“Oh! my beloved!” said Dunoisse brokenly. “If you have never loved me I am glad of it for your sake!... But, remembering that evening in the Cemetery at Scutari—can you tell me truly that it is so?”
“I will answer you in a letter,” she said, “when I have gathered strength sufficiently. How soon you will receive the letter, I cannot say!” She added, when they had sat together for a little space in silence: “Now bid me good-by and leave me. Never seek me!—do not follow me! If you can, find earthly happiness elsewhere. For we are set apart while we both live, by the Will of God. Nevertheless, in His good time, and in the place He has appointed, I believe that you and I shall meet again!”
And so he had left her, and never since seen her. Yearly a letter from her had reached him, but it had never been the letter. Now you know why Dunoisse would not consent to die. He was waiting for the letter that told him of her love.
He had already waited fifty-six years. Well! he would go on waiting.... The letter was sure to come.
CVI
She died in August, and the letter would never come now....
September paved the chestnut-woods with golden leaves, the ripened blackberries vanished before the onslaughts of children and the attack of birds. The snow-peaks turned into pyramids of ice, blizzards swept screaming down the gorges, there were frost-frogs in the valleys and icicles upon the edges of the rocks over which the waterfalls hung in blocks of frozen foam. The Promenade of Zeiden grew empty—people had migrated to Davos or Grindelwald. The familiar figure of the old white-haired man in the Bath-chair had not been seen for many a day. For he lay in his large bedroom at the Home, dying at ninety-three years of age, of a complaint the existence of which is, by the physicians, denied....
He was tended with the kindest care. Nor, when the land and submarine telegraphs tapped out the news East, West, North, and South, and the Wireless sent it to the ears of the helmeted operators in the Marconi Installation Room on the upper decks of the great passenger steamers, hurrying with their human cargo to distant countries, did expressions of sympathy fail.
People were very sorry. Extremely sorry. Though hardly anybody had ever in their lives before heard the name of the dying man. Of the Society of the Crimson Cross, they knew quite certainly. An excellent institution. Had done heaps of good. But they had rather imagined it to have been founded by the Prince Consort in 1859, if they were English; and if they happened to be Germans, they boldly said that the-never-to-be-sufficiently-esteemed and-now-with-his-mourned-ancestors-and-beloved-wife-reposing Imperial Chancellor, Prince Bismarck, had laid the egg of the idea that another less eminent had hatched.... Italians draped with fine art their own innate convictions that Garibaldi or the Pope was responsible. French people shrugged, superior, for even an Austro-Helvetian, born and bred in Paris, becomes by the most subtle of transitions, a Frenchman of France.
Several Crowned Heads and Scientific Associations cabled sympathetic messages, the Council of the Society of the Crimson Cross pressed for the latest bulletin, the State Council of Widinitz despatched a delegate; the Mayor of Zeiden, with two of his town councillors, made a visit of ceremony to the dying man’s bedside.... Two Little Sisters of the Poor were with him—mild-eyed religious who had taken it in turns for years with others of their Community, to visit him daily. Lights were burning between vases of flowers before a Crucifix set upon a little white-draped table. They were ending the recitation of the Sorrowful Mysteries of the Rosary as the officials were ushered in.