And he at once disappeared in the darkness. I gazed into the shadows which had swallowed him up, and then suddenly closed the door;—but too late, for it seemed to me that some one had come in, an invisible some one who took his way up the stairs, through the passage, to the room. I tried to cry out, but my lips uttered no sound; and I thought to myself that if I had cried out they would have thought me crazy. I stood there paralysed, knowing that some one had come into the house before me, and that I could not drive out him who was there, before me, who would not go out, who was noiselessly going up the stairs, his actual presence unsuspected by all but me.
Now I understood the true, the irreparable meaning of what I had vaguely seen without admitting that I saw it. That poor stammering creature had said “He was a man,” speaking of my father in the past tense, speaking of my father as if my father was no longer living. Then that invisible presence which had come in by the open door was Death. For the first time it seemed to me an active thing, for the first time Death seemed to me—there is no other word—alive. Until that moment I had attached no importance to its acts. And in my horror and impotence, I stood there, my arms hanging helpless at my sides.
Long ago, when we had been in danger of losing the house, I had been born into the unknown sense of grief; now I was born into the sense of death. And I felt all the cruelty of the parting, before it had come to pass.
As in that long ago time, I fled into the garden and threw myself upon the grass. The night was there before me; the earth was cold and seemed to repel me. The wind which had risen was wrenching the branches of the chestnut trees, and they groaned, uttering lamentations. Especially one of them, the one of the breach in the wall, never ceased moaning, and I thought to see it fall. I recalled to mind some that I had seen in the forest of the Alpette after a storm, prone upon the ground, at such length that the eye was astonished on measuring them from root to tip. And I recalled, too, that picture in my Bible of the tall cedars of Lebanon lying on the ground—those that were destined to be used in building the Temple in Jerusalem.
The beams of the roof seemed to be complaining, like the trees, and I expected to see the house fall into a heap. What would there be to wonder at, if the house did fall, since my father was dying?
IV
THE HEIR
SORROWS like these have their own modesty, and I throw a veil over mine....
I resume my story at the time when we resumed our ordinary life. The first meal by ourselves consecrated its permanence, after the comings and goings of relatives and friends were over, with all the confusion inseparable from a house of mourning. My brother Stephen, who had hastened from Rome, had gone back to complete his theological studies. Mélanie was doubtless finding expression for her own grief by more complete devotion to all the sorrows of the hospital, and Bernard, far away, had acknowledged the blow by a brief cablegram in which we could measure his affection. We others, who remained, could now count one another like the wounded after defeat.
The bell rang and we must go to the dining-room. Grandfather came in from his walk; he was bent and broken, he leant upon his cane, bemoaning himself about something, I can not tell what. Something had gone wrong, he himself could not quite understand.
“Ah!” he sighed, all out of breath. “I thought I should never get back to the house.”