Anna Lombard, page 169 by Victoria Cross
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atmosphere was feeding one with death; but I did not think I should die, nor she. I believed she would pass through the shadow; but I did not think the time had come for her to die. I can not explain this confidence; but it flooded my whole soul, and I watched the great, glittering Scorpion plunging through the sky before me, and felt tranquil and secure in the great stillness around me, which I knew was the stillness of desolation and death. Where lights had gleamed out through the foliage of the compounds, now there was blackness. The indefinite sounds of distant music and laughter, that had formerly floated up the flower-laden alleys, were replaced by a brooding silence in the poison-laden air. There was not a house from which the occupants had not fled or were preparing to flee or was not full of mourning or terror. Kalatu, in all its glory of tropic beauty, was but a pest- and charnel-house.
Yet I felt calm. Gaida was dead. Nothing now but grief stood between her soul and mine; and grief for the loss of physical passion is as short as grief for the loss of a passion of the soul is lasting.
When I reached my room that night, my head seemed reeling. I craved nothing but sleep. I saw the doors leading into Anna's room, that communicated with mine, and I knew she was sleeping behind them. Sleeping or weeping? But all was dull except that great longing for sleep that obliterated all else. My eyes were dim and my eyelids seemed fallen on them already. Without any power to raise them I descried in one corner the outline of the bed and staggered toward it as if blind or drunk. Then, fully dressed, I threw myself, face downward, on it and fell asleep. I awakened suddenly with a violent shock. It was still dark. A terrible cry of agony came from Anna's room:
"Gerald!"
I sprung from the bed and to the intermediate door and threw it wide open. A night-lamp burned on the table and shed its light through the room. I saw Anna standing in the centre in her white night-gown, with her fair hair fal