They went out hand in hand, and when they reached the door, the sun which had been hid burst out as a benediction upon them.
Among the guests one man had stepped in unnoticed and unseen. Why he came he could not tell, for never before did he have any desire to go to the little church.
It was midnight when the news came to him that Tom Travis had returned as from the dead. It was Jud Carpenter who had awakened him that Saturday night to whisper at the bedside the startling news.
But Travis only yawned from his sleep and said: “I've been expecting it all the time—go somewhere and go to bed.”
After Carpenter had gone, he arose, stricken with a feeling he could not describe, but had often seen in race horses running desperately until within fifty yards of the wire, and then suddenly—quitting. He had almost reached his goal—but now one week had done all this. Alice—gone, and The Gaffs—he must divide that with his cousin—for his grandfather had left no will.
Divide The Gaffs with Tom Travis?—He would as soon think of dividing Alice's love with him. In the soul of Richard Travis there was no such word as division.
In the selfishness of his life, it had ever been all or nothing.
All night he thought, he walked the halls of the old house, he ran over a hundred solutions of it in his mind. And still there was no solution that satisfied him, that seemed natural. It seemed that his mind, which had heretofore worked so unerringly, deducing things so naturally, now balked before an abyss that was bridgeless. Heretofore he had looked into the future with the bold, true sweep of an eagle peering from its mountain home above the clouds into the far distance, his eyes unclouded by the mist, which cut off the vision of mortals below. But now he was the blindest of the blind. He seemed to stop as before a wall—a chasm which ended everything—a chasm, on the opposite wall of which was printed: Thus far and no farther.
Think as he would, he could not think beyond it. His life seemed to stop there. After it, he was nothing.
Our minds, our souls—are like the sun, which shines very plainly as it moves across the sky of our life of things—showing them in all distinctness and clearness; so that we see things as they happen to us with our eyes of daylight. But as the sun throws its dim twilight shadows even beyond our earth, so do the souls of men of great mind and imagination see, faintly, beyond their own lives, and into the shadow of things.