with a choking, retching cry, half gasp, half hiccup, fell forward on her face, twitched spasmodically, and lay still.
It needed no physician to pronounce her dead. The film-glazed eyes, the flaccid jaw, the prolapsed tongue and idiotically opened mouth all bore their eloquent testimony. Marjotte lay dead of a broken heart, and Mordecai's heart was breaking.
How long he sat there staring sightlessly at nothing he could never tell. He was stunned, but not too stunned to suffer. The world seemed desolate as it had been before God's spirit moved upon the waters and decreed, "Let there be light."
Light? I' God's good name, what talk was this of light? There was no light! The sun and moon and stars had gone forever from his firmament; only shadows, cold and everlasting, stayed. He tried to face the facts, but one dreadful sentence rang with clamoring echoes in his brain, beating out all other thought. Susette, little sweet Susette, was dead. Dead, and already lying in a pauper's grave in the cemetery of the Madeleine. Nevermore would he be greeted by her purling, laughing voice, never feel the touch of her soft hands again, never look into her face. . . .
"By heaven, I will!" he shouted, and rose to fling his cloak about him and stamp out into the street. "Adieu, my poor Marjotte. I am going to her."
He'd promised her. "You shall go home with me, petite Susette de mon coeur," he'd said, and go with him she should.
She was buried in a three-year grave, virtually laid on the surface; he could tear the earth away, break the flimsy coffin with his hands and take her little body to the Deborah. Brother Hezekiah would provide a pipe of rum into which they could put her; her flesh should not know corruption until they had reached Boston and he'd laid her in the Westhorne family plot within the shadow of Kings' Chapel.
The wind was rising now, and the storm that had delayed all day was breaking. "Howl tempest; bellow, thunder; pour, rain!" It had been raining on the night he met her; it was fitting it should rain tonight.
"Susette—Susette!" As on the night he met her, so now the scuffing of his feet upon the leaves kept cadence with the syllables of her name. Tears streamed down his face as in his mind's eye he beheld her at the table with the gleam of candlelight upon her arms and shoulders, sensed the perfume of her nearness as they sat upon the sofa by the fire. When he closed his hand he almost felt the answering pressure of her little fingers.
Her little hands, her laughing eyes, her sweet, small, ivory-gleaming feet! They'd minded him of Solomon's canticle when he first saw them; now another stanza of the Song of Songs ran in his mind. He smiled sardonically as he recalled the citations—sixth verse, eighth chapter of the Song of Songs: "Love is strong as death!"
He repeated it, again — again. Its meter seemed to fall into the rhythm of a drum that beats time for a march—"Love—is—strong-as-death; Love—is—strong-as-death!"
Now he'd reached the Place de la Revolution. Grim and bare as Death's own hungry skeleton the chopper reared in ghastly silhouette against a flare of lightning. That way, to the right, the cemetery of the Madeleine lay. Rain came down in gusts, in torrents, floods. He walked through it unnoticing as if it had been moonlight.
