"If I have lost you in this world," he said aloud, as though she could hear him, "I will follow where you are, to tell you that we belong to one another through all eternity, and nothing can part us. But you haven"t gone. You could not leave me so."
As he spoke to her, on his knees, her cold hand pressed against his warm throat, he kept his eyes upon her face, hungrily, watching for some sign that her spirit heard him from very far off. But there was no change.
The dark, double line of her lashes did not break. Her lips kept their faint, mysterious half-smile.
Vanno resolved that if she had gone, he too would go, for without her the world was empty and dead.
It was then that Peter stole to the open door with Apollonia, and looked in. Her impulse was to cry out, and run into the room to sob at her friend"s feet; but something held her back. It was as if she caught a strain of music; and she remembered the air. It came from the opera of "Romeo e Giuletta," which she had heard in New York a year ago. The music was as reminiscently distinct as if her brain were a gramophone.
She had seen a tableau like this, of two lovers, while that music played in the theatre; and with tears in her eyes she had thought, "If only Romeo had waited, if he had had faith, he could have called her back again."
She did not enter the room, but standing by the door she said softly yet clearly, "Don"t let her go. Call her spirit. Maybe it is near. Tell her that you are calling her back to happiness and love. I believe she will come to you, because you are her heart and her soul. I am going, and I will bring a doctor. But you are the only one who can save her now."
The girl"s voice had no personality for Vanno. He did not turn his mind for an instant to Peter. It was as if his own thoughts spoke aloud and gave him counsel what to do.
He rose from his knees, and sitting on the side of the bed gathered Mary up into his arms. He held her closely against his breast, her hair twined in his clasping fingers. Then he bent his head over the upturned face, and whispered.
"Darling," he said, "heart of my heart, wherever you are have mercy and come back to me. I can"t live without you. You are my all. G.o.d will give you to me if you will come. You look so happy, but you will be happier with me, for you can"t go and leave everything unfinished. Best and dearest one, I need you. Come back! Come back!"
Mary"s spirit had crossed the threshold and stood looking out into the unknown, which stretched on and on into endlessness, like a sea of light ringing round the world; and in this sea there was music which seemed to be part of the light. She thought that she had been almost engulfed in a terrible storm with waves mountain-high arising over her head in a great darkness, and explosive noises of machinery loud in her ears as when Carleton took her through the water of the harbour in his hydro-aeroplane. But the noise had ceased, and the darkness was gone.
All was light and peace. She was conscious that she had struggled and suffered, that she had borne a burden of unhappiness which had been too heavy for her shoulders. The burden had fallen off. She was no longer unhappy, and though her heart was empty of joy, dimly she seemed to hear an a.s.surance that soon it would be filled to overflowing. The promise was in the music that was part of the light, and of the great sea over which she was pa.s.sed. She knew that she was far above it now, and rising higher, as she had risen in the aeroplane when she had felt the wonder after the shrinking. But something which had been herself lay under the sea, down in the storm and the darkness she had left behind.
Then, suddenly, the music was disturbed. Through it she listened to a vague undertone of sorrow; and she became aware that some one was suffering as she had suffered, some one whom she had loved--some one whom she would always love. Out of the darkness a voice was calling her to come back. Indistinct and far away at first, it became clear, insistent, irresistible.
A faint shiver ran through Mary"s body, and Vanno"s heart leaped against her breast, as if he sent his life to warm her heart.
"Come back to me, if you loved me!" he called her.
Very slowly she opened her eyes, dazzled still with the light she had seen through the open door.
"Mary, come back and save me!" he cried to her out of the darkness.
"I am coming," she whispered, not sure if she was answering in a dream to a voice in a dream. But the light of the wondrous sea was dimmed to the light of an earthly sunset. Through it Vanno"s eyes called to her as his voice had called--those eyes which had been her stars of love--and she forgot the brighter light, just seen and lost.
"You!" she said. "It"s like--heaven----"
"It is heaven--now," he answered, as he held her closely.
When Mary was well again, the cure married her to her Prince, and the two went together into the desert that Vanno loved. There it did not matter to them that Angelo was thinking coldly and harshly of them both; and perhaps there was even an added sweetness in Mary"s happiness because a sacrifice of hers could spare pain to one very near to Vanno.
She would not let her husband say that he could not forgive his brother.
"But if our love is to be perfect, we must forgive Angelo, and poor Marie too," she told him.
Late in the summer (they had left Egypt long ago, and were in the high mountains of Algeria), one day a letter came to Vanno, forwarded on from place after place, where it had missed him. Angelo had written at last.
"Perhaps you may have seen," he said, "in some paper, that in giving me a little daughter my wife died. She left a letter to be handed me after her death, if a presentiment she had were fulfilled. If she had lived, I would have forgiven her. Will you and Mary forgive me?"
There was no question as to what their answer would be.
"When two people love each other as we do," Vanno said, "I see now that there can be no room for any bitterness in their hearts."
THE END