Two days later—the day he was to have sailed for India—hurriedly skimming a column of the Times he came upon the news he was looking for.
"It is with much regret that we record the death from bubonic plague of Miss Frida Tancred. It was quite recently that this lady gave up a large part of her fortune to founding the Bacteriological Laboratory in Bombay, more recently still that she distinguished herself by her services to the famine-stricken population of Gujerat. Miss Tancred has added to the immense debt our Indian Empire owes her by this final example of heroic self-sacrifice. It is said that she contracted plague while nursing one of her coolies, who has since recovered."
He bowed his head.
It was not grief he felt, but a savage exultant joy. The world could have no more of her. She was his, in some inviolable, irrevocable way. He knew. He understood her now, clearly and completely.
His joy deepened to a passionless spiritual content; as if in the fulness of his knowledge he had embraced the immortal part of her.
Why had he not understood her long ago? She had never changed. As he had first seen her, playing cards with her father in the drawing-room at Coton Manor, as he had last seen her, pacing the deck of the Windward, intoxicated with her freedom, as he saw her now, bending her head over the plague-poisoned body of the coolie, she was the same tender, resolute, passionate Frida, who ruined her life and glorified it, laid it down and took it up again at her will. And as he saw—would always see her, in this new light of her death, she was smiling, as if she defied him to see anything pathetic in it.
She had loved the world, the mystic maddening beauty of it, the divine darkness and glory of it. She had taken to her heart the rapture and the pain of it. She had stretched out her hands to the unexplored, to the unchanged and changing, the many-faced, incomprehensible, finite, infinite Whole.
And she had flung it all up; for what?
For a 'rickshaw coolie's life?—Or for something—yet—beyond?
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