Horton himself was almost as deeply perplexed. "Mamie," he said to his
wife, when he came out of the spare room half an hour later, "will you
take Mrs. Alexander the things she needs? She is going to do everything
herself. Just stay about where you can hear her and go in if she wants
you."
Everything happened as Alexander had foreseen in that moment of
prescience under the river. With her own hands she washed him clean of
every mark of disaster. All night he was alone with her in the still
house, his great head lying deep in the pillow. In the pocket of his
coat Winifred found the letter that he had written her the night before
he left New York, water-soaked and illegible, but because of its length,
she knew it had been meant for her.
For Alexander death was an easy creditor. Fortune, which had smiled
upon him consistently all his life, did not desert him in the end.
His harshest critics did not doubt that, had he lived, he would have
retrieved himself. Even Lucius Wilson did not see in this accident the
disaster he had once foretold.
When a great man dies in his prime there is no surgeon who can say
whether he did well; whether or not the future was his, as it seemed to
be. The mind that society had come to regard as a powerful and reliable
machine, dedicated to its service, may for a long time have been sick
within itself and bent upon its own destruction.