When the old Sikh had ceased speaking, he lay greatly exhausted. The
night deepened. It was a remote spot. Now and then the sound of
trampling feet or the tread of a horse climbing the difficult road
reached the ear. The hours were long and dreary, but they passed.
Morning dawned, and Atma found himself alone. He had known that it would
be so, and yet it came with the sharpness of an unexpected blow. He
mourned, and, as is the way with mourners, he accused himself from hour
to hour of having failed in duty to the departed during his lifetime.
Looking on the face of the dead, he wondered much where the spirit that
so lately had seemed to be with the frame but a single identity, one and
indivisible, had fled. He recalled his father's words, "Upward or down, or toward the setting sun,
None knows," and with the recollection, the sense of loss deepened. An old cry rose
to his lips, "Oh, that I knew where I might find him!"
The words by which his father had sought to comfort him still sounded in
his hearing, but Grief is stronger than Wisdom. Human speech is the
least potent of forces, and arguments that clash and clang bravely in
the tournament of words, slaying shadows, and planting the flag of
triumph over fallen fancies, on entering the lists to combat the fact of
Death, but beat the air, and their lusty prowess only fetches a laugh
from out of the silence.