The room was still Isabel’s. Nothing had been changed: even the photographs of George, of the Major, and of “brother George” still stood on her dressing-table, and in a drawer of her desk was an old picture of Eugene and Lucy, taken together, which George had found, but had slowly closed away again from sight, not touching it. To-morrow everything would be gone; and he had heard there was not long to wait before the house itself would be demolished. The very space which tonight was still Isabel’s room would be cut into new shapes by new walls and floors and ceilings; yet the room would always live, for it could not die out of George’s memory. It would live as long as he did, and it would always be murmurous with a tragic, wistful whispering.
And if space itself can be haunted, as memory is haunted, then some time, when the space that was Isabel’s room came to be made into the small bedrooms and “kitchenettes” already designed as its destiny, that space might well be haunted and the new occupants come to feel that some seemingly causeless depression hung about it—a wraith of the passion that filled it throughout the last night that George Minafer spent there.
Whatever remnants of the old high-handed arrogance were still within him, he did penance for his deepest sin that night—and it may be that to this day some impressionable, overworked woman in a “kitchenette,” after turning out the light will seem to see a young man kneeling in the darkness, shaking convulsively, and, with arms outstretched through the wall, clutching at the covers of a shadowy bed. It may seem to her that she hears the faint cry, over and over:
At least, it may be claimed for George that his last night in the house where he had been born was not occupied with his own disheartening future, but with sorrow for what sacrifices his pride and youth had demanded of others. And early in the morning he came downstairs and tried to help Fanny make coffee on the kitchen range.
“There was something I wanted to say to you last night, Aunt Fanny,” he said, as she finally discovered that an amber fluid, more like tea than coffee, was as near ready to be taken into the human system as it would ever be. “I think I’d better do it now.”