lane; children shouting by the hedgerows, and the signal-women who sat by their little huts on the railway as the train sped by. He could not read; sometimes, with a sigh, he sought a paper (France had just caught the popular magazine habit from England), turned the pages restlessly, and, finally, leaning on the arm-rest, stared out of the window....
The shuttle of his mind went to and fro, twining together the disconnected threads of his thoughts into a pattern of memories—memories of his youth and his work and his aunt interwoven with the strong, dominating thought of Elizabeth....
His thoughts turned continually to Elizabeth; sometimes they spun away to something else, but always they were led back through a series of memories to that night when he had kissed her for the first time.
It was odd how this absence from her seemed to have changed her in his mind. There had been an undercurrent of disappointment in their relations, of late. Her letters had been strangely sterile and unsatisfying. She had written an evasive reply, after a delay, an answer to his last letter begging her to come to him....
Yet he was eager to see her and to kiss her. He felt that she was all that he had left to him in the world: that she and his work were all that mattered....
A garrulous Frenchman lured him into conversation during dinner; he was glad, for it gave him relief from the monotonous burden of his thoughts ... and on the boat he dozed in the sunshine of a smooth crossing.