May rescue thee from earth’s embrace,
And rhyme and revel with the dead.”
He repeated the last stanza aloud and raised the goblet in both hands.
“Rhyming and revelling—what else counts? To drink the wine of youth to the dregs and then—good night! Is there anything beyond? Who knows? He who cannot tell! Who tells us there is? He who does not know!”
Did the dead know?
He set the wine down, pushing it from him, sprang up, seized the candle and entered the room on the other side of the corridor. The bed-curtains were drawn close and a Bible lay open on the night-stand. He wondered with a kind of impersonal pity if the book had held comfort for her at the last.
He held the candle higher so its rays lighted the page: But the Lord shall give thee there a trembling heart, and failing of eyes, and sorrow of mind.... In the morning thou shall say, Would God it were even! and at even thou shalt say, Would God it were morning!
It stared at him plainly in black letters, an age-old agony of wretchedness. Had this been the keynote of her lonely, fitful, vehement life? Had years of misery robbed her—as it had robbed him, too? A distressed doubt, like a dire finger of apprehension, touched him; he put out his hand and drew aside the curtains.
Looking, he shuddered. Death had lent her its mystery, its ineffaceable dignity. He recognized it with a new and inexplicable feeling, like rising from the grave. Back of the placid look, in abeyance, in the stirlessness of the unringed hands—she had lost her wedding-ring years ago—some quality, strange, unintimate, lay confronting him. He remembered his words to Hobhouse in the street—words that had not been cold on his lips when he read Fletcher’s message. Ever since, they had lain rankling like a raw burn in some crevice of his brain. “Lame brat!” And yet, beneath her frantic rages, under the surface he had habitually disregarded, what if in her own way she had really loved him!
A clutching pain took possession of him, a sense of physical sickness and anguish. He dropped the curtain, and stumbled from the room, down the long stair, calling for the footman.