“Oh, speak! speak!” he moaned aloud. “I weary of those pictures. They are too vast; they crush me. I grow weak. I have no strength left to fight against the power of this fearful life that is discovered. I cannot bear this calm everlasting life. It sucks out my mortality as mists are sucked up by the sun. Become human. Speak. Let me touch your hand. Or be angry. Only cease smiling that awful smile, and take those solemn eyes out of my heart. Oh, my darling, my darling! remember that I am still a man. In pity answer me before I die.”
Then a low and awful cry, and Morris turned to behold Mary his wife. At last she had seen and heard, and read his naked heart. At last she knew him—mad, and in his madness, most unfaithful—a man who loved one dead and dragged her down to earth for company.
Look! there in his charmed and secret sight stood the spirit, and there, over against her, the mortal woman, and he—wavering—he lost between the two.
Certainly he had been sick a long while, since the sun-ray touched the face of the old abbot carved in that corner of the room to support the hammer beam. This, as he had known from a child, only chanced at mid-summer. Mary was bending over him, but he was astonished to find that he could sit up and move. Surely, then, his mind must have been more ill than his body.
“Hush!” she said, “drink this, dear, and go to sleep.”
It was a week after, and Morris had told her all, the kind and gentle wife who was so good to him, who understood and could even smile as he explained, in faltering, shame-heavy words. And he had sworn for her sake and his children’s sake, that he would put away this awful traffic, and seek such fellowship no more.
Nor for six months did he seek it; not till the winter returned. Then, when his body was strong again, the ravening hunger of his soul overcame him, and, lest he should go mad or die of longing, Morris broke his oath—as she was sure he would.
One night Mary missed her husband from her side, and creeping down in the grey of the morning, she found him sitting in his chair in the chapel workshop, smiling strangely, but cold and dead. Then her heart seemed to break, for she loved him. Yet, remembering her promises, and the dust whereof he was made, and the fate to which he had been appointed, she forgave him all.
The search renewed, or the fruit of some fresh discovery—what he sought or what he saw, who knows?—had killed him.
Or perhaps Stella had seemed to speak at last and the word he heard her say was Come!