I.
For hours she had lain in a kind of gentle torpor, not unlike that sweet lassitude which masters one in the hush of a midsummer noon, when the heat seems to have silenced the very birds and insects, and, lying sunk in the tasselled meadow-grasses, one looks up through a level roofing of maple-leaves at the vast shadowless, and unsuggestive blue.Now and then, at ever- lengthening intervals, a flash of pain darted through her, like the ripple of sheet-lightning across such a midsummer sky; but it was too transitory to shake her stupor, that calm, delicious, bottomless stupor into which she felt herself sinking more and more deeply, without a disturbing impulse of resistance, an effort of reattachment to the vanishing edges of consciousness.
The resistance, the effort, had known their hour of violence; but now they were at an end.Through her mind, long harried by grotesque visions, fragmentary images of the life that she was leaving, tormenting lines of verse, obstinate presentments of pictures once beheld, indistinct impressions of rivers, towers, and cupolas, gathered in the length of journeys half forgotten-- through her mind there now only moved a few primal sensations of colorless well-being; a vague satisfaction in the thought that she had swallowed her noxious last draught of medicine...and that she should never again hear the creaking of her husband's boots-- those horrible boots--and that no one would come to bother her about the next day's dinner...or the butcher's book....
At last even these dim sensations spent themselves in the thickening obscurity which enveloped her; a dusk now filled with pale geometric roses, circling softly, interminably before her, now darkened to a uniform blue-blackness, the hue of a summer night without stars.And into this darkness she felt herself sinking, sinking, with the gentle sense of securityof one upheld from beneath.Like a tepid tide it rose around her, gliding ever higher and higher, folding in its velvety embrace her relaxed and tired body, now submerging her breast and shoulders, now creeping gradually, with soft inexorableness, over her throat to her chin, to her ears, to her mouth....Ah, now it was rising too high; the impulse to struggle was renewed;...her mouth was full;...she was choking....Help!
"It is all over," said the nurse, drawing down the eyelids with official composure.
The clock struck three.They remembered it afterward.Someone opened the window and let in a blast of that strange, neutral air which walks the earth between darkness and dawn; someone else led the husband into another room.He walked vaguely, like a blind man, on his creaking boots.
II.
She stood, as it seemed, on a threshold, yet no tangible gateway was in front of her.Only a wide vista of light, mild yet penetrating as the gathered glimmer of innumerable stars, expanded gradually before her eyes, in blissful contrast to the cavernous darkness from which she had of late emerged.
She stepped forward, not frightened, but hesitating, and as her eyes began to grow more familiar with the melting depths of light about her, she distinguished the outlines of a landscape, at first swimming in the opaline uncertainty of Shelley's vaporous creations, then gradually resolved into distincter shape--the vast unrolling of a sunlit plain, aerial forms of mountains, and presently the silver crescent of a river in the valley, and a blue stencilling of trees along its curve--something suggestive in its ineffable hue of an azure background of Leonardo's, strange, enchanting, mysterious, leading on the eye and the imagination into regions of fabulous delight.As she gazed, her heart beat with a soft and rapturous surprise; so exquisite a promise she read in the summons of that hyaline distance.
"And so death is not the end after all," in sheer gladness she heardherself exclaiming aloud."I always knew that it couldn't be.I believed in Darwin, of course.I do still; but then Darwin himself said that he wasn't sure about the soul--at least, I think he did--and Wallace was a spiritualist; and then there was St.George Mivart--"Her gaze lost itself in the ethereal remoteness of the mountains.
"How beautiful! How satisfying!" she murmured."Perhaps now I shall really know what it is to live."As she spoke she felt a sudden thickening of her heart-beats, and looking up she was aware that before her stood the Spirit of Life.
"Have you never really known what it is to live?" the Spirit of Life asked her.
"I have never known," she replied, "that fulness of life which we all feel ourselves capable of knowing; though my life has not been without scattered hints of it, like the scent of earth which comes to one sometimes far out at sea.""And what do you call the fulness of life?" the Spirit asked again.
"Oh, I can't tell you, if you don't know," she said, almost reproachfully."Many words are supposed to define it--love and sympathy are those in commonest use, but I am not even sure that they are the right ones, and so few people really know what they mean.""You were married," said the Spirit, "yet you did not find the fulness of life in your marriage?""Oh, dear, no," she replied, with an indulgent scorn, "my marriage was a very incomplete affair.""And yet you were fond of your husband?"
