"Why?"
"Don't; don't!"
"All right."
They sat still.
And now the horror that had possessed Valentine so utterly began to fade away, making its exit from his body and soul with infinitesimally small steps. At length it had quite gone, and its place was taken by a numb calm, level and still at first, then curiously definite, almost too definite to be calm at all. Gradually this calm withdrew into exhaustion, an exhaustion such as dwells incessantly with the anemic, with those whose hearts beat feebly and whose vitality flickers low to fading. That was like a delicious arrival of death, of death delicate and serene, ivory white and pure, death desirable, grateful. Valentine indeed believed that he was dying, there in the darkness beside his friend, and, impersonally as it seemed, something of him, his brain perhaps, seemed to be floating high up, as a bird floats over the sea, and listening, and noting all that he did in this crisis. This attentive spirit heard a strange movement of his soul in its bodily prison, heard his soul stir, as if waking out of sleep, heard it shift, and rise up slowly, noted its pause of hesitation. Then, as the vitality of the body ebbed lower, there grew in the soul an excitement that aspired like a leaping flame. It was as if a madman, prisoned in his narrow cell in a vast asylum, secluded with his company of phantoms, heard the crackling of the fire that devoured his habitation, and was stirred into an ignorant and yet tumultuous passion. As the madman, with a childish, increasing uneasiness, awed by the sinuous approach of the unseen fire, might pace to and fro, round and round about his cell, so it seemed to this poised, watching faculty of Valentine that his soul wandered in its confined cell of the body, at first with the cushioned softness of an animal, moving mechanically, driven by an endless and unmeaning restlessness, then with an increasing energy, a fervour, a crescendo of endeavour. What drove his soul? Surely it was struggling with an unseen power. And the steady diminuendo of his bodily forces continued, until he was a corpse in which a fury dwelt. That fury was the soul. He had a strange fancy that he, unlike all the rest of humanity, would die, yet still retain his spirit in its fleshy prison, and that the spirit screamed and fought to be free on its wayward pilgrimage to heaven or hell. All its brother and sister spirits had fled, since the beginnings of time, from their bodies at the crisis of dissolution, had gone to punishment or to reward. His soul alone was to meet a different fate, was to be confined in a decaying body, to breathe physical corruption, and to be at home in a crumbling dwelling to which no light, no air, could ever penetrate. And the soul, which knows instinctively its eternal mêtier, rebelled with a fantastic violence. And still, ever, the body died. The pulses ceased from beating. The warm blood was mixed with snow until it grew cold and gradually congealed in the veins. The little door of the heart swung slower and slower upon its hinges, more feebly—more feebly. And then there came a supreme moment. The soul of Valentine, with a frantic vehemence, beat down at last its prison door, and, even as his body died, escaped with a cry through the air.
* * * * *
"Valentine, did you hear that strange cry?"
* * * * *
"Valentine, what was it? I never heard any sound like that before, so thin and small, and yet so horribly clear and piercing; neither like the cry of a child nor of an animal, nor like the wail that could come from any instrument. Valentine, now I see a little flame come from where you are sitting. It's so tiny and faint. Don't you see it? It is floating toward me. Now it is passing me. It's beyond. It's going. There, it has vanished. Valentine! Valentine!"