Father Cyprian Hammond came to see her sometimes, and sat long and talked delightfully; but he, who was past master in the art of making proselytes, could get no nearer the mind of this woman than he had got a year before. Whatever her burden was, she would not open her heart to him. Whatever her sense of sin, she would not ask him for absolution. It was in vain that he told her what his Church could do for a penitent—the ineffable power possessed by that one Holy and Infallible Church to heal the wounded heart and to bring the strayed lamb back to the Shepherd's arms.
"Try to think of yourself in the wilderness and that divine Shepherd seeking for you," said the priest gently.
But Father Cyprian, with all his gifts, could not win her to confide in him. It was only to Francis Symeon, the spiritualist, that she ever spoke of the thoughts that filled her mind, as she sat alone in the room that had been her husband's, dreaming over one of the books he had loved. Her intimacy with Francis Symeon had grown closer since the world outside that quiet room had closed upon her for ever, since he knew and she knew that the transition from the known to the unknown life was very near. He had told her the story of his own sorrows, the tragedy of love and death that had made him a mystic and a dreamer, whose hopes and convictions the world scoffed at.
Life had given him all the things he desired, and last, best gift of all, the love of a perfect woman, who alone could make that life complete for himself and for others, lifting him for ever above the sphere of sensual joys and worthless ambitions. It was she who had taught him to look beyond the present life, and to consider the beauty of the world no more than a screen that concealed the glory of diviner worlds, hidden from them only while they were moving along their earthly pilgrimage, always looking beyond, always dreaming of something better.
The day came, without an hour's warning, when he was to be told that her pilgrimage was nearly done. The after-life was calling her. The divine companions were beckoning.
All that there had been of high enthusiasm and scorn of life left him in that moment. He was as weak and helpless as a mother with her only child, her infant child threatened by death. The dreamer was no more a dreamer; and only the earthly lover remained, he who was to have been her husband. He hung upon moments, he listened to every failing breath, he counted time by her ebbing strength and the opinions of doctors. He lived only to watch and to listen beside her sofa, or in the curtained twilight of her sick room, when the pretty garden-parlour was no longer possible. Wherever she was carried in the vain pursuit of life he went with her. The time of alternating hope and dread lasted nearly a year.
"It was our union," he told Vera. "It was my only marriage. As I sat day after day with her hand clasped in mine I knew that this was all I could ever know of marriage or of woman's love. From the day of her death I had done with the world; and all the rest of my days were given up to searching for those who had gone—for those who were in her world, not in mine. I have waited at the door, as your dog waits when he cannot see you, and as he believes that you are there, on the other side, so I believe and know that she is near me; and my days have known no other business or interest than my patient search into the books of all ages and nations that help the science of the future life, and the society of those people whom you have met in my rooms, and who think and feel as I do. I am a rich man, but I only use money for the relief of distress; and I have allowed myself no luxury or indulgence beyond my books, and the rooms that are large enough to hold them and me."
The hospital nurse sat in the adjoining room, with the door ajar. So far, and so far only, was the patient allowed the privilege of solitude. Someone must be always there, within hearing. When she had a visitor the door might be shut, but not otherwise.
"There must be something very dreadful the matter with me," she said when Dr. Tower insisted upon this point.