He did not answer, but deliberately lit his pipe; and though Miss Ley knew it not, his words had the calming effect he foresaw. She brushed away the tears and took his arm. They walked up and down the lawn slowly; but Miss Ley, unused to give way to her emotions, was shaken still, and he felt her trembling.
“It’s just at such times as these that you and I are so utterly helpless. When people’s hearts are breaking for a word of consolation, when they’re sick with fear because of the unknown, we can only shrug our shoulders and tell them that we know nothing. It’s too awful to think that we shall never see again those we have loved so deeply; it’s too awful to think that nothing awaits us but cold extinction. I try to put death from my thoughts—I wish never to think of it; but it’s hateful, hateful. Each year I grow older I’m more passionately attached to life. After all, even if the beliefs of men are childish and untrue, isn’t it better to keep them? Surely superstition is a small price to pay for that wonderful support at the last hour, when all else fades to insignificance. How can people have the heart to rob the simple-minded of that great comfort?”
“But don’t you think most of us would give our very souls to believe? Of course we need it, and sometimes so intensely that we can hardly help praying to a God we know is not there. It’s very hard to stand alone and look forward—without hope.”
They wandered still, and the birds began to sing blithely; Nature awoke from her sleep, slowly, with languid movements. The night was gone, and yet the day was not come. The trees and the flowers stood out with a certain ghostly dimness, and the air in those first moments of dawn was fresh and keen: all things were swathed in a strange violet light that seemed to give new contours and new hues. There was a curious self-consciousness about the morning, and the leaves rustled like animate beings; the sky was very pale, cloudless, gray, and amethystine; and then suddenly a ray of yellow light shot right across it, and the sun rose.
“D’you know,” said Frank, “it seems to me that just as there is an instinct for life there must be an instinct for death also; some very old persons, here and there, long for the release, just as the majority long for existence. Perhaps in the future this will be more common; and just as certain insects, having done their life’s work, die willingly, without regret, from sheer cessation of the wish to live, so it may happen that men, too, will develop some such feeling. And then death will have no terrors, for we shall come to it as joyfully as after a hard day we go to our sleep.”
“And meanwhile?” asked Miss Ley, with a painful smile.
“Meanwhile we must have courage. In our sane moments we devise a certain scheme of life, and we must keep to it in the hour of trouble. I will try to live my life so that when the end comes I can look back without regret, and forward without fear.”
But now the sun flooded the garden with its magnificence, and there was a beauty in the morning that told more eloquently than human words the good lesson that life is to the living and the world is full of joy. Still the birds sang their merry songs—throstle and merle, and finch and twittering sparrow—and the flowers defiant, squandered their perfume. There were roses everywhere, and side by side were the buds and the full-blown blossoms and the dead, drooping splendours of yesterday; the great old trees of the Deanery garden were fresh and verdant as though they had not bloomed and faded for a hundred years; the very air was jocund and gay, and it was a delight merely to stand still and breathe.
But while they walked Miss Ley gave a cry, and leaving Frank’s arm, stepped forward; for Bella was seated on a bench under a tree, with the sun shining full on her face; she stared in front of her with wide-open eyes, unblinded by the brilliance, and the lines of care were suddenly gone from her face. Her expression was radiant, so that for a moment she was a beautiful woman.
“Bella, what is it?” cried Miss Ley. “Bella!”