At last the day drew near of whose approach all who had visited the cottage knew but of which they had schooled themselves not to think.
January 1847 was waning. For many days the ground had not been seen. The branches of the cherry trees gleamed—not with flowers, but with icicles—as they leaned against the windows of the bed-chamber under the roof. Sometimes as the winter blast stirred them, they knocked against the panes with a sound the knuckles of a skeleton might have made. There was not the slightest suggestion of the soft-voiced "Ligeia" in that harsh, horrible sound.
Upon the bed the girl-wife lay well nigh as still and as white as the snow outside. Now and again she coughed—a weak, ghostly sort of cough. Over her wasted body, in addition to the thin bed-clothing, lay her husband's old military cape. Against her breast nestled Catalina, purring contentedly while she kept the heart of her mistress warm a little longer. Near the foot of her bed the Mother sat—a more perfect picture than ever of the Mater Dolorosa—chafing the tiny cold feet; at the head her husband bent over her and chafed her hands. About the room, but not near enough to intrude upon the sacred grief of the stricken mother and husband, sat several of the good women whose friendship had been the mainstay of the three. Through the window, gaining brilliance from the ice-laden branches outside, fell the rays of the setting sun, glorifying the room and the bed. Scarce a word was spoken, but upon the request of the dying girl for music one of the visitors began to sing in low, tremulous tones, the beautiful old hymn, "Jerusalem the Golden." To the man, bowed beneath his woe as it had been a physical weight, the words came as a knell, and a blacker despair than ever settled upon his wild eyes and haggard face. To his dying wife they were a promise—the smile upon her lip and the look of wonder in her eyes showed that she was already beholding the glories of which the old hymn told.
And so wandered her spirit out of the cold and the want and the gloom that had darkened and chilled the Valley of the Many-Colored Grass, into the regions of "bliss beyond compare."
But her husband, left behind, was as the man in his own story, "Silence," who sat upon a rock—the gray and ghastly rock of "Desolation." "With his brow lofty with thought and his eyes wild with care and the fables of sorrow and weariness and disgust with mankind written in furrows upon his cheek," he sat upon the lonely grey rock and leaned his head upon his hand and looked out upon the desolation. She was no more—no more!—the maiden who lived with no other thought than to love and be loved by him;—his wife—in all the storm and stress of his troubled life his true heartsease!
Out of the desolation he perceived a thing that was formless, that was invisible—but that was appalling—silence. Silence that made him shrink and quake—he that had loved, had longed for silence! Silence would crush him now. And solitude!—how often he had craved it! He had solitude a plenty now.
Like a hunted animal, he looked about for a refuge from the Silence and the Solitude that gave him chase, but he knew that however fast he might flee they would be hard on his heels.
How white she was—and how still! Nevermore to hear the sounds of her low sweet voice, nevermore to hear her merry laughter, nevermore her light foot-step that—like her voice and her laugh—was music to his ears! Nevermore!—for she was wrapped in the Silence—the last great silence of all.
Nevermore would she sit beside him as he worked, or plant flowers about the door, or lay her hand in his and explore with him the wonderful dream-valley; nevermore lay her sweet lips upon his or raise the snow-white lids from her eyes and shine on him from under their long, jetty fringes. Henceforth a Solitude as vast as the Silence would be his portion.
Their sweet friend Marie Louise Shew robed her for the tomb and over the snow they bore her to rest in a vault in the village churchyard.