The Shadow of Life

by Anne Douglas Sedgwick

“I seem to have loved you forever, Eppie,” he said.

But, once more, in all the strange oblivion of his acceptance, there had been for him in their kiss and their embrace the undertone of anguish, the distant tolling—as if for something accomplished, over forever—of a funeral bell.

He watched her figure—white was not the word for it in this midnight world—pass away into the darkness. And, as she disappeared, the bell seemed still to toll, “Gone. Gone. Gone.”

So he was alone.

He was alone. The hours went by and he still sat there. The white roses near him, they, too, only a strange blossoming of darkness, symbolized, in their almost aching sweetness, the departed presence. He breathed in their fragrance; and, as he listened to his own quiet breaths, they seemed those of the night made conscious in him. The roses remembered for him; the night breathed through him; it was an interchange, a mingling. Above were the deep vaults of heaven, the profundities of distance, the appalling vastness, strewn with its dust of stars. And it, too, was with him, in him, as the roses were, as his own breath came and went.

The veils had now lifted from the night and it was radiant, all its stars visible; and veil after veil seemed drifting from before his soul.

A cool, light breeze stirred his hair.

Closing his eyes, at last, his thought plunged, as his sight had plunged, into gulf under gulf of vacancy.

After the unutterable fatigue, like the sinking under anæsthesia, of his final yielding, he could not know what was happening to him, nor care. It had often happened before, only never quite like this. It was, once more, the great peace, lapping wave after wave, slow, sliding, immeasurable waves, through and through him; dissolving thought and feeling; dissolving all discord, all pain, all joy and beauty.

The hours went by, and, as they went, Eppie’s face, like a drift of stars, sank, sank into the gulf. What had he said to her? what promised? Only the fragrance of the roses seemed to remember, nothing in himself. For what had he wanted? He wanted nothing now. Her will, her life, had seized him; but no, no, no,—the hours quietly, in their passing seemed to say it,—they had not kept him. He had at last, after a lifelong resistance, abandoned himself to her, and the abandonment had been the final step toward complete enfranchisement. For, with no effort now of his own at escape, no will at all to be free, he had left her far behind him, as if through the waters of the whirlpool his soul, like a light bubble, had softly, surely, risen to the air. It had lost itself, and her.