estate to me—we can’t take any of it with us, Cash,’I said—’there are no pockets in shrouds and we only need six feet of earth to bury us in the end—so I’m going to pull out and begin to enjoy life—or as the feller says—before it’s too late’—'Well, I don’t know that I blame you, Mrs. Gant,’he said—’I reckon you’re right—we can’t take any of it with us,’he said—’and besides, even if we could, what good would it do us where we’re goin’?'—Now here” (she addressed Eugene with sudden change, with the old looser masculine gesture of her hand)—“here’s the thing I’m going to do—you know that lot I told you I owned on Sunset Crescent—”
And now the terrible silence came between them once again.
The marvellous hills were blooming in the dusk. We shall not come again. We never shall come back again.
Without speech now they faced each other, without speech they knew each other. In a moment Eliza turned quickly from him and with the queer unsteady steps with which she had gone out from the room where Ben lay dying, she moved toward the door.
He rushed back across the walk and with a single bound took the steps that mounted to the porch. He caught the rough hands that she held clasped across her body, and drew them swiftly, fiercely, to his breast.
“Good-bye,” he muttered harshly. “Good-bye! Good-bye, mama!” A wild strange cry, like that of a beast in pain, was torn from his throat. His eyes were blind with tears; he tried to speak, to get into a word, a phrase, all the pain, the beauty, and the wonder of their lives—every step of that terrible voyage which his incredible memory and intuition took back to the dwelling of her womb. But no word came, no word could come; he kept crying hoarsely again and again, “Good-bye, good-bye.”
She understood, she knew all he felt and wanted to say, her small weak eyes were wet as his with tears, her face was twisted in the painful grimace of sorrow, and she kept saying:
“Poor child! Poor child! Poor child!” Then she whispered huskily, faintly: “We must try to love one another.”
The terrible and beautiful sentence, the last, the final wisdom that the earth can give, is remembered at the end, is spoken too late, wearily. It stands there, awful and untraduced, above the dusty racket
