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In the night she heard him coughing, and slipping into her flannel wrapper, she went into the kitchen and beat up an egg with milk and brandy. When she took it into his room, he appeared feverish and asked for veronal. “But the brandy will undo it,” he added mechanically. His face was flushed and when she touched his hand it was burning. “Is it near day?” he inquired.
“No, it is only one o’clock. I thought you were sleeping.”
“I was, but I wake up this way. I’ve done it every night for months.”
She gave him veronal, and then raised his head while he sipped the eggnog. “An owl has been hooting so loud I thought it was at the window,” he said, looking up at her over the rim of the glass.
“It’s up in the big pine. You’ve been dreaming.”
The fire had burned down to a few embers, which flickered out when she tried to stir them to life. A dim light from the screened lamp on the floor behind the chintz-covered chair left the bed and his uncovered face in shadow.
“Do you feel better?” she asked, as she was turning away.
“Yes, I feel better.” His eyes followed her from the shadow with a glance of mute interrogation.
“I’ll put this stick by your bed.” She went out into the hall and came back with one of John Abner’s hickory sticks. “If you want anything or feel nervous, knock on the wall. I am a light sleeper, and Mirandy is in the room off the kitchen.”
She waited, but he did not answer. Had he understood her, or was he incapable of grasping the meaning of sounds? It was like the inconsistency of life, she thought, that he, who once had been so voluble, should have become almost inarticulate at the end. She knew that he was trying to give as little trouble as possible, yet he seemed unable to put his wish into words.
Before going out, she made one last effort with the embers, but the wood she threw into the fireplace did not catch. When she went over to the bed again, Jason was lying with closed eyes. “He doesn’t look as if he could last much longer,” she thought dispassionately.
The still October days drifted by, hazy, mellow, declining into the rich light of the sunsets. With the dry weather and sufficient food after starvation, Jason appeared to improve. The old wheel-chair which had once belonged to Rose Emily was brought down from the attic, and he sat out, muffled in rugs, on bright afternoons. He liked his meals, though he never asked for them. Sometimes, after a hard spell of coughing, he would say, “How long is it before I have my eggnog?”; yet he never attempted to hasten the hour. Twice, after a severe hæmorrhage, they believed he was dying, but he recovered and was wheeled out again on the lawn. Day after day, he sat there in the sunshine, passive, silent, wrapped in a curious remoteness which was like the armour of an inscrutable reserve. Yet it was not reserve, she felt instinctively. It was something thinner; vaguer, something as impalpable as a shadow. It was, she realized suddenly one day, an emptiness of spirit. He was silent because there was nothing left in him to be uttered. He was remote because he had lost all connection with his surroundings, with events, with the material structure of living. Through the autumn days he would sit there, propped on pillows, in his wheel-chair between the half-bared lilac bushes and the “rockery,” where Mrs. Oakley had planted portulaca over an old stump. His head would sink down into the rugs, and his unseeing eyes would gaze up the road to the starry fields of the life-everlasting. Behind him there was the porch and the long grey roof where swallows were wheeling. From the locust trees by the wings a rain of small yellow leaves fell slowly and steadily in the windless air, turning once as they left the stem, and drifting down to the flagged walk and the borders of sheepmint and wire-grass. His figure, bowed under the rugs, seemed to her to become merely another object in the landscape. He was as inanimate as the fields or the trees; and yet he made the solitude more lonely and the autumn dreaminess more pensive. His features had the scarred and seared look that is left in the faces of men who had fought their way out of a forest fire. Only the look that Jason wore now had passed from struggle into defeat. He appeared to be waiting, without fear and without hope, for whatever might happen. “I’ve seen so many people die,” she thought, and then, “In fifty years many people must die.”
She had come home this afternoon a little earlier than usual, and, still in riding breeches, she stood by the porch and looked down on the inert figure in the wheel-chair. Jason’s eyes were open, but she could not tell whether he saw her or not. The mask of his features was as blank as if an indestructible glaze were spread over his face; and he stared straight before him, searching the road and the distant fields of life-everlasting for something that was not there. Though his helplessness was his only hold on her, she felt that it had become too poignant for her to bear. If only he would speak! If only he would complain! If only he would say what he was seeking! In the faint sunshine, beneath the ceaseless rain of leaves, he gathered, a deeper meaning, a fresher significance. A glamour of sadness enveloped him. For an instant the memory of the Jason she had first known flickered over him like a vanishing ray of sunlight. As the gleam faded, she felt that he was passing with it into some unearthly medium where she could not follow. It was, she told herself, only the endless riddle of mortality, renewed again and yet again in each human being. It was the old baffling sense of a secret meaning in the universe, of a reality beneath the actuality, of a deep profounder than the deeps of experience. The reserve of even one human being was impenetrable; the reserve of every human being was impenetrable. Of what was he thinking? she wondered, and knew that she could never discover. Had he loved her in the past, or had his desire for her been merely a hunger? Would he have been faithful to her if stronger forces had not swept him away? Which was the accident, his love or his faithlessness? When it was over, had she dropped out of his life, or had she continued to exist as a permanent influence? Was he better or worse than she had believed him to be? She had never known, and now she could never know. The truth would always elude her. She could never wring his secret from this empty shell which was as unfathomable as the sea. She felt that the mystery was killing her, and she knew that it was a mystery which could never be solved.
She tried to ask, “How much did I mean in your life?” an found herself reciting, parrot-like, “Do you feel any pain?”
He shook his head, without looking at her. His gaze was still on the road where it dipped at the bridge and travelled upward into the dreamy distance.
“Are you ready for your eggnog?” The effort to make her voice sound light and natural brought tears to her eyes.
At last she had touched him. The quiver of appetite stole over his face, and he turned his eyes, which were dark with pain, away from the road. “Is it almost time?” This was what he lived for now, an egg with milk and whiskey every four hours.
“It must be nearly. I’ll go and see.” As she still lingered, the quiver on his face deepened into a look of impatience, and he repeated eagerly, “You will go and see?”
“In a minute. Has the doctor been here?”
“Nobody has been here. A few people went by in the road, but they did not stop.”
“Something must have prevented the doctor. He will come to-morrow.”
“It makes no difference. I am a doctor.”
A thought occurred to her while she watched him. “Would you rather be at Five Oaks? It might be managed.”
He shook his head. “It doesn’t matter. You are good to me here. I don’t know why.” He broke off with a rough, grating cough which sounded like the blows of a hammer. A few minutes afterwards, when the spell of coughing was over, he repeated, so mechanically that the words seemed to reach no deeper than his lips, “I don’t know why.”
He had not said as much as this since she had brought him to Old Farm, and while she listened a piercing light flashed into her mind, as if a lantern had been turned without warning on a dark road. In this light, all the hidden cells of her memory were illuminated. Things she had forgotten; things she had only dimly perceived when they were present; swift impulses; unacknowledged desires; flitting impressions like the shadow of a bird on still water,—all these indefinite longings started out vividly from the penumbra of darkness. As this circle of light widened, she saw Jason as she had first seen him more than thirty years ago, on that morning in winter. She saw his dark red hair, his brown-black eyes, his gay and charming smile with its indiscriminate friendliness. Time appeared to stand still at that instant. Beyond this enkindled vision there was only the fall of the locust leaves, spinning like golden coins which grew dull and tarnished as soon as they reached the ground. Then, as suddenly as it had come, the vision faded and the light flickered out. There remained this stranger, huddled beneath the rugs in the wheel-chair, and around him the melancholy stillness of the October afternoon.
“People have to be kind to each other sometimes,” she answered.
His brief animation had passed. He seemed to have forgotten his words as soon as he had uttered them. The blank despair was in his eyes again as he fixed them on the empty road, searching—searching. His face, so scarred and burned out by an inner fire, wore a lost and abstracted look, as if he were listening for some sound at a distance.
“I’ll bring the eggnog in a minute,” she added hastily, and went into the house. She felt embarrassed by her rugged health, and by her firm and energetic figure when she contrasted it with his diminished frame. Yet her pity, she knew, could make no impression on vacancy.
As the weeks passed, she grew to look for his chair when she returned from work in the fields. There was no eagerness, no anxiety even. There was merely the wonder if she should still find him in the pale afternoon sunshine, watching the road for something that never came. If he had been absent, she would scarcely have missed him; yet, in a way, his wheel-chair made the lawn, or the fireside on wet days, more homelike. He was a poor thing, she felt, to look forward to, but at least he was dependent upon her compassion.
Then one afternoon in November, when she returned, riding her white horse through the flame and dusk of the sunset, she saw that the wheel-chair was not in its accustomed place between the porch and the “rockery.” When she had dismounted at the stable door and watched the bedding down of Snowbird, she walked slowly back to the house. Even before she met Mirandy running to look for her, she knew that Jason was dead.
“He ‘uz settin’ out dar de hull evelin’,” began Mirandy, who being old still spoke the vivid dialect of her ancestors. “He sot out dar jes’ lak he’s done day in an’ day out w’ile I wuz gittin’ thoo wid de ironin’. Den w’en de time come fuh his eggnog, I beat it up jes’ ez light, en tuck it out dar ter de cheer, en dar he wuz layin’ back, stone daid, wid de blood all ovah de rugs en de grass. He died jes’ ez quick ez ern he ain’ nevah ketched on ter w’at wuz gwinter happen. ‘Fo’ de Lawd, hit wa’n’t my fault, Miss Dorindy. I ’uz jes’ gittin’ erlong thoo wid de ironin’, lak you done tole me.”
“No, it wasn’t your fault, Mirandy. Have you telephoned for the doctor?”
“Yas’m, Fluvanna, she done phone fuh ’im right straight away. We is done laid ’im out on de baid. You’d ‘low jes’ ter look at ’im dat hit wuz a moughty pleasant surprise ter find out dat he wuz sholy daid.”
Turning away from her, Dorinda went into the spare room, where the fire was out, and in deference to one of Aunt Mehitable’s superstitions, Mirandy had draped white sheets over the furniture and the pictures. The windows were wide open. In the graveyard on the curve of the hill, she could see the great pine towering against the evening sky. A stray sheep was bleating somewhere in the meadow, and it seemed to her that the sound filled the universe.
So at last he was dead. He was dead, and she could never know whether or not he remembered. She could never know how much or how little she had meant in his life. And more tragic than the mystery that surrounded him at the end, was the fact that neither the mystery nor his end made any difference. The passion that had ruined her life thirty years ago was nothing, was less than nothing, to her to-day. She was not glad that he was dead. She was not sorry that he had died alone.
Turning back the end of the sheet, she looked down on his face. Despair had passed out of it. The scarred and burned look of his features had faded into serenity. Death had wiped out the marks of the years, and had restored, for an instant, the bright illusion of youth. He wore, as he lay there with closed eyes, an expression that was noble and generous, as if he had been arrested in some magnanimous gesture. This was what death could do to one. He had wasted his life, he had destroyed her youth; yet, in a few hours, death had thrown over him an aspect of magnanimity.
She was standing there when John Abner came in from milking and joined her. “Poor devil,” he said. “I suppose it’s the best thing that could have happened.”
“Yes, it’s the best thing.”
“Is there anybody we’d better get a message to?”
“No one I can remember. He had lost all his friends.”
“Has the doctor been here?”
“Not yet, but Fluvanna telephoned for him.”
“Then we might as well have the funeral to-morrow. There is no reason to postpone it. He’s been dying for months.”
Yes, he had been dying for months; yet, she realized now, his death had come to her with a shock. Though the moment had been approaching so long, she felt that it had taken her by surprise, that she had not had sufficient time to prepare.
“Of course, it isn’t as if we could be expected to feel it,” John Abner said, reasonably enough, and she repeated vacantly: “No, of course it isn’t.”