“And a madman still,” he added, laughing sadly to himself.
Then raising the lid of the urn, he looked in. The white ash filled but half the little urn. Gently thrusting in his hand, he let the ashes sift through his long fingers over and over again, and as he did so he gazed at the Beautiful Face upon the wall....
After a while he replaced the lid upon the urn, and lay back with closed eyes—thinking of it all.
Presently the lawyer returned softly into the room, and fancying him asleep, was about to leave again, but Wasteneys had heard him.
“Is that you?” he said. “Come to me. I have said good-bye. You know where my ashes are to lie.”
The lawyer assented, locking the urn once more in the cabinet, and bringing the key back again to Wasteneys. The little urn, as I have said, was as yet only half filled.
The two friends sat silent together for a long time, saying nothing, for there was nothing to say. Both knew all.
After a while the poet turned to his friend. “Will you ask Isabel, my wife, to come to me?” he said. And presently there entered the room a woman so fragilely beautiful that she seemed to be made of moonbeams. She was indeed, compared to the Beautiful Face on the wall, as the moon to the sun. That, alas! had been her place in the poet’s life. She had been the moon to the Beautiful Face. And yet, in his strange way, the poet had always loved her, deep down——
“Very deep down!” she used to say sometimes, with a sad smile.
As she came and sat beside him, he took her face tenderly in his hands, and looked and looked into her fairy blue eyes without a word. A curiously lined face it was for so young a woman—all beautiful silver lines filled with delicate refinements of thought and feeling. “Suffering,” said the ignorant world, attributing these silver lines to the unfaithfulness of the poet. Yet, as a matter of fact, Isabel’s face had been hardly less lined when she was twenty. The poet and the years together had barely added half a dozen lines. In fact, nature had seemed to intend, when making Isabel’s face, to show that beauty is something more than velvet skin and dreamy eyes and rounded contours; to prove that nothing is needed for the making of a beautiful face but—light. Isabel’s face, indeed, seemed made of light. The lines in it were like rays of brightness, and her eyes like deep springs of purest radiance.