“I don’t like that way of talking, boy,” she said.
Her eyes blurred suddenly.
Eugene seized her rough hand and kissed it.
“It’s all right, mama!” he said.
“It’s all right.
I didn’t mean it!”
He put his arms around her.
She wept, suddenly and bitterly.
“Nobody ever knew him.
He never told us about himself.
He was the quiet one.
I’ve lost them both now.”
Then, drying her eyes, she added:
“You boys go get something to eat.
A little walk will do you good.
And, say,” she added, “why don’t you go by The Citizen office?
They ought to be told.
They’ve been calling up every day to find out about him.”
“They thought a lot of that boy,” said Gant.
They were tired, but they all felt an enormous relief.
For over a day, each had known that death was inevitable, and after the horror of the incessant strangling gasp, this peace, this end of pain touched them all with a profound, a weary joy.
“Well, Ben’s gone,” said Helen slowly.
Her eyes were wet, but she wept quietly now, with gentle grief, with love.
“I’m glad it’s over.
Poor old Ben!
I never got to know him until these last few days.
He was the best of the lot.
Thank God, he’s out of it now.”
Eugene thought of death now, with love, with joy.
Death was like a lovely and tender woman, Ben’s friend and lover, who had come to free him, to heal him, to save him from the torture of life.
They stood there together, without speaking, in Eliza’s littered kitchen, and their eyes were blind with tears, because they thought of lovely and delicate death, and because they loved one another.
Eugene and Luke went softly up the hall, and out into the dark.
Gently, they closed the big front door behind them, and descended the veranda steps.
In that enormous silence, birds were waking.
It was a little after four o’clock in the morning.
Wind pressed the boughs.
It was still dark.
But above them the thick clouds that had covered the earth for days with a dreary gray blanket had been torn open.
Eugene looked up through the deep ragged vault of the sky and saw the proud and splendid stars, bright and unwinking.
The withered leaves were shaking.
A cock crew his shrill morning cry of life beginning and awaking.
The cock that crew at midnight (thought Eugene) had an elfin ghostly cry.
His crow was drugged with sleep and death: it was like a far horn sounding under sea; and it was a warning to all the men who are about to die, and to the ghosts that must go home.
But the cock that crows at morning (he thought), has a voice as shrill as any fife.
It says, we are done with sleep.
We are done with death.
O waken, waken into life, says his voice as shrill as any fife.
In that enormous silence, birds were waking.
He heard the cock’s bright minstrelsy again, and by the river in the dark, the great thunder of flanged wheels, and the long retreating wail of the whistle.
And slowly, up the chill deserted street, he heard the heavy ringing clangor of shod hoofs.