Joseph Conrad: Heart of Darkness

3. PART III (continued)

"`. . . 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.'

"She stood up; her fair hair seemed to catch all the remaining light in a glimmer of gold. I rose too.

"`And of all this,' she went on, mournfully, `of all his promise, and of all his greatness, of his generous mind, of his noble heart, nothing remains--nothing but a memory. You and I--'

"`We shall always remember him,' I said, hastily.

"`No!' she cried. `It is impossible that all this should be lost-- that such a life should be sacrificed to leave nothing--but sorrow. You know what vast plans he had. I knew of them too--I could not perhaps understand,--but others knew of them. Something must remain. His words, at least, have not died.'