Thus ended the story of my marriage with Blanche Aleys.
BOOK II
CHAPTER I
THE NEW WORLD
They were forever silent now, who, but a breath before, had been so full of life and the stir of mortal passion; Deleroy dead beneath the cloak upon the floor, Blanche dead in the oaken chair. We who remained alive were silent also. I glanced at Kari’s face; it was as that of a stone statue on a tomb, only in it his large eyes shone, noting all things and, as I imagined in my distraught fancy, filled with triumph and foreknowledge. Considering it in that strange calm of the spirit which sometimes supervenes on great and terrible events that for a while crush its mortality from the soul and set it free to marvel at the temporal pettiness of all we consider immediate and mighty, I wondered what was the aspect of my own.
At the moment, I, who on this day had passed the portals of so many emotions: that of the lover’s longing for his bride won at last, only to be lost again, that of acute and necessary business, that of the ancient joy of battle and vengeance wreaked upon an evil man; that of the unshuttering of my own eyes to the flame of a hellish truth, that of the self-murder and turning to cold clay before those same eyes of her whom I had hoped to clasp in honest love—I, I say, felt as though I, too, were dead. Indeed all within was dead, only the shell of flesh remained alive, and in my heart I echoed the words of my old uncle and of a wiser than he who went before him—“Vanity of vanities! All is vanity!”
It was Kari who spoke first, Kari as ever calm and even-voiced, saying in his broken English of which but the substance is recorded:
“Things have happened, good things I hold, though you, Master, may think otherwise for a little while. Yet in this rough land of savages and small justice these things may bring trouble. That lord brought a writing,” and he nodded towards the document on the table, “and talked of death for you, Master—not for himself. And the lady, while she still lived, she say—‘Fly, fly or die!’ And now?” and he glanced at the two bodies.