The following day I left the Sleeping Woods. Raymond Cernay, henceforth guided by unfailing memories, no longer needed my presence.
* * *
I read of his death one morning in the newspapers.
He had been found at nightfall the day before, in a field near the seashore where he experimented with his aeroplane on his lonely flights,—mangled, his shattered machine on top of him. No one, it was at first supposed, had seen the accident, and consequently no details could be learned.
I went to him at once. Admitted to the shed where his body had been placed before the laying-out, I raised the sheet which covered him. He was not disfigured. One could just make out above his right eye a slight bruise. A fracture of the skull and a broken spine, only natural, considering the weight of the motor, had caused his death. But the face, spared by a curious chance, showed no sign of fear, and his serenity was more impressive than any wounds.
On account of the mystery which surrounded his end, and recalling that sorrowful evening when he had struggled against an impulse to kill himself, I wondered if his fall had been voluntary. What he had confided to me at the little lake, came back to me:
“One can not betray his machine, or allow false suspicion to fall upon it. It may make a mistake, but the man that it carries—no—”
Looking for the last time on that countenance, where shone that same peace he had achieved on that night of agony, I was ashamed of my suspicions. Death had overtaken him in midair. It was not he that had sought Death.
The tardy testimony of a little shepherd lad cast a feeble light ta the catastrophe. The boy, seated every day on a rock, where he tended his sheep, had been curiously watching Cernay fly. He had seen him ascend in wide circles like a hawk, until he must have been quite high, because the boy could not hear the buzzing of the screw, so high that the machine touched a cloud and was swallowed up.
“I waited,” said the lad, “and then I saw him further up. At that moment he was right against the sun. Then perhaps he began to come down, but suddenly he fell like a stone. I got up, I screamed, I closed my ears, but still I heard the shock against the earth. Then I ran away with my sheep.”