Rachel Marquis paused a moment with her hand on the library-door. She had had John placed in here because it was the room she herself loved best, and she knew that it was here she would prefer to sit beside him in these last hours of waiting. Yet she had hesitated to come down, and even now, with her hand on the door-knob, she lingered again to re-strengthen herself before entering. The very unusualness of an unfamiliar sight in the familiar room would add, she knew, to the sharp strangeness of the whole event. She almost hoped, as she waited this moment, for another practical duty of some sort, which would postpone again her entrance to the room.
But no sound came from any part of the silenced house, and she opened the door and entered. The long casket stood awkwardly across the blank fireplace, for she had chosen to give no direction to the undertaker and he had followed his own professional judgment. Everything was arranged, however, with a sort of intention which indicated the intrusion of the professional into the private. In spite of the stronger feeling of the moment, Rachel Marquis noticed this, with sharp disapproval. But she went directly to the chair which had been placed beside the casket and seated herself, bowing her head long on her folded arms before she looked on the familiar face beside her.
It was now only twenty-four hours since the strange accident had happened, and she had not yet adjusted herself, even so far as to determine her fundamental emotion. It was grief, of course, but the kind or degree of that grief was still undefined. The hours since they had brought him home had been so full of the unfamiliar practical things which arise at such a time, of the sudden necessities and small perplexities which muddle and chafe sorrow, that there had been scarcely a moment for her to look consciously at the great fact. Even now, as she covered her eyes, to be the more alone with herself, she felt rather a welcoming of momentary inactivity, than the relaxation of grief. She realized, with a sort of pang of disapproval, that she did not need to relax from any tension of anguish. She did not know what she wished to say to herself in this communion. She was sorry, bitterly sorry; but what elements went into the making of that grief?—She could not yet tell.
So she leaned with covered eyes, almost as if she were waiting for something outside of herself to give her a cue. As the minutes passed, however, the great simple fact that John was dead and that his place beside her would now be empty, engrossed all supplementary feelings, and her genuine regret had its way. She wept long, and ever more bitterly, absorbed, as one may be, in a mere physical expression of grief. The activity of sorrow overcame thought for the time, and left her no energy for analysis of feeling. Death alone seemed enough to weep over, and her tears still fell.
At last, as if having reached a natural period, she rose and moved away to the window and sat down there, in a quiet reverie of sadness. She was sorry for the life cut off, shocked at the abruptness and completeness of the tragedy,—John himself, she was sure, the assertive, energizing John, would have hated this sudden subduing of himself, and she sympathized with such revolt,—sorry, sorry for it all.
As she thought, she looked gravely out across the garden, the gay stretch to which John had given so much time. She had never understood his devotion to that garden. He had not been ready to spend money on things to give æsthetic pleasure in the house, although in practical matters he had been willing enough to make outlays, ever since his business had been secure. She thought of their new car, of the signs of prosperity in their living. 'Poor John!' she said at last with a deep sigh, when, aware of the nodding line of rare dahlias on which her eyes were resting, she thought of all the pains he had taken in the propagation and selection of them. She had come to recognize this lavishness of care and money as a sort of blind expression of the one æsthetic element in his nature, and had felt a quiet approval of it. 'Poor John!' she sighed again, and turned from the window to go.
But even as she did so, the simplicity of her mood passed, and the old complexity of feeling returned with a keenness which was for the moment bewildering. As she left the window, the long black shape across the fireplace confronted her again, and she paused, startled anew; it was so strange and so tremendous a thing in her room.
For the library was, above everything else in the world, hers. It was such a room as shows it has been taking on character through succeeding decades, cumulative of its type, slowly drawing to itself an atmosphere of fineness and greatness. The credit of it belonged only remotely to Rachel Marquis. She was the possessor, but not the maker of it. She had kept it and loved it, but her own contribution to it had been slight. A few shelves of new books not yet mellowed down to the tone of the others, standing as if waiting to be proved, and a bit of renewing of texture here and there, whose freshness showed need of the softening of time, were the only marks of her hand or taste. But it was such a room as any lover of the long effects of books would cherish.
In the midst of its harmonies, the heavy black box undoubtedly looked harsh and intrusive. Rachel recognized, as a sort of confidence with herself, that bringing it here was an invasion. Because she loved the room herself she had placed John here, without thought of the inappropriateness of the act. But now the incongruity of the choice struck her. Why should he be brought here, she thought pitifully, to the room he never frequented, where she scarcely welcomed him, she acknowledged? Why should she sit beside him here, when she had so seldom done so before? She remembered very well the manner with which he occasionally sought her here, tentative, unfamiliar, and yet assertive. She had resented every element of that manner. Anywhere else in the house he was more nearly himself; here everything she did not desire in him was accentuated.
It had been, she thought, with an instinctive desire to do the best for him in every way, that she had directed that he should be placed here; just as she had ordered everything of the choicest and had given her most careful attention and taste to every detail. But this thought had been a failure.