Page:The Novels and Tales of Henry James, Volume 1 (New York, Charles Scribner's Sons, 1907).djvu/560

 he had fallen fifty feet or three hundred little mattered now. Even if it had not been far, it had been far enough. Now that all was over Rowland understood how up to the brim, for two years, his personal world had been filled. It looked to him at present as void and blank and sinister as a theatre bankrupt and closed.

Singleton came back with four men—one of them the landlord of the inn. They had formed a rude bier of the frame of a chaise-à-porteurs, and by taking a very roundabout course homeward were able to follow a tolerably level path and carry their burden with due decency. To Rowland it seemed as if the little procession would never reach the inn, yet as they drew near it he would have given his right hand for a longer holding-off. The few lingerers came forward to do them silent solemn homage, and in the doorway, clinging together, appeared the two bereaved women. Mrs. Hudson tottered forward with outstretched hands, divided between yearning and terror; but before she reached her son Mary Garland had rushed past her and, in the face of the staring, pitying, awestricken crowd, had flung herself, with the magnificent movement of one whose rights were supreme and with a loud tremendous cry, upon the senseless vestige of all she had cherished.

That cry still lives in Rowland's ears. It interposes persistently against the consciousness that when he sometimes—very rarely—sees her, she is inscrutably civil to him; against the reflection that during the awful journey back to America, made of course with his assistance, she had used him, with the last 526