Miss Barbara was very ignorant. He himself could not know, probably Eppie herself didn’t know, what had killed her, though she had so well known what she wanted; but he suspected that Grainger had been right, and that it was on him that Eppie’s life had shattered itself.
Her will, evidently, still ruled those about her, for when Miss Barbara had led him up-stairs she said, pausing in the passage, that Eppie would see him alone; the nurse would leave them. She had insisted on that, and there was now no reason why she should not have her way. The nurse came out to them, telling him that Miss Gifford waited; and, just before she let him go, Miss Barbara drew his head down to hers and kissed him, murmuring to him to be brave. He really didn’t know whether he were more the felon, or more the victim that she thought him. Then the door closed behind him and he was alone with Eppie.
Eppie was propped high on pillows, her hair twisted up from her brows and neck and folded in heavy masses on her head.
In the wide, white room, among her pillows, so white herself, and strange with a curious thinness, he had never received a more prodigious impression of life than in meeting her eyes, where all the forces of her soul looked out. So motionless, she was like music, like all that moves, that strives and is restless; so white, she was like skies at dawn, like deep seas under sunlight. In the stillness, the whiteness, the emptiness of the room she was illusion itself, life and beauty, a wonderful rainbow thing staining “the white radiance of eternity.” And as if, before its final shattering, every color flamed, her whole being was concentrated in the mere fact of its existence—its existence that defied death. A deep, quiet excitement, almost a gaiety, breathed from her. In the tangled rivers of her hair, the intertwined currents of dark and gold winding in a lovely disorder,—in the white folds of lawn that lay so delicately about her; in the emerald slipping far down her finger, the emeralds in her ears, shaking faintly with her ebbing heart-beats, there was even a sort of wilful and heroic coquetry. She was, in her dying, triumphantly beautiful, yet, as always, through her beauty went the strength of her reliance on deeper significances.
She lay motionless as Gavan approached her, and he guessed that she saved all her strength. Only as he took the chair beside her, horror at his heart, the old familiar horror, she put out her hand to him.
He took it silently, looking up, after a little while, from its marvelous lightness and whiteness to her eyes, her smile. Then, at last, she spoke to him.
“So you think that you have got the better of me at last, don’t you, Gavan dear?” she said. Her voice was strange, as though familiar notes were played on some far-away flute, sweet and melancholy among the hills. The voice was strange and sad, but the words were not. In them was a caress, as though she pitied his pity for her; but the old antagonism, too, was there—a defiance, a willingness to be cruel to him. “I did play fair, you see,” she went on. “I wouldn’t have you come till there was no danger, for you, any more. And now this is the end of it all, you think. You will soon be able to say of me, Gavan,
“her words to Scorn
Are scattered, and her mouth is stopt with Dust!”
His hand shut involuntarily, painfully, on hers, and as though his breath cut him, he said, “Don’t—don’t, Eppie.”