Next time I saw her she was dead. In our hateful English fashion, they had shut her up in a dark room, and we had to take candles to see her. I shall never forget the moment when my eyes first rested on that awful snow-white sheet, so faintly indented by the fragile form beneath, lines very fragile, but oh! so hard and cold, like the indentations upon frozen snow; never forget my strange unaccountable terror when he on one side and I on the other turned down the icy sheet from her face. But terror changed to awe and reverence, as her face came upon us with its sweet sphinx-like smile. Lying there, with a little gold chain round her neck and a chrysanthemum in the bosom of her night-gown, there was a curious regality about her, a look as though she wore a crown our eyes were unable to see. And while I gazed upon her, the sobs of my friend came across the bed, and as he called to her I seemed to hear the eternal Orpheus calling for his lost Eurydice. Poor lad!—poor maid! Here, naked and terrible, was all the tragedy of the world compressed into an hour, the Medusa-face of life that turns the bravest
to stone. Surely, I felt, God owed more than He could ever repay to these two lovers, whom it had been so easy to leave to their simple joys. And from that night to this I can never look upon my white bed without seeing afar off the moment when it, too, will bear the little figure of her I love best in the world, bound for her voyage to the Minotaur Death; just as I never put off my clothes at night, and stretch my limbs down among the cool sheets, without thinking of the night when I shall put off my clothes for the last time and close my eyes for ever.
LECTOR. But, my friend, this is to feel too much; it is morbid.
SCRIPTOR. Morbid! How can one really feel and not be morbid? If one be morbid, one can still be brave.
LECTOR. But surely, true-lover as you are, it would be a joy to you to think that this terrible parting of death will not be final. We cannot love so well without hoping that we may meet our loved ones somewhere after death.
SCRIPTOR. Hopes! wishes! desires! What of them? We hope, we desire all things.
Who has not cried for the moon in his time? But what is the use of talking of what we desire? Does life give us all we wish, however passionately we wish it, and is Death any more likely to listen to the cry of our desires? Of course we wish it, wish it with a pathetic urgency which is too poignant to bear, and which the wise man bravely stifles. It would all be different if we knew.
LECTOR. But does not science even, of late, hold out the promise of its probability?—and the greatest poets and thinkers have always been convinced of its truth.
SCRIPTOR. The promise of a probability! O my Lector, what a poor substitute is that for a certainty! And as for the great men you speak of, what does their 'instinctive' assurance amount to but a strong sense of their own existence at the moment of writing or speaking? Does one of them anywhere assert immortality as a fact—a fact of which he has his own personal proof and knowledge—a scientific, not an imaginative, theological fact? Arguments on the subject are naught. It is waste of time to read them; unsupported by fact,
they are one and all cowardly dreams, a horrible hypocritical clutching at that which their writers have not the courage to forgo.