Doctor Brinkerhoff looked after him, his old eyes dim. The impassable chasm of the years lay between him and Lynn—a measureless gulf which no trick of magic might span. “If I had it to do over,” said the Doctor, to himself,—“if I had my lost youth—and was not afraid,—things would not be as they are now.”
Margaret saw him from her upper window, and something tightened round her heart, as though some iron hand held it unpityingly. Then came a great throb of relief, because it was Aunt Peace, instead of Lynn.
Iris, too, had seen him as he left the house. She perceived that he was eager to get away—that only a sense of the fitness of things kept him from running and whistling as was his wont. From the first, she had known that it was nothing to him. “He has no heart,” she said to herself. “He is as cold as—as cold as Aunt Peace is now.”
Slow torture held the girl in a remorseless gird. Dimly, she knew that some day there would be a change—that it could not always be like this. Sometime it must ease, and each throb would be sensibly less of a hurt—just a little easier to bear. With rare prescience, also, she knew that nothing in the world would ever be the same again—that she had come to the dividing line. One reaches it as a light-hearted child; one crosses it—a woman.
“No,” said the Doctor, for the fiftieth time, “there is nothing you can do. Mrs. Irving and Miss Temple are not receiving. Yes, we expected it. The end was very peaceful and she did not suffer at all. Yes, it is surely a comfort to know that. The arrangements are all made. Yes, thank you, we have the music provided for. It was kind of you to come, and the ladies will be grateful for your sympathy. Who shall I say called?”
Behind him were the portraits, ranged in orderly rows. Some were old and others young, but all had gone the way that Peace should go to-morrow. Dumbly, the Doctor wondered if the same remorseless questioning had gone on every time there had been a death in the old house, and, if so, why the very floors did not cry out in protest at the desecration.
Life, that mystery of mysteries! The silence at the end and the beginning is far easier to understand than the rainbow that arches between. Man, the epitome of his forbears,—more than that, the epitome of creation,—stands by himself—the riddle of the universe.
The house in some way seemed alive, in pitiful contrast to its mistress, who lay upstairs, spending her last night in the virginal whiteness of her chamber. To-night there, and to-morrow night——
Doctor Brinkerhoff, unable to bear the thought, recoiled as if from an unexpected blow. Was it fancy, or did the painted lips of the young officer in the uniform of the Colonies part in an ironical smile?