She saw that she had stirred some black terror in him, and her ignorant, responsive fear made her pitiless: “Could you forget her if she died? Never. Never as long as you lived.”
“Already,” he said, as though the words were forced from him by her will, “I haven’t remembered her all the time.”
“She is there. You haven’t forgotten her.”
“Years and years come. New things come. Old things fade and fade,—all but the deepest things. They couldn’t fade. No,” he repeated, “they couldn’t. Only, even they might get dimmer.”
She saw that he spoke from an agony of doubt, and he seemed to wrench the knife she had stabbed him with from his heart as he added: “But Robbie is such a little thing. And little things people do forget, I am sure of it. It’s that that makes them so sad.”
“Well, then,”—Eppie, too, felt the relief of the lesser pain,—“they will remember again. When you see Robbie in heaven you will remember all about him. But I won’t forget him,” she repeated once more, swallowing the sob that rose chokingly at the thought of how long it would be till they should see Robbie in heaven.
Gavan had now a vague, chill smile for the pertinacity of her faith. Something had broken in him, as if, with Robbie’s passing, a veil had been drawn from reality, an illusion of confidence dispelled forever. He leaned out of the window and breathed in the scent of the wet pine-tree, looking, with an odd detachment and clearness of observation,—as if through that acceptation of tragedy all his senses had grown keener,—at the bluish bloom the dew made upon the pine-needles; at the flowers and fruit in the garden below, the thatched roof of the summer-house, the fragile whiteness of the roses growing near it, like a bridal veil blown against the ancient wall. It was, in a moment of strange, suspended vision, as if he had often and often seen tragic dawn in the garden before and was often to see it again. What was he? Where was he? All the world was like a dream and he seemed to see to its farthest ends and back to its beginnings.
Eppie stood silent beside him.
He was presently conscious of her silence, and then, the uncanny crystal, gazing sense slipping from him, of a possible unkindness in his repudiating grief. He looked round at her. The poor child’s eyes, heavy with weeping and all the weight of the dark, encompassing woe he had shown her, dwelt on him with a somber compassionateness.
“Poor, darling little Eppie,” he said, putting an arm about her, “what a brute, a selfish brute, I am.”