She feels his fingers close more tightly over hers,—once, twice,—then relax; his chin falls, and the doctor passes his hand over his eye-lids and puts a handkerchief to his lips; and the cow-girl drops with a cry to the ground and throws her apron over her head; and at the gate above a child calls "Mammy!" in frightened tones; and the lad who has been sitting up on the slope at the foot of the flag-staff slides the Union Jack half-mast; and the big white house is without a master.
She is sitting in an old garden, a retired place in the village, right on the fjord. They have driven her down there away from the house that seems haunted by his spirit, infected with the loathsome odor of rapid dissolution that nothing can overcome, that seems to ooze out and taint the very flowers. And then the myriad flies that crawl and creep, as if sick or drunk, over everything, and make one loathe and turn from the very sight of food and drink, for dread of where they have been; make one long to scream hysterically to drown their hateful buzzing, and rush away and plunge into the sea,—were it not that it too seems to whisper in undertones of dead men and lost sweethearts, drowned mariners with swollen gray-green faces and tangled locks floating like sea-sedge behind them, as they toss on the swift undercurrents beneath its treacherous smiling surface.
It is with her, sitting there, as it is with most men, that when numbed in mind and heart by some great trouble her senses are more alive to outward sounds and scenes. It is as if when one's inner self is working with some emotion, wrestling with some potential moral enemy, crying out under the crucifixion of some soul-passion, eyes and ears, and above all sense of smell, are busy receiving impressions and storing them up, as a phonograph records a sound, to reproduce them with absolute fidelity if any of the senses be touched in the same way by the subtile connection between perfume and memory. She will, in all time to come, never forget that old garden. She is rocking unconsciously to and fro. Her thoughts, and the emotions belonging to them, cross one another rapidly, flash past as the landscape seen from a mail train, so that she cannot fasten any of them. The weary vigils of many months, the details of days and hours, are ticked off as the events on a tape. The look in his eyes, press of his fingers; the quiet face with the awful look of peace; the rapid changes to a thing to be hidden away as swiftly as hands can coffin it; the clasped fingers, never to be lifted in tender caress or angry gesture; the future to face without even the rough protection of his passionate, wayward affection;—all these conflicting images and reasonings dash through her brain, and yet not a detail of her surroundings escapes her,—the strips of blue fjord, with the pilot boats with their numbered sails in the immediate foreground, and the prams turned bottom up on the miniature wharf for a fresh coat of paint; the dip of the white sail of a pleasure-boat in the distance, and the gleam of the scarlet cap of a girl steering; bright flecks on the black-green shadows of the trees in the near background, that stand out distinctly from the misty blue of the distant mountains, misty with the purple light that only clothes the northern heights.
Not a detail of the quaint garden escapes her. It is a garden of surprises. Fruit-trees from strange lands, dwarf shrubs of foreign birth, curious shells gathered on the beach of far-away islands, flourish promiscuously with indigenous plants. A painted lady (the figure-head of some effete sailing-craft), who has cloven the storms through many seas with her mighty breasts, and commanded the rising waves with her upraised hand, and faced the storm with a smile ghastly in its wooden fixity, has come here to rest. She leans next to an old sun-dial in the shade of an ancient lilac-bush. The sense of beauty, and the bump of utility of successive owners, is manifested at every turn. The even drills of potatoes are disturbed by the tombstone of a favorite dog; a plaster Mercury, and a shrub, cut in the form of a bulgy tea-pot, spoil the symmetry of a bed of carrots; strawberries carrying their ripe, red fruit right bravely fill the background of one bed, and a tangled profusion of pinks, pansies, and gilly-flowers, forget-me-nots, and fragrant lavender spikes have a long straight line of leeks running amid their sweet irregularity as a pungent line in a dainty sheaf of verse. She is conscious of a vague pleasure as she notes these things, and a sort of wondering pity at the pathos of her own quiet figure. She fingers her black cashmere gown and the heavy silk fringe of her shawl. She never wore a shawl before; they had nothing else black. Her mother used to wear a shawl, a white Indian silk with raised flowers. Her shoulders sloped too, like Eugenie's. Funny to wear a shawl like an old lady! She has a bag with money, papers, certificate of death for the customs. What a nuisance all these formalities are! "Lum tum, te tum, te tum,"—the dead march in Saul! no, she mustn't hum that. She remembers once in the long ago, before the flood, her flood, she had a sweetheart, a boy officer,—she wonders did he get fat; they always chaffed and said he would. Once she was humming it, when he stopped her saying, "Oh, don't! when any one hums that, a poor soldier dies somewhere." Superstition, of course; but she won't hum it, all the same, just for the old sake's sake. Why should she kill a soldier? She used to like all soldiers. "Tum tum!" Is she going mad? How does one go mad?
She turns her head in relief at an approaching step. The little doctor stands bowing, hat in hand. She notices that he is wearing his dress-suit, and adds mentally, "They wear dress clothes on solemn occasions, christenings, weddings, funerals. Why, of course it's the funeral!" She even smiles at the conjunction of a swallow-tail with elastic side-leather boots with high heels. His trousers too must have been made before he grew stout; they ruck up at the knees, and show the end line of his under-drawers quite plainly. She feels inclined to laugh. She hasn't really laughed for a long time; well, why shouldn't she laugh?
"Will Fruen come now?" he queries.
There is a subtile blending of the soothing professional tone he uses to lady patients and the gravity befitting a solemn occasion.
She takes up her bag, gathers her shawl mechanically into graceful folds over her arms, and follows him. They go up through the wood, past the poor-house, to a side entrance. She notices as she looks down over the town that the flags are all half-way down the staffs, and that the village is crowded with folk; and that outside the house there are groups of black-coated men, like ants crawling about a white stone, she thinks. The little housekeeper meets her at the door; the other girls are crying. She bows to people without recognizing them. Then there is a tramping of feet, and some one leads her out; the bell is tolling up from the church, and she sees that they have covered the gray cobs with black palls, and attached a black canopy to the cart, and outlined the spokes of the wheels with fir needles, and smothered the rest of it with branches and flowers, wreaths and crosses, and harps and lyres: he hated music too! The coffin—what an ugly black thing, with an exaggerated stomach and garished silver ornaments!—is resting upon the Union Jack. A crowd of faces that she does not know meets her. She places herself behind the cart, and the maids follow her, and all the dogs gather round her, but never growl once as they move on; and the crowd follows. She can see the green road; they have covered it according to custom with branches of fir and pine,—a green river, a grass-green river, winding to the left. And the sea, the sea he loved,—it seems to her that there is a cadence of pity in the eternal note of its quiet sadness. How tired her feet are! It's quite half a mile yet. She has no ankles, how funny! Just stilts made of her will. She trips. The cow-girl pushes past the housekeeper, and watches her steps.
"Lord God, how stony-faced she is!" whispers the doctor's wife, "and she never cried once."