Then he stooped to kiss her; and then he slid to his knees, and hid his face in his shaking hands, and uttered no cry, nor any word or sound.
He was so still, and he was still so long, that his friends took alarm for him, and Helen Thorne quietly opened the door. When she saw him, she retreated as quietly, went downstairs, and called his little girl.
Pink trotted up noisily as Pink always did, hurried to her mother's room, and hesitated on the threshold. When she said "Hullo, Papa!" her father turned and saw her standing there. He made an instinctive movement towards her; the child ran to him; he caught her, and kissed her little hands and hair, and Pink said: "Crying, Papa? Have you got 'e toofache? ... Come to Mummer Dee. She 'll comfort you."
Into the Church of the Happy Saints, where Jean was used to worship (for she was a religious woman, in her quiet, unobtrusive way), they carried her for her last prayer and chant. And it was noticed how many people there were among the mourners of this gentle lady to whom she had done some kindness, forgotten by every one except themselves, or, more likely, not known to any one else; obscure people, those who had not many friends, and especially sick people, the not helpless, but not curable, whom life and death alike pass by. In her short, invalid life Jean had remembered everybody within her reach who bore this fate; and it would never be known now in what sweet fashion she had contrived to make over to these poor souls a precious portion of her abounding courage, or the gift of Jean's own sympathy. This was something quite peculiar to herself. It was finer than the shading of words in a poem, as reverent as the motion of feeling in a prayer, and always as womanly as Jean.
He who followed her to her burial in such a trance of anguish as few men know who love a wife and cherish her (as so many do, that women may well thank Heaven for their manly number),—he who had loved, but had not cherished, looked into Jean's open grave, and believed that in all the world he stood most desolate among afflicted men.
"I left her to die alone," he said. He grasped Pink's little hand till he hurt the child, and she wrenched it away. He did not even notice this, and his empty hand retained its shape as the little girl's fingers had left it. "I went on a gunning trip. And she asked me not to go. And she died alone." ...
The clergyman's voice intoning sacred words smote upon and did not soothe this comfortless man.
"He that believeth on Me." ...
"Jean believed on me. And I failed her. And she is dead."
Pink crept up to his side again, and put her fingers back into his still outstretched hand. Perhaps it was the child's touch; perhaps—God knew—it was some effluence from the unseen life within whose mystery the deathless love of the dead wife had ceased from the power of expression; but something at that instant poured vigor into the abjectly miserable man. His first consciousness that Jean was not dead rushed back upon him at the mouth of her grave. It seemed, indeed, no grave, but a couch cut in a catafalque of autumn leaves.