She caught that up breathlessly. "Make it right for Karl?"
"You say he was always cut off just this side of achievement. Then you achieve something which will at least show what he was able to inspire."
That sunk so deep that her face went very white.
"But you do not understand," she whispered passionately. "You mean that I should paint—and I tell you I cannot. I tell you it is dead!"
"Not necessarily that you should paint. Not just now, if you cannot. But come back into touch with life. Do something to force yourself back into it, and then let life itself show you that the other things are not dead after all."
"But I do not want to!" came bitterly from her.
"Sometimes," he said, with more of his usual manner, "we do things we do not want to, and through the doing of them, we get to want to. Do something!—whether you want to or not. Stop doing futile things and dwelling on the sense of their futility. Why, Ernestine, come up to the hospital and go to work as a nurse! Heaven knows I never expected to advise you to do that, but anything—painting pictures or scrubbing floors—that will bring you back to a sense of living—the obligations of life—show you that something is yours that life and death and hell can't take from you!"
And still he sat there, thinking. In just a moment he must go—go away leaving her alone with the years which awaited her. For just an instant it seemed as though all of the past and all of the future were in his keeping. What word leave with her? He knew by her passionate breathing that he had reached her. And now he was going away. Could he have done more—reached deeper? In this, too, had he failed? What word leave with her? His heart was so full of many things that his mind did not know what to choose. He remembered the day she had come to him filled with the spirit to ride down an adverse fate and win triumph from defeat. Her splendid spirit then! Would that spirit ever come again? Could it?
Karl was very close in those final moments, and even more close than Karl was the spirit of love. Many precious things seemed in his keeping just then.
"Ernestine," he said at the last, and his face was white and his voice trembled, "you have known. It came to you. You had it. It came to you as June to the roses,—in season, right. I grant you it was short. I grant you it was hard to see it go. But you had it! Say that to yourself when you go to sleep at night. Say it to yourself when you wake in the morning. And some day you will come to see what it means just to know that you know, and then your understanding and your heart will go out to all who have never known. You will pity all who scoff and all who yearn, and you will say to yourself: 'The world needs to know more about love. More than knowledge or science or any other thing, the world needs more faith in love.' Then some day you will see that you not only know but have power to make it plain, and you will not hold back any longer then. And there is to be the real victory and completion of Karl Hubers' life!—there the real triumph over fate—that triumph of the spirit of love. I see it now. I see it all now. And my good-bye word to you is just this—I do not believe you are going to withhold from Karl the immortality which should be his."