Dazed and trembling, Mrs. Doring was about to start when Prescott entered, and he volunteered to accompany her.
They found everything calm and orderly. The doctor was noted for keeping an even mind under all circumstances, and had permitted no intrusion of the curious and idle. He opened the door to an inner room, and led them to a sofa on which the dead man lay awaiting the coroner. With professional coolness the doctor turned down the sheet, saying, “He was already gone when they brought him in.”
In very truth he had become a child again. The fair weak face wore a look of youth and innocence. The light, shiny hair, scarcely ruffled from its careful arrangement of the morning, had on it baby tints of sunshine, and under the blonde moustache lurked the remnant of the childishly sweet smile that lighted his face when Mrs. Doring saw him go singing down the stairs two hours before. The placid form before her was his semblance, indeed, but it was not he. That mysterious fact Cartice realized in an instant. There were his clay garments, but all that was he was gone.
The funeral took place two days later. Mrs. Doring could not be present, for she was unable to raise her head from the pillow. Thoughts of the great mystery which had just touched elbows with her haunted her all the time. The “narrow sea that divides the heavenly land from ours,” what was it like? What shore touched it on the other side? Was there a heavenly land or any land beyond that dark ocean? And where was Colonel Layton now?
No answer to these perplexing queries came. And yet, perhaps an answer always comes could we but read it. Perhaps it came to Mrs. Doring, for as she lay there wondering about it, a calm came upon her, and in imagination she saw Colonel Layton as he stood at the top of the stairs on the day they talked together about this greatest of all problems, and heard him say, “I am not afraid. It seems all right.” Far down within herself she heard the echo, “all right! all right!” and then she saw again the Colonel’s childish smile, and he repeated assuringly, “Yes, it’s all right.”
Chrissalyn went to live with a friend and determined to find a way to earn her bread. The end of one path through which she had sought happiness was reached and only sadness and disappointment were there. Now she must look for others, for the endless quest goes on, clear to the grave itself and possibly beyond. When she with the last scrap of her possessions was gone and her apartments left solitary, Cartice felt a sense of desolation greater than she had known since she and the Butterfly had been friends. Life is as inexorable as death; its separations are often more cruel.
In the office of the Register the final fate of man was a subject often under discussion. Prescott snorted in derision at any mention of a continuance of life in a sphere invisible to us now. “We die and turn to dust, like the worm,” he said. Cartice held to the hope of something more than we have here—a sequel to this life, or a continuation of it, but she could advance no basis for the hope which he considered tenable.
Well-known figures in the state and community passed out of sight into the silence of the grave every now and then, and it was the Register’s custom to speak with unvarnished frankness about their lives. Without doubt this, in many instances, added to the terrors of death, for Prescott was capable of very rough surgery in his post-mortem analysis. He flouted the old injunction, “speak no ill of the dead,” saying that mere dying did not excuse a man’s misdeeds, nor make an angel of him, and that they should reap an obituary harvest of whatever crop they had sown. Not even the time-honored “regular subscriber” or “constant reader,” had immunity from this harsh ruling. He was willing to take the same medicine himself when his time came, and it should never be said of him that he was in the habit of plastering people all over with laudatory lies just because they had died. “O yes,” he would snarl, “lots of men serve the devil all their lives, and then expect newspapers to put plenty of heaven in the truck they print about them when they die. But the Register isn’t conducted that way. They shall get in it what they have earned, no more, no less.” Truly, many found, even without dying, that it was a terrible thing to fall into the too truthful hands of the Register’s editor.