When Mrs. Lloyd entered the room, the attention of every one was
taken from the dead man on the bed and concentrated upon the woman.
Dr. Story, a nervous, intense, elderly man with a settled frown of
perplexity over keen eyes, which he had gotten from a struggle of
forty years with unanswerable problems of life and death, stepped
towards her hastily. Robert pressed close to her side. Ellen came
behind her, holding in a curious, instinctive fashion to a fold of
the older woman's gown, as if she had been a mother holding back a
child from a sudden topple to its hurt. Everybody expected her to
make some heart-breaking manifestation. She did nothing. At that
moment the sublime unselfishness of the woman, which was her one
strength of character, seemed actually to spread itself, as with
wings, before them all. She moved steadily, close to her husband on
the bed. She gazed at that profile of rigid calmness and enforced
peace, which, although the head lay low, seemed to have an effect of
upward motion, as if it were cleaving the mystery of space. Mrs.
Lloyd laid her hand upon her husband's forehead; she felt a slight
incredulousness of death, because it was still warm. She took his
hands, drew them softly together, and folded them upon his breast.
Then she turned and faced them all with an angelic expression.
"He did not realize it to suffer much?" she said.
"No, Mrs. Lloyd," replied Dr. Story, quickly. "No, I assure you that
he suffered very little."
"He seemed very happy when he died, Aunt Lizzie," said Robert,
huskily.
Mrs. Lloyd looked away from them all around the room. It was a
magnificent apartment. Norman Lloyd had had an artistic taste as
well as wealth. The furnishings had always been rather beyond Mrs.
Lloyd's appreciation, but she admired them kindly. She took in every
detail; the foam of rich curtains at the great windows, the
cut-glass and silver on the dressing-table, the pale softness of a
polar-bear skin beside the bed, the lifelike insistence of the
costly pictures on the walls.
"He's gone where it is a great deal more beautiful," she said to
them, like a child. "He's gone where there's better treasures than
these which he had here."
They all looked at her in amazement. It actually seemed as if, for
the moment, the woman's sole grief was over the loss to her husband
of those things which he had on earth--the treasures of his mortal
state.
Robert took hold of his aunt's arm and led her, quite unresisting,
from the room, and as she went she felt for Ellen's hand. "It is
time she was home," she said to Robert. "Her folks will be worried
about her. She's been a real comfort to me."
It was the first time that Ellen had ever seen death, that she had
ever seen the living confronted with it. She felt as if a wave were
breaking over her own head as she clung fast to Mrs. Lloyd's hand.
"Sha'n't I stay?" she whispered, pitifully, to her. "If I can send
word to my mother--"
"No, you dear child," replied Mrs. Lloyd, "you've done enough, and
you will have to be up early in the morning." Then she checked
herself. "I forgot," said she to Robert; "the factory will be closed
till after the funeral, won't it?"
"Of course it will, Aunt Lizzie."
"And the workmen will be paid just the same, of course," said Mrs.
Lloyd. "Now, can't you take her home, Robert?"
"Oh, don't mind about me," cried Ellen.
"You can have a horse put into the buggy," said Mrs. Lloyd.
"Oh, you mustn't leave her now," Ellen whispered to Robert. "Let
somebody else take me--Dr. James--"
"I would rather you took her," said Mrs. Lloyd. "And you needn't
worry about his leaving me, dear child; the doctor will stay until
he comes back."
As Robert was finally going out his aunt caught his arm and looked
at him with a radiant expression. "He will never know about _me_
now," said she, "and it won't be long before I-- Oh, I feel as if I
had gotten rid of my own death."
She was filled with inexpressible thankfulness that she had herself
to bear what she had dreaded for her husband. "Only think how hard
it would have been for Norman," she said to Cynthia, the next day.
Cynthia looked at her wonderingly. She could have understood this
feeling over a dearly beloved child. "You are a good woman, Lizzie,"
she said, in a tone of pitiful respect.
"Not half as good a woman as he was a man," returned Mrs. Lloyd,
jealously. "Norman wasn't a professor, I know, but he was a
believer. You don't think it is necessary to be a professor in order
to be saved, do you, Cynthia?"
"I certainly do not," Cynthia replied. "I wish you would go and lie
down, Lizzie."
"Oh, I can't. I wouldn't let anybody do these things but me, for the
whole world." Mrs. Lloyd was arranging flowers, tuberoses and white
carnations, in vases, and the whole house was scented with them. She
looked ghastly, yet still unconquerably happy. She had now no reason
to conceal the ravages of disease, and her color was something
frightful. Still, she did not suffer as much, for her mind had
overborne her body to such an extent that she had the mastery for
the time, to a certain extent, of those excruciating stabs of pain.
People looked at her incredulously. They could not believe that she
felt as she talked, that she was as happy and resigned as she
looked, but it was all true. It was either an abnormal state into
which her husband's death had thrown her, or one too normal to be
credited. She looked at it all with a supreme childishness and
simplicity. She simply believed that her husband was in heaven,
where she should join him; that he was beyond all suffering which
might have come to him through her, and all that troubled her was
the one consideration of his having been forced to leave his
treasures of earth. She looked at various things which had been
prized by the dead man, and found her chief comfort in saying to the
minister or Cynthia or Robert that Norman had loved these, but he
would have that which was infinitely more precious. She even gazed
out of the window, that Tuesday night, and saw her nephew driving
away with Ellen, and reflected, with pain, that her husband had been
fond and proud of that bay. She was a little at a loss to conceive
what could make up to her husband for that in another world, but she
succeeded, and evolved from her own loving fancy, and her
recollection of the Old Testament, a conception of some wonderful
creature, shod with thunder and maned with a whirlwind. Her disease,
and a drug she had been taking of late, stimulated her imagination
to results of grotesque pathos, but she was comforted.
That night when they were alone, Robert turned to the girl at his
side with a sudden motion. It was no time for love-making, for that
was in the mind of neither of them, but the bereavement of this
other woman, and the tragedy of her state, filled him with a sort of
protective pain towards the girl who might some time have to suffer
through him the same loss.
"Are you all tired out, dear?" he said, and passed his free arm
around her waist.
"No," replied Ellen. Then, since she was only a girl, and
overwrought, having been through a severe strain, she broke down,
and began to cry.
Robert drew her closer, and she hid her face on his shoulder. "Poor
little girl, it has been very hard for you," he whispered.
"Oh, don't think of me," sobbed Ellen. "But I can't bear it, the way
she acts and looks. It is sadder than grief."
"She is not going to live long herself, dear," said Robert, in a
stifled voice.
"And he--did not know?"
"Hush! yes; but you must never tell any one. She tried to keep it
from him. That is her comfort."
"Oh," said Ellen. She looked up at the white face of the young man
bending over her, and suddenly the realization of a love that was
mightier than all the creatures who came of it and all who followed
it was over her.