§13
When she was in her room again she began to think of Sir Isaac and more particularly of that last fixed stare of his....
She was impelled to go and see him, to see for herself that he was peaceful and no longer a figure of astonishment. She went slowly along the corridor and very softly into his room—it remained, she felt, his room. They had put candles about him, and the outline of his face, showing dimly through the linen that veiled it, was like the face of one who sleeps very peacefully. Very gently she uncovered it.
He was not simply still, he was immensely still. He was more still and white than the moonlight outside, remoter than moon or stars.... She stood surveying him.
He looked small and pinched and as though he had been very tired. Life was over for him, altogether over. Never had she seen anything that seemed so finished. Once, when she was a girl she had thought that death might be but the opening of a door upon a more generous feast of living than this cramped world could give, but now she knew, she saw, that death can be death.
Life was over. She felt she had never before realized the meaning of death. That beautiful night outside, and all the beautiful nights and days that were still to come and all the sweet and wonderful things of God’s world could be nothing to him now for ever. There was no dream in him that could ever live again, there was no desire, no hope in him.
And had he ever had his desire or his hope, or felt the intensities of life?
There was this beauty she had been discovering in the last few years, this mystery of love,—all that had been hidden from him.
She began to realize something sorrowful and pitiful in his quality, in his hardness, his narrowness, his bickering suspicions, his malignant refusals of all things generous and beautiful. He made her feel, as sometimes the children made her feel, the infinite pity of perversity and resistance to the bounties and kindliness of life.
The shadow of sorrow for him came to her at last.