“I will remember,” he said.
His arms still held her. And through his mind an army seemed to rush, galloping, with banners, with cries of lamentations, agony, regret, passionate rebellion. It crashed in conflict, blood beneath it, and above it tempests and torn banners. And the banners were desperate hopes riddled with bullets; and the blood was love poured out and the tempest was his heart. It was, he thought, even while he saw, listened, felt, the last onslaught upon his soul. She was going—the shadow of life was sliding from her—and from him, for she was life and its terror and beauty. Above the turmoil was the fated peace. He had won it, unwillingly. He could not be kept from it even by the memory that would stay.
But though he knew, and, in knowing, saw his contemplative soul far from this scene of suffocating misery, Eppie, his dear, his beautiful, was in his arms, her eyes, her lips, her heart. He would never see her again.
He raised his head to look his last, and, like a faint yet piercing perfume, her soul’s smile still dwelt on him as she lay there speechless. For the moment—and was not the moment eternity?—the triumph was all hers. The moment, when long, long past, would still be part of him and her triumph in it eternal. To spare her the sight of his anguish would be to rob her. Anguish had been and was the only offering he could make her. He felt—felt unendurably, she would see that; he suffered, he loved her, unspeakably; she had that, too, while, in their last long silence, he held her hands against his heart. And her eyes, still smiling on him with their transcendent faith, showed that her triumph was shadowless.
HE heard next day that she had died during the night.
Peace did not come to him for long; the wounds of the warring interlude of life had been too deep. He forgot himself at last in the treadmill quiet of days all serene laboriousness, knowing that it could not be for many years that he should watch the drama. She had shattered herself on him; but he, too, had felt that in himself something had broken. And he forgot the wounds, except when some sight or sound, the song of a bird in Spring, a spray of heather, a sky of stars, startled them to deep throbbing. And then a hand, stretched out from the past, would seize him, a shudder, a pang, would shake him, and he would know that he was alone and that he remembered.