Chapter III

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"`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! I had 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, remained 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 I can 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 anyone 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 impatience of comparative poverty that drove him out there.

"`. . . Who was not his friend who had heard him speak once?' she was saying. `He drew men towards him by what was best in them.' She looked at me with intensity. `It is the gift of the great,' she went on, and the sound of her low voice seemed to have the accompaniment of all the other sounds, full of mystery, desolation, and sorrow, I had ever heard--the ripple of the river, the soughing of the trees swayed by the wind, the murmurs of wild crowds, the faint ring of incomprehensible words cried from afar, the whisper of a voice speaking from beyond the threshold of an eternal darkness. `But you have heard him! You know!' she cried.

"`Yes, I know,' I said with something like despair in my heart, but bowing my head before the faith that was in her, before that great and saving illusion that shone with an unearthly glow in the darkness, in the triumphant darkness from which I could not have defended her-- from which I could not even defend myself.

"`What a loss to me--to us!'--she corrected herself with beautiful generosity; then added in a murmur, `To the world.' By the last gleams of twilight I could see the glitter of her eyes, full of tears--of tears that would not fall.

"`I have been very happy--very fortunate--very proud,' she went on. `Too fortunate. Too happy for a little while. And now I am unhappy for--for life.'