The bent gilt legs and backs of the furniture shone in indistinct curves. The tall marble fireplace had a cold and monumental whiteness. A grand piano stood mas-sively in a corner, with dark gleams on the flat sur-faces like a somber and polished sarcophagus. A high door opened--closed. I rose.
"She came forward, all in black, with a pale head, floating towards me in the dusk. She was in mourning.
It was more than a year since his death, more than a year since the news came; she seemed as though she would remember and mourn for ever. She took both my hands in hers and murmured, 'I had heard you were coming.' I noticed she was not very young--Imean not girlish. She had a mature capacity for fidelity, for belief, for suffering. The room seemed to have grown darker, as if all the sad light of the cloudy evening had taken refuge on her forehead. This fair hair, this pale visage, this pure brow, seemed surrounded by an ashy halo from which the dark eyes looked out at me. Their glance was guileless, profound, confident, and trustful. She carried her sorrowful head as though she were proud of that sorrow, as though she would say, I--I alone know how to mourn for him as he deserves.
But while we were still shaking hands, such a look of awful desolation came upon her face that I perceived she was one of those creatures that are not the playthings of Time. For her he had died only yesterday. And, by Jove! the impression was so powerful that for me too he seemed to have died only yesterday--nay, this very minute. I saw her and him in the same instant of time --his death and her sorrow--I saw her sorrow in the very moment of his death. Do you understand? I saw them together--I heard them together. She had said, with a deep catch of the breath, 'I have survived;' while my strained ears seemed to hear distinctly, mingled with her tone of despairing regret, the summing-up whisper of his eternal condemnation. I asked myself what Iwas doing there, with a sensation of panic in my heart as though I had blundered into a place of cruel and absurd mysteries not fit for a human being to behold.
She motioned me to a chair. We sat down. I laid the packet gently on the little table, and she put her hand over it. . . . 'You knew him well,' she murmured, after a moment of mourning silence.
"'Intimacy grows quick out there,' I said. 'I knew him as well as it is possible for one man to know another.'
"'And you admired him,' she said. 'It was impossible to know him and not to admire him. Was it?'
"'He was a remarkable man,' I said, unsteadily. Then before the appealing fixity of her gaze, that seemed to watch for more words on my lips, I went on, 'It was impossible not to--'
"'Love him,' she finished eagerly, silencing me into an appalled dumbness. 'How true! how true! But when you think that no one knew him so well as I! Ihad all his noble confidence. I knew him best.'
"'You knew him best,' I repeated. And perhaps she did. But with every word spoken the room was growing darker, and only her forehead, smooth and white, re-mained illumined by the unextinguishable light of belief and love.
"'You were his friend,' she went on. 'His friend,'
she repeated, a little louder. 'You must have been, if he had given you this, and sent you to me. I feel Ican speak to you--and oh! I must speak. I want you --you who have heard his last words--to know I have been worthy of him. . . . It is not pride. . . . Yes!
I am proud to know I understood him better than any-one on earth--he told me so himself. And since his mother died I have had no one--no one--to--to--'
"I listened. The darkness deepened. I was not even sure whether he had given me the right bundle. I rather suspect he wanted me to take care of another batch of his papers which, after his death, I saw the manager examining under the lamp. And the girl talked, easing her pain in the certitude of my sympathy; she talked as thirsty men drink. I had heard that her engagement with Kurtz had been disapproved by her people. He wasn't rich enough or something. And indeed I don't know whether he had not been a pauper all his life. He had given me some reason to infer that it was his im-patience of comparative poverty that drove him out there.
