“It doesn’t matter. I only want to rest and stop thinking—and—and—everything. Will it be long?”
“Not long,” he said in a choked undertone.
Presently she coughed and a black fluid oozed hideously from her lips and seemed to be threatening to strangle her. He called the doctor who gave her an opiate.
“Come with me, sir,” said Wackle in a hoarse, sick-room whisper, “Mrs. Clocker has spread a nice cold lunch for you.”
Stilson waved him away. Alone again, he swept the finery from the sofa and stretched himself there. Trivial thoughts raced through his burning brain—the height and width of the candle flames, the pattern of the wall paper, the tracery of cracks in the ceiling, the number of yards of lace and of goods in the dresses heaped on the floor. As his thoughts flew from trifle to trifle, his head ached fiercely and his skin felt as if it were baking and cracking.
Then came a long sigh and a rattling in the throat from the woman in the bed. He started up. “Marguerite!” he called. He looked down at her. She sighed again, stretched herself at full length, settled her head into the pillow. “Marguerite,” he said. And he bent over her. “Are you there?” he whispered. But he knew that she was not.
He took the candle from the night stand and held it above his head. The dim flame made his living face old and sorrow-seamed, while her dead face looked smooth, almost young. Her expression of rest, of peaceful dreams, of care forever fled, brought back to him a far scene. He could hear the crash of the orchestra, the stirring rhythm of a Spanish dance; he could see the stage of the Gold and Glory as he had first seen it—the bright background of slender, girlish faces and forms; and in the foreground, slenderest and most girlish of all, Marguerite—the embodiment of the motion and music of the dance, the epitome of the swift-pulsing life of the senses.
He knelt down beside the bed and took her dead hand. “Good-bye, Rita,” he sobbed. “Good-bye, good-bye!”
Suddenly the day broke and the birds in the eaves began to chirp, to twitter, to sing. He rose, and with the sombre and clinging shadows of the past and the present there was mingled a light—faint, evasive, as yet itself a shadow. But it was light—the forerunner of the dawn of a new day upon a new land where his heart should sing as in the days of his youth.