"Gabrielle, is this your love? You know that Life is now my prison. Return! Return!"
If human effort could have torn my own soul from my body, then, there, I would have wrecked my substance, and flown with her in the cosmic tide of the disembodied. But human effort waits only on the decrees of Fate. It was not to be. I still saw with enthralled eyes the rising figures of Quintado and of Gabrielle. The irretrievable misery of it half maddened me, and again I cried out, with might and main rending the silences around me with the fierce invocation: "God! God! Give me back my sister!"
And then, benumbed with wonder, I saw the shades part, and slowly descending upon me, the figure of Gabrielle, like some floating dream of shape, drew near. It stopped above my head, and the face bent forward, and the lips—those sweet lips of truth and innocence—opened, and to me came the REVELATION.
"Alfred! Alfred! There can be no separation between loving hearts. I shall always be with you. But it is appointed that there are times and seasons. I am called, you remain. Life and Death have no meaning to the immortal soul. It is in both the same. The vapor that melts in the air is still there; a moment's colder breath might bring it back again. Perhaps I shall return, perhaps not, perhaps you may come to me, but through the eternal series of designs that God weaves with Life and Death an immortal purpose runs. It is the Salvation of Mankind. Watch how even now it shall be upon the earth. These spirits, rent from all they loved, in this ministration of their return, have sanctified the hearts of men to a new consecration of endless PEACE upon the earth. The Death of thousands brings with it the irreversible decree of the Life of Reconciliation."
The voice was heard no more. With the rapture of my love I watched the last ghostly remnant of that beloved being fade upward, into the swiftly racing tides, forever out of my sight. On me the cruel burden of taking up life alone had been insupportably laid. I think that it was then that I ran forward and gazed around the hillside, looking towards Vitry, and searched the sky. There above me fled the last meteoric trails, like phosphorescent skeins. I could see the eclipsed stars reappear through them. It was—so I recall it—as if a cupola of shining walls opened in the very centre of the Firmament, and, rushing through it, a tiny spark. Was that the fleeting soul of Gabrielle? Strained beyond endurance, agonized by the vehement protest of my despairing heart, the hope of even then rejoining her roused me to a sudden murderous resolve. I had seen a shepherd's knife left in the sheepcote. That should cut the loosening knot of Life. I found it, and then—there arose somewhere from illimitable distances, and from the neighborhoods about me, an unearthly muffled groan, like a cry buried in the ground, and heard in stifled shouts. It froze the blood, for it half seemed as if the corpses of the slain everywhere about, were speaking from their graves, the raucous outcry of mutilated bodies. A moment later I forgot my suicidal intent. The sentence from Isaiah that Quintado had spoken to Gabrielle, rang in my ears; rang like a trumpet.
"And they shall be brought down, and shall speak out of the ground, and their speech shall be low out of the dust, and their voice shall be, as of one that hath a familiar spirit, out of the ground, and their speech shall whisper out of the dust."
The great groan was the utterance of the embattled millions, coming to consciousness.