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By Root 815 0

fell down on her knees in the middle of the floor and whispered, “Jay. My dear. My dear one. You’re all right now, darling. You’re not troubled any more, are you, my darling? Not any more. Not ever any more, dearest. I can feel how it is with you. I know, my dearest. It’s terrible to go. You don’t want to. Of course you don’t. But you’ve got to. And you know they’re going to be all right. Everything is going to be all right, my darling. God take you. God keep you, my own beloved. God make His light shine upon you.” And even while she whispered, his presence became faint, and in a moment of terrible dread she cried out “Jay!” and hurried to her daughter’s crib. “Stay with me one minute,” she whispered, “just one minute, my dearest”; and in some force he did return; she felt him with her, watching his child. Catherine was sleeping with all her might and her thumb was deep in her mouth; she was scowling fiercely. “Mercy, child,” Mary whispered, smiling, and touched her hot forehead to smooth it, and she growled. “God bless you, God keep you,” her mother whispered, and came silently to her son’s bed. There was the cap in its tissue paper, beside him on the floor; he slept less deeply than his sister, with his chin lifted, and his forehead flung back; he looked grave, serene and expectant.

“Be with us all you can,” she whispered. “This is good-bye.” And again she went to her knees. Good-bye, she said again, within herself; but she was unable to feel much of anything. “God help me to realize it,” she whispered, and clasped her hands before her face: but she could realize only that he was fading, and that it was indeed good-bye, and that she was at that moment unable to be particularly sensitive to the fact.

And now he was gone entirely from the room, from the house, and from this world.

“Soon, Jay. Soon, dear,” she whispered; but she knew that it would not be soon. She knew that a long life lay ahead of her, for the children were to be brought up, and God alone could know what change and chance might work upon them all, before they met once more. She felt at once calm and annihilating emptiness, and a cold and overwhelming fullness.

“God help us all,” she whispered. “May God in His loving mercy keep us all.”

She signed herself with the Cross and left the room.

She looks as she does when she has just received, Hannah thought as she came in and took her old place on the sofa; for Mary was trying, successfully, to hide her desolation; and as she sat among them in their quietness it was somewhat diminished. After all, she told herself, he was there. More strongly even than when he was here in the room with me. Anyhow. And she was grateful for their silence.

Finally Andrew said, “Aunt Hannah has an idea about it, Mary.”

“Maybe you’d prefer not to talk about it,” Hannah said.

“No; it’s all right; I guess I’d rather.” And with mild surprise she found that this was true.

“Well, it’s simply that I thought of all the old tales and beliefs about the souls of people who die sudden deaths, or violent deaths. Or as Joel would prefer it, not souls. Just their life force. Their consciousness. Their life itself.”

“Can’t get around that,” Joel said. “Hannah was saying that everything of any importance leaves the body then. I certainly have to agree with that.”

“And then even whether you believe or not in life after death,” Mary said, “in the soul, as a living, immortal thing, creature, why it’s certainly very believable that for a little while afterwards, this force, this life, stays on. Hovers around.”

“Sounds highly unlikely to me, but I suppose it’s conceivable.”

“Like looking at a light and then shutting your eyes. No, not like that but—but it does stay on. Specially when it’s someone very strong, very vital, who hasn’t been worn down by old age, or a long illness or something.”

“That’s exactly it,” Andrew said. “Something that comes out whole, because it’s so quick.”

“Why they’re as old as the hills, those old beliefs.”

“I should imagine they’re as old as life and death,” Andrew said.

“The thing I mean is, they aren’t