Bella hid her face.
With fresh tears Hildegarde went on, “And Louis wouldn’t know. It hadn’t occurred to me at all while I was there. I found myself sobbing, and saying half out loud, ‘Oh, God, oh, God, is that why Jack is dying?’ The sailors were staring. I leaned over and said to the big Dane, ‘Do you want to make some money, you and these others? I’ll pay you, pay you well, if you’ll give me just five minutes more on shore.’ No, no. They were all of one mind. ‘I’ll pay you ten dollars a minute,’ I said, and I’d have gone on offering more if they hadn’t turned back for that. It’s risking life, they said, and they told me how the captain—But they thought I was distracted at leaving Louis, and that all I wanted was to get him. They liked Louis. They turned back. Just then the whistle screamed out from the Beluga very angrily. But they ran the boat in on a great wave, and I flung out through the surf and ran up on the tundra calling Louis. He was standing at the door of the hut with the man who’d shown him the way to the mines. Louis turned round when he heard my voice, and oh, Bella, the look on his face! ‘So you couldn’t leave it to me even to bury him,’ he said.” She hid her eyes in Bella’s lap. “And that was the end.”
There was a long, long silence. At last a hand on Hildegarde’s hair, and Bella’s voice saying: “For you it wasn’t the end.”
The other lifted her face. “Yes, for me, too. ‘There’s nothing to be done,’ Louis repeated that. I was to go back, he said, for my father’s sake. And I did. I was quite dazed. But for me, too, it was the end.”
“Where is Louis now?”
“I don’t know. I haven’t seen him since.”
“Nor heard?”
“I got a letter to him, but—”
“Wasn’t there time for an answer?”
“I got an answer. But there was nothing in the letter.”