A Man and a Woman

by Stanley Waterloo

Murderous Death has certain kindnesses in his killings. Just before the end is peace. The struggles of this strong man became something fearful as the lungs congested, and the most powerful of anti-pyretics ceased to have effect, and then came the peace which follows nature's virtual surrender, the armistice of the moment. What trick of reversion to first impressions comes, and what causes it, none have yet explained, but long before the time of Falstaff men, dying, had babbled o' green fields. Grant Harlson, now, was surely dying. The physicians had warned us all, and we were all about his bedside. As for me, thank God, the tears could come as they did to the children. But there were none upon the cheeks of Jean. Her sweet face was as if of stone; whiter than that of the man in the bed.

The convulsions had ceased, but his mind was wandering and his speech was rambling. It was easy to tell of what he was thinking. He was a little boy in the woodland home with his mother again, and was telling her delightedly of what he had seen and found, and of the yellow mandrake apples he had stored in a hollow log. She should help him eat them. And then the scene would shift, and he was older, and we were together in the fields. He called to me excitedly to take the dog to the other side of the brush-heap, for the woodchuck was slipping through that way! There was the old merry ring in his voice, and I knew where he was and how there came to him, in fancy, the sweet perfumes of the fields, and how his eyes, which were opened wide but saw us not, were blessed with all the greenness and the glory of the summer of long ago. Then his manner changed, and the word "Jean" came softly to his lips, and again I knew they were camping out together, and he was teaching to his wife the pleasant mysteries of the forest, and all woodcraft. There was love in his tones and in his features. The breast of the woman holding his hand heaved, and the pallor on her face grew more.

There was another struggle for breath, then a desperate one, and with its end came consciousness. Grant smiled and spoke faintly:

"It must he pretty near the end. I am very tired. Jean, darling, get closer to me. Kiss me."

She leaned over and kissed him passionately. He smiled again, then feebly took one of her little hands in each of his and lifted them to his face and kissed them; then held them down upon his eyes. There was a single heave of his great chest, and he was dead.

And the woman who fell to the floor was, apparently, as lifeless as the silent figure on the bed.

She was not dead. We carried her to her own room—hers and his, with the dressing-rooms attached—and she woke at last to a consciousness of her world bereft of one human being who had been to her nearly all there was. She was not as we had imagined she would be when she recovered. She was not hysterical, nor did she weep. She was singularly quiet. But that set, thoughtful look had never left her face. She seemed some other person. I talked to her of what was to be done. What a task that was, for I could scarcely utter words myself. She suddenly brightened when I spoke of the crematory and what Grant's wishes were.

"It must be as he wished," she said—"as he wished, in each small detail." Then she said no more, and all the rest was left to me.

She was quiet and grave at the funeral of her husband and my friend. She shed no tears; she uttered not a word. She listened quietly while I told her how I had arranged to carry out all his wishes about himself, or, rather, about his tenement. She did not accompany me. There came with me on that journey only the Ape, who was red of eye and vainly trying to conceal it all. How the youth was suffering!

I came to the home one day with an urn of bronze. There were only ashes in it, clean and white. Jean looked at them and asked me to go away. The urn was put, at her request, in her own apartments. It was sealed and stood upon a mantel of the room in which she slept. I do not believe she thought much of the ashes as representing the man who had gone away from her. She may have thought of them as precious, just as she did of a pair of gloves she had mended for him just before his illness, and which she kept always with her, but I believe that of the ashes, as of the gloves, she thought only of what her love had used in life and left behind. That was the total of it. It was the heart, the soul, the knowing of her that was gone.