Thou shalt reach him never—ah ... ah ...!"
And the wail of despair at the end of the verse smote as a piercing blast on her spirit.
"Yes," she said, "he will come down from the mountains, and the joy of reunion will be theirs; and I shall be outside of it—outside of it as always. Always outside the heart of things."
She went slowly up the stairs; but when she reached the threshold where the dead man was lying alone and as yet unmourned, she had forgotten herself and her own personal life.
She uncovered his face once more. There was the burnt mark where the lightning had passed through his brain. She tried to hide it with his hair. His eyes were closed; but she laid her gentle hands on each of them, so that his own countrywoman, and not a foreigner, should be the one to put the last seal of sightlessness on them. She drew a soft little handkerchief from her satchel and spread it over his face. Then she glanced through the letters and papers which had been found on him, and she discovered his name and his home address in Cornwall. He was a soldier, captain in one of the line regiments. Probably he had been out in South Africa. Yes, there was a letter addressed to him at Bloemfontein. Katharine's sympathy deepened.
"Even more willingly do I watch by him," she said.
As there was no evidence of where he had come from in Norway, and as the people of the Skyds-station had not even begun to make active inquiries, she telegraphed to his Cornish address, and also to two or three of the sanatoria in the more mountainous part of the country. No answer came; and meantime she watched by his side, weaving from some forget-me-nots and berries a garland, which she placed at his feet. It was no strain to her to be giving her companionship to the dead. Katharine was fearless of life and fearless of death, fearless of the living, fearless of the dead. Her mind wandered back to her own dead: her mother whom she had loved passionately and lost as a young girl; her girlhood's lover, whom she had lost when she was scarcely twenty; her school-friend, whom she had laid to rest ten years past. When each of them had died, she had said, "This is the end of everything for me." But she knew that those words had been no truer for her at thirty than at thirteen, and that the only end of life itself, and therefore of life's thrill, was death itself; and then was that the end? Was there immortality?—and what was immortality? Was it, as some one had once told her, merely the natural persistence under different conditions of the temperamentally strong? Not necessarily the persistence of the good, but of the masterful? She thought of all the forceful people she had known, and she could not believe in their obliteration; somehow, somewhere they would surely continue their individual processes for good or for bad. She thought of all the half-toned, colourless people she had known, who scarcely seemed to have any life in them in this life. Was it reasonable to suppose that there could be any continuance of their feeble outlines?
She recalled a conversation she had had with an embittered man in Arizona. He had scoffed at everything: at life, at love, at patriotism, at death, at immortality.
"Belief in immortality!" he had cried. "Why, it is just a typical bit of selfishness, that's all. We want immortality for ourselves and for those we love. But we do not want it for those we hate. We do not want it for those who interfere with us. We may pretend to have the principle of it implanted in our hearts; but all we really care about is the offshoot—the personal application of it to our own individual needs."
She remembered she had said to him: