She bowed her white face.
"Not to God—I don't know about God—but there's some one else now out in the vague, and I—I have need of her."
Her face drooped out of sight, and the moments passed. The motionless figure with the folded palms might have been a mortuary marble on an ancient tomb, so rigid was it, so uninformed by life. Ethan sat at the coffin's foot and watched the candles flare.
What if this shock and jar were to send Val back to the faith of her fathers? What was it in its lesser effect upon himself? What was it working in him? He looked at the long, dim outlines. Death! For the girl, too, with her joy of life, her greed of consciousness, and for him, this hour would come, of rigid quiet, and of watchers in the candle-light. He shivered involuntarily, glancing at the kneeling figure. Death! How much he had thought about it, and how little he had seen. Here it was beside him in a narrow box. He turned away his eyes, seized upon afresh by its horror and its fascination. That moment of dissolution, what had it been like? Even the brave old woman had covered up her face. He peered a moment into the pit, realizing for that instant the wrenching away of life's supports, the plunge, the sinking to the bottom. With an effort he reminded himself of the peace, too, awaiting all down there, and its being the only possible solution to the riddle of the world. But the end—the end! Earthquake and avalanche it is, for the one who lies a-dying; fire and flood and shock of battle, the true end of the world. For us the lamp of the sun was lit on the day of our birth, for us the stars will be snuffed out and chaos come again when we lie down to die.
Had it been like that with her—this dead woman at his elbow? He stood up; cautiously he came to the coffin's head, with parted lips, like one about to put an eager question. He laid back the white sheet. At sight of the tranquil features his own tense look relaxed. Ah, no; for that steadfast spirit the end had brought no terror, or if it had, the quiet face kept triumphantly its secret. A movement down in the shadow, and Val lifted her head, but not as high as the coffin.
"Ethan!"—she clutched his hand—"don't you feel how alive she is? Hush! in a moment she will speak. I've asked her for a sign."
They waited—in that silence that wraps the world. Then Val stood up, and gave a cry as she beheld the face for the first time since the "laying out." She caught up the candle, and held up the light before the dead, as she had held it before the living woman on that evening long ago, when Ethan saw her first.
"Oh, Ethan, Ethan," said the girl, "she's smiling! That's her answer."
They had come back from the burial, and for the first time in their lives Val and Emmie were in the old house without that constant presence that had come to seem as much a part of the Fort as its very walls. Ethan was still there. Mrs. Otway had come to be with them through those first days; but since the dead body had been carried out of the house loneliness was lodged there like a bailiff, violating the sanctity and blessedness of home.
Ethan found Val in the long room the next evening, sitting on the floor crying, with head against the big empty chair.