I
Rachel Marquis paused a moment with her hand on the library-door. She
had had John placed in here because it was the room she herself loved
best, and she knew that it was here she would prefer to sit beside him
in these last hours of waiting. Yet she had hesitated to come down, and
even now, with her hand on the door-knob, she lingered again to
re-strengthen herself before entering. The very unusualness of an
unfamiliar sight in the familiar room would add, she knew, to the sharp
strangeness of the whole event. She almost hoped, as she waited this
moment, for another practical duty of some sort, which would postpone
again her entrance to the room.
But no sound came from any part of the silenced house, and she opened
the door and entered. The long casket stood awkwardly across the blank
fireplace, for she had chosen to give no direction to the undertaker and
he had followed his own professional judgment. Everything was arranged,
however, with a sort of intention which indicated the intrusion of the
professional into the private. In spite of the stronger feeling of the
moment, Rachel Marquis noticed this, with sharp disapproval. But she
went directly to the chair which had been placed beside the casket and
seated herself, bowing her head long on her folded arms before she
looked on the familiar face beside her.
It was now only twenty-four hours since the strange accident had
happened, and she had not yet adjusted herself, even so far as to
determine her fundamental emotion. It was grief, of course, but the
kind or degree of that grief was still undefined. The hours since they
had brought him home had been so full of the unfamiliar practical things
which arise at such a time, of the sudden necessities and small
perplexities which muddle and chafe sorrow, that there had been scarcely
a moment for her to look consciously at the great fact. Even now, as she
covered her eyes, to be the more alone with herself, she felt rather a
welcoming of momentary inactivity, than the relaxation of grief. She
realized, with a sort of pang of disapproval, that she did not need to
relax from any tension of anguish. She did not know what she wished to
say to herself in this communion. She was sorry, bitterly sorry; but
what elements went into the making of that grief?--She could not yet
tell.
So she leaned with covered eyes, almost as if she were waiting for
something outside of herself to give her a cue. As the minutes passed,
however, the great simple fact that John was dead and that his place
beside her would now be empty, engrossed all supplementary feelings, and
her genuine regret had its way. She wept long, and ever more bitterly,
absorbed, as one may be, in a mere physical expression of grief. The
activity of sorrow overcame thought for the time, and left her no energy
for analysis of feeling. Death alone seemed enough to weep over, and her
tears still fell.
At last, as if having reached a natural period, she rose and moved away
to the window and sat down there, in a quiet reverie of sadness. She was
sorry for the life cut off, shocked at the abruptness and completeness
of the tragedy,--John himself, she was sure, the assertive, energizing
John, would have hated this sudden subduing of himself, and she
sympathized with such revolt,--sorry, sorry for it all.
As she thought, she looked gravely out across the garden, the gay
stretch to which John had given so much time. She had never understood
his devotion to that garden. He had not been ready to spend money on
things to give aesthetic pleasure in the house, although in practical
matters he had been willing enough to make outlays, ever since his
business had been secure. She thought of their new car, of the signs of
prosperity in their living. 'Poor John!' she said at last with a deep
sigh, when, aware of the nodding line of rare dahlias on which her eyes
were resting, she thought of all the pains he had taken in the
propagation and selection of them. She had come to recognize this
lavishness of care and money as a sort of blind expression of the one
aesthetic element in his nature, and had felt a quiet approval of it.
'Poor John!' she sighed again, and turned from the window to go.
But even as she did so, the simplicity of her mood passed, and the old
complexity of feeling returned with a keenness which was for the moment
bewildering. As she left the window, the long black shape across the
fireplace confronted her again, and she paused, startled anew; it was so
strange and so tremendous a thing in her room.
For the library was, above everything else in the world, hers. It was
such a room as shows it has been taking on character through succeeding
decades, cumulative of its type, slowly drawing to itself an atmosphere
of fineness and greatness. The credit of it belonged only remotely to
Rachel Marquis. She was the possessor, but not the maker of it. She had
kept it and loved it, but her own contribution to it had been slight. A
few shelves of new books not yet mellowed down to the tone of the
others, standing as if waiting to be proved, and a bit of renewing of
texture here and there, whose freshness showed need of the softening of
time, were the only marks of her hand or taste. But it was such a room
as any lover of the long effects of books would cherish.
In the midst of its harmonies, the heavy black box undoubtedly looked
harsh and intrusive. Rachel recognized, as a sort of confidence with
herself, that bringing it here was an invasion. Because she loved the
room herself she had placed John here, without thought of the
inappropriateness of the act. But now the incongruity of the choice
struck her. Why should he be brought here, she thought pitifully, to the
room he never frequented, where she scarcely welcomed him, she
acknowledged? Why should she sit beside him here, when she had so seldom
done so before? She remembered very well the manner with which he
occasionally sought her here, tentative, unfamiliar, and yet assertive.
She had resented every element of that manner. Anywhere else in the
house he was more nearly himself; here everything she did not desire in
him was accentuated.
It had been, she thought, with an instinctive desire to do the best for
him in every way, that she had directed that he should be placed here;
just as she had ordered everything of the choicest and had given her
most careful attention and taste to every detail. But this thought had
been a failure.
'Poor John!' she said gently once more, with a pity in her thought all
the greater for this very incongruity, as she came over and stood beside
him. But as her eyes rested on his face, she felt almost compelled to
withdraw the phrase. The dead man seemed to allow no such pity. The
unfamiliar in the familiar, which is stranger than a new thing, held her
startled attention as she looked. She had thought that she knew John
Marquis to the last shred of his character, but death seemed to have
laid a fineness she had never known over the stubbornness and
taciturnity of the face. The dignity of the last great experience of
his life seemed to mark him. He seemed to be gathering himself away from
her pitying kindness. Very soon she went out again and closed the door.