He was perfectly clear of mind, but his breathing was affected, and a deadly torpor hung over him which his will alone prevented falling.
He took in all the details around him with extraordinary clearness, amongst others the fact that the mushi’s cage had been removed.
Having waited for a moment, straining his ears to catch the faintest sound, he seized the swinging paper lantern that lit the hall, and with it in his hand went into the kitchen. It was deserted. Then he went upstairs—every room was empty. It was like a house from which the people had fled in terror, and he came down again, wild with the apprehension of some unknown tragedy.
He brought the lamp into the room on the right of the passage, and placed it on the floor. Something crimson lay on the primrose-colored matting. He picked it up; it was Campanula’s obi. Why had she cast it there?
He was looking round him as if for a person to explain all these things, when his eye caught an open drawer of the great lacquer cabinet that contained his papers. He looked into the drawer, and it was empty. It was the drawer in which he had placed the waki-zashi—the suicide sword, given to him by Jane.
From the open drawer his eyes turned to the obi, which he had dropped, and then he looked round him, as Dives looks round him in that picture of Teniers, where Dives wakes in Hell.
As he stood, the wind shook the broken lath outside, and played with it. “Tap! tap! tap!”
He saw the sunlit Nikko road, the valley of the crimson azaleas, the Lost One who had loved him as no other being had loved him—the one he had lost for ever.
She was dead, yet it was denied to him to find her, and clasp her in his arms, and die with her.
Death was nothing, but never to find her again, never to see her again, or touch her small body, that was an agony far beyond death.