Coming out of the bright light of the studio I didn’t make out Therese
very distinctly. She, however, having groped in dark cupboards, must
have had her pupils sufficiently dilated to have seen that I had my hat
on my head. This has its importance because after what I had said to her
upstairs it must have convinced her that I was going out on some midnight
business. I passed her without a word and heard behind me the door of
the studio close with an unexpected crash. It strikes me now that under
the circumstances I might have without shame gone back to listen at the
keyhole. But truth to say the association of events was not so clear in
my mind as it may be to the reader of this story. Neither were the exact
connections of persons present to my mind. And, besides, one doesn’t
listen at a keyhole but in pursuance of some plan; unless one is
afflicted by a vulgar and fatuous curiosity. But that vice is not in my
character. As to plan, I had none. I moved along the passage between
the dead wall and the black-and-white marble elevation of the staircase
with hushed footsteps, as though there had been a mortally sick person
somewhere in the house. And the only person that could have answered to
that description was Señor Ortega. I moved on, stealthy, absorbed,
undecided; asking myself earnestly: “What on earth am I going to do with
him?” That exclusive preoccupation of my mind was as dangerous to Señor
Ortega as typhoid fever would have been. It strikes me that this
comparison is very exact. People recover from typhoid fever, but
generally the chance is considered poor. This was precisely his case.
His chance was poor; though I had no more animosity towards him than a
virulent disease has against the victim it lays low. He really would
have nothing to reproach me with; he had run up against me, unwittingly,
as a man enters an infected place, and now he was very ill, very ill
indeed. No, I had no plans against him. I had only the feeling that he
was in mortal danger.
I believe that men of the most daring character (and I make no claim to
it) often do shrink from the logical processes of thought. It is only
the devil, they say, that loves logic. But I was not a devil. I was not
even a victim of the devil. It was only that I had given up the
direction of my intelligence before the problem; or rather that the
problem had dispossessed my intelligence and reigned in its stead side by
side with a superstitious awe. A dreadful order seemed to lurk in the
darkest shadows of life. The madness of that Carlist with the soul of a
Jacobin, the vile fears of Baron H., that excellent organizer of
supplies, the contact of their two ferocious stupidities, and last, by a
remote disaster at sea, my love brought into direct contact with the
situation: all that was enough to make one shudder—not at the chance, but
at the design.
For it was my love that was called upon to act here, and nothing else.
And love which elevates us above all safeguards, above restraining
principles, above all littlenesses of self-possession, yet keeps its feet
always firmly on earth, remains marvellously practical in its
suggestions.
I discovered that however much I had imagined I had given up Rita, that
whatever agonies I had gone through, my hope of her had never been lost.
Plucked out, stamped down, torn to shreds, it had remained with me
secret, intact, invincible. Before the danger of the situation it
sprang, full of life, up in arms—the undying child of immortal love.
What incited me was independent of honour and compassion; it was the
prompting of a love supreme, practical, remorseless in its aim; it was
the practical thought that no woman need be counted as lost for ever,
unless she be dead!
This excluded for the moment all considerations of ways and means and
risks and difficulties. Its tremendous intensity robbed it of all
direction and left me adrift in the big black-and-white hall as on a
silent sea. It was not, properly speaking, irresolution. It was merely
hesitation as to the next immediate step, and that step even of no great
importance: hesitation merely as to the best way I could spend the rest
of the night. I didn’t think further forward for many reasons, more or
less optimistic, but mainly because I have no homicidal vein in my
composition. The disposition to gloat over homicide was in that
miserable creature in the studio, the potential Jacobin; in that
confounded buyer of agricultural produce, the punctual employé of
Hernandez Brothers, the jealous wretch with an obscene tongue and an
imagination of the same kind to drive him mad. I thought of him without
pity but also without contempt. I reflected that there were no means of
sending a warning to Doña Rita in Tolosa; for of course no postal
communication existed with the Headquarters. And moreover what would a
warning be worth in this particular case, supposing it would reach her,
that she would believe it, and that she would know what to do? How could
I communicate to another that certitude which was in my mind, the more
absolute because without proofs that one could produce?
The last expression of Rose’s distress rang again in my ears: “Madame has
no friends. Not one!” and I saw Doña Rita’s complete loneliness beset by
all sorts of insincerities, surrounded by pitfalls; her greatest dangers
within herself, in her generosity, in her fears, in her courage, too.
What I had to do first of all was to stop that wretch at all costs. I
became aware of a great mistrust of Therese. I didn’t want her to find
me in the hall, but I was reluctant to go upstairs to my rooms from an
unreasonable feeling that there I would be too much out of the way; not
sufficiently on the spot. There was the alternative of a live-long night
of watching outside, before the dark front of the house. It was a most
distasteful prospect. And then it occurred to me that Blunt’s former
room would be an extremely good place to keep a watch from. I knew that
room. When Henry Allègre gave the house to Rita in the early days (long
before he made his will) he had planned a complete renovation and this
room had been meant for the drawing-room. Furniture had been made for it
specially, upholstered in beautiful ribbed stuff, made to order, of dull
gold colour with a pale blue tracery of arabesques and oval medallions
enclosing Rita’s monogram, repeated on the backs of chairs and sofas, and
on the heavy curtains reaching from ceiling to floor. To the same time
belonged the ebony and bronze doors, the silver statuette at the foot of
the stairs, the forged iron balustrade reproducing right up the marble
staircase Rita’s decorative monogram in its complicated design.
Afterwards the work was stopped and the house had fallen into disrepair.
When Rita devoted it to the Carlist cause a bed was put into that
drawing-room, just simply the bed. The room next to that yellow salon
had been in Allègre’s young days fitted as a fencing-room containing also
a bath, and a complicated system of all sorts of shower and jet
arrangements, then quite up to date. That room was very large, lighted
from the top, and one wall of it was covered by trophies of arms of all
sorts, a choice collection of cold steel disposed on a background of
Indian mats and rugs: Blunt used it as a dressing-room. It communicated
by a small door with the studio.
I had only to extend my hand and make one step to reach the magnificent
bronze handle of the ebony door, and if I didn’t want to be caught by
Therese there was no time to lose. I made the step and extended the
hand, thinking that it would be just like my luck to find the door
locked. But the door came open to my push. In contrast to the dark hall
the room was most unexpectedly dazzling to my eyes, as if illuminated _a
giorno_ for a reception. No voice came from it, but nothing could have
stopped me now. As I turned round to shut the door behind me noiselessly
I caught sight of a woman’s dress on a chair, of other articles of
apparel scattered about. The mahogany bed with a piece of light silk
which Therese found somewhere and used for a counterpane was a
magnificent combination of white and crimson between the gleaming
surfaces of dark wood; and the whole room had an air of splendour with
marble consoles, gilt carvings, long mirrors and a sumptuous Venetian
lustre depending from the ceiling: a darkling mass of icy pendants
catching a spark here and there from the candles of an eight-branched
candelabra standing on a little table near the head of a sofa which had
been dragged round to face the fireplace. The faintest possible whiff of
a familiar perfume made my head swim with its suggestion.
I grabbed the back of the nearest piece of furniture and the splendour of
marbles and mirrors, of cut crystals and carvings, swung before my eyes
in the golden mist of walls and draperies round an extremely conspicuous
pair of black stockings thrown over a music stool which remained
motionless. The silence was profound. It was like being in an enchanted
place. Suddenly a voice began to speak, clear, detached, infinitely
touching in its calm weariness.
“Haven’t you tormented me enough to-day?” it said. . . . My head was
steady now but my heart began to beat violently. I listened to the end
without moving, “Can’t you make up your mind to leave me alone for
to-night?” It pleaded with an accent of charitable scorn.
The penetrating quality of these tones which I had not heard for so many,
many days made my eyes run full of tears. I guessed easily that the
appeal was addressed to the atrocious Therese. The speaker was concealed
from me by the high back of the sofa, but her apprehension was perfectly
justified. For was it not I who had turned back Therese the pious, the
insatiable, coming downstairs in her nightgown to torment her sister some
more? Mere surprise at Doña Rita’s presence in the house was enough to
paralyze me; but I was also overcome by an enormous sense of relief, by
the assurance of security for her and for myself. I didn’t even ask
myself how she came there. It was enough for me that she was not in
Tolosa. I could have smiled at the thought that all I had to do now was
to hasten the departure of that abominable lunatic—for Tolosa: an easy
task, almost no task at all. Yes, I would have smiled, had not I felt
outraged by the presence of Señor Ortega under the same roof with Doña
Rita. The mere fact was repugnant to me, morally revolting; so that I
should have liked to rush at him and throw him out into the street. But
that was not to be done for various reasons. One of them was pity. I
was suddenly at peace with all mankind, with all nature. I felt as if I
couldn’t hurt a fly. The intensity of my emotion sealed my lips. With a
fearful joy tugging at my heart I moved round the head of the couch
without a word.
In the wide fireplace on a pile of white ashes the logs had a deep
crimson glow; and turned towards them Doña Rita reclined on her side
enveloped in the skins of wild beasts like a charming and savage young
chieftain before a camp fire. She never even raised her eyes, giving me
the opportunity to contemplate mutely that adolescent, delicately
masculine head, so mysteriously feminine in the power of instant
seduction, so infinitely suave in its firm design, almost childlike in
the freshness of detail: altogether ravishing in the inspired strength of
the modelling. That precious head reposed in the palm of her hand; the
face was slightly flushed (with anger perhaps). She kept her eyes
obstinately fixed on the pages of a book which she was holding with her
other hand. I had the time to lay my infinite adoration at her feet
whose white insteps gleamed below the dark edge of the fur out of quilted
blue silk bedroom slippers, embroidered with small pearls. I had never
seen them before; I mean the slippers. The gleam of the insteps, too,
for that matter. I lost myself in a feeling of deep content, something
like a foretaste of a time of felicity which must be quiet or it couldn’t
be eternal. I had never tasted such perfect quietness before. It was
not of this earth. I had gone far beyond. It was as if I had reached
the ultimate wisdom beyond all dreams and all passions. She was That
which is to be contemplated to all Infinity.
The perfect stillness and silence made her raise her eyes at last,
reluctantly, with a hard, defensive expression which I had never seen in
them before. And no wonder! The glance was meant for Therese and
assumed in self-defence. For some time its character did not change and
when it did it turned into a perfectly stony stare of a kind which I also
had never seen before. She had never wished so much to be left in peace.
She had never been so astonished in her life. She had arrived by the
evening express only two hours before Señor Ortega, had driven to the
house, and after having something to eat had become for the rest of the
evening the helpless prey of her sister who had fawned and scolded and
wheedled and threatened in a way that outraged all Rita’s feelings.
Seizing this unexpected occasion Therese had displayed a distracting
versatility of sentiment: rapacity, virtue, piety, spite, and false
tenderness—while, characteristically enough, she unpacked the
dressing-bag, helped the sinner to get ready for bed, brushed her hair,
and finally, as a climax, kissed her hands, partly by surprise and partly
by violence. After that she had retired from the field of battle slowly,
undefeated, still defiant, firing as a last shot the impudent question:
“Tell me only, have you made your will, Rita?” To this poor Doña Rita
with the spirit of opposition strung to the highest pitch answered: “No,
and I don’t mean to”—being under the impression that this was what her
sister wanted her to do. There can be no doubt, however, that all
Therese wanted was the information.
Rita, much too agitated to expect anything but a sleepless night, had not
the courage to get into bed. She thought she would remain on the sofa
before the fire and try to compose herself with a book. As she had no
dressing-gown with her she put on her long fur coat over her night-gown,
threw some logs on the fire, and lay down. She didn’t hear the slightest
noise of any sort till she heard me shut the door gently. Quietness of
movement was one of Therese’s accomplishments, and the harassed heiress
of the Allègre millions naturally thought it was her sister coming again
to renew the scene. Her heart sank within her. In the end she became a
little frightened at the long silence, and raised her eyes. She didn’t
believe them for a long time. She concluded that I was a vision. In
fact, the first word which I heard her utter was a low, awed “No,” which,
though I understood its meaning, chilled my blood like an evil omen.
It was then that I spoke. “Yes,” I said, “it’s me that you see,” and
made a step forward. She didn’t start; only her other hand flew to the
edges of the fur coat, gripping them together over her breast. Observing
this gesture I sat down in the nearest chair. The book she had been
reading slipped with a thump on the floor.
“How is it possible that you should be here?” she said, still in a
doubting voice.
“I am really here,” I said. “Would you like to touch my hand?”
She didn’t move at all; her fingers still clutched the fur coat.
“What has happened?”
“It’s a long story, but you may take it from me that all is over. The
tie between us is broken. I don’t know that it was ever very close. It
was an external thing. The true misfortune is that I have ever seen
you.”
This last phrase was provoked by an exclamation of sympathy on her part.
She raised herself on her elbow and looked at me intently. “All over,”
she murmured.
“Yes, we had to wreck the little vessel. It was awful. I feel like a
murderer. But she had to be killed.”
“Why?”
“Because I loved her too much. Don’t you know that love and death go
very close together?”
“I could feel almost happy that it is all over, if you hadn’t had to lose
your love. Oh, _amigo_ George, it was a safe love for you.”
“Yes,” I said. “It was a faithful little vessel. She would have saved
us all from any plain danger. But this was a betrayal. It was—never
mind. All that’s past. The question is what will the next one be.”
“Why should it be that?”
“I don’t know. Life seems but a series of betrayals. There are so many
kinds of them. This was a betrayed plan, but one can betray confidence,
and hope and—desire, and the most sacred . . .”
“But what are you doing here?” she interrupted.
“Oh, yes! The eternal why. Till a few hours ago I didn’t know what I
was here for. And what are you here for?” I asked point blank and with a
bitterness she disregarded. She even answered my question quite readily
with many words out of which I could make very little. I only learned
that for at least five mixed reasons, none of which impressed me
profoundly, Doña Rita had started at a moment’s notice from Paris with
nothing but a dressing-bag, and permitting Rose to go and visit her aged
parents for two days, and then follow her mistress. That girl of late
had looked so perturbed and worried that the sensitive Rita, fearing that
she was tired of her place, proposed to settle a sum of money on her
which would have enabled her to devote herself entirely to her aged
parents. And did I know what that extraordinary girl said? She had
said: “Don’t let Madame think that I would be too proud to accept
anything whatever from her; but I can’t even dream of leaving Madame. I
believe Madame has no friends. Not one.” So instead of a large sum of
money Doña Rita gave the girl a kiss and as she had been worried by
several people who wanted her to go to Tolosa she bolted down this way
just to get clear of all those busybodies. “Hide from them,” she went on
with ardour. “Yes, I came here to hide,” she repeated twice as if
delighted at last to have hit on that reason among so many others. “How
could I tell that you would be here?” Then with sudden fire which only
added to the delight with which I had been watching the play of her
physiognomy she added: “Why did you come into this room?”
She enchanted me. The ardent modulations of the sound, the slight play
of the beautiful lips, the still, deep sapphire gleam in those long eyes
inherited from the dawn of ages and that seemed always to watch
unimaginable things, that underlying faint ripple of gaiety that played
under all her moods as though it had been a gift from the high gods moved
to pity for this lonely mortal, all this within the four walls and
displayed for me alone gave me the sense of almost intolerable joy. The
words didn’t matter. They had to be answered, of course.
“I came in for several reasons. One of them is that I didn’t know you
were here.”
“Therese didn’t tell you?”
“No.”
“Never talked to you about me?”
I hesitated only for a moment. “Never,” I said. Then I asked in my
turn, “Did she tell you I was here?”
“No,” she said.
“It’s very clear she did not mean us to come together again.”
“Neither did I, my dear.”
“What do you mean by speaking like this, in this tone, in these words?
You seem to use them as if they were a sort of formula. Am I a dear to
you? Or is anybody? . . . or everybody? . . .”
She had been for some time raised on her elbow, but then as if something
had happened to her vitality she sank down till her head rested again on
the sofa cushion.
“Why do you try to hurt my feelings?” she asked.
“For the same reason for which you call me dear at the end of a sentence
like that: for want of something more amusing to do. You don’t pretend
to make me believe that you do it for any sort of reason that a decent
person would confess to.”
The colour had gone from her face; but a fit of wickedness was on me and
I pursued, “What are the motives of your speeches? What prompts your
actions? On your own showing your life seems to be a continuous running
away. You have just run away from Paris. Where will you run to-morrow?
What are you everlastingly running from—or is it that you are running
after something? What is it? A man, a phantom—or some sensation that
you don’t like to own to?”
Truth to say, I was abashed by the silence which was her only answer to
this sally. I said to myself that I would not let my natural anger, my
just fury be disarmed by any assumption of pathos or dignity. I suppose
I was really out of my mind and what in the middle ages would have been
called “possessed” by an evil spirit. I went on enjoying my own
villainy.
“Why aren’t you in Tolosa? You ought to be in Tolosa. Isn’t Tolosa the
proper field for your abilities, for your sympathies, for your
profusions, for your generosities—the king without a crown, the man
without a fortune! But here there is nothing worthy of your talents.
No, there is no longer anything worth any sort of trouble here. There
isn’t even that ridiculous Monsieur George. I understand that the talk
of the coast from here to Cette is that Monsieur George is drowned. Upon
my word I believe he is. And serve him right, too. There’s Therese, but
I don’t suppose that your love for your sister . . .”
“For goodness’ sake don’t let her come in and find you here.”
Those words recalled me to myself, exorcised the evil spirit by the mere
enchanting power of the voice. They were also impressive by their
suggestion of something practical, utilitarian, and remote from
sentiment. The evil spirit left me and I remained taken aback slightly.
“Well,” I said, “if you mean that you want me to leave the room I will
confess to you that I can’t very well do it yet. But I could lock both
doors if you don’t mind that.”
“Do what you like as long as you keep her out. You two together would be
too much for me to-night. Why don’t you go and lock those doors? I have
a feeling she is on the prowl.”
I got up at once saying, “I imagine she has gone to bed by this time.” I
felt absolutely calm and responsible. I turned the keys one after
another so gently that I couldn’t hear the click of the locks myself.
This done I recrossed the room with measured steps, with downcast eyes,
and approaching the couch without raising them from the carpet I sank
down on my knees and leaned my forehead on its edge. That penitential
attitude had but little remorse in it. I detected no movement and heard
no sound from her. In one place a bit of the fur coat touched my cheek
softly, but no forgiving hand came to rest on my bowed head. I only
breathed deeply the faint scent of violets, her own particular fragrance
enveloping my body, penetrating my very heart with an inconceivable
intimacy, bringing me closer to her than the closest embrace, and yet so
subtle that I sensed her existence in me only as a great, glowing,
indeterminate tenderness, something like the evening light disclosing
after the white passion of the day infinite depths in the colours of the
sky and an unsuspected soul of peace in the protean forms of life. I had
not known such quietness for months; and I detected in myself an immense
fatigue, a longing to remain where I was without changing my position to
the end of time. Indeed to remain seemed to me a complete solution for
all the problems that life presents—even as to the very death itself.
Only the unwelcome reflection that this was impossible made me get up at
last with a sigh of deep grief at the end of the dream. But I got up
without despair. She didn’t murmur, she didn’t stir. There was
something august in the stillness of the room. It was a strange peace
which she shared with me in this unexpected shelter full of disorder in
its neglected splendour. What troubled me was the sudden, as it were
material, consciousness of time passing as water flows. It seemed to me
that it was only the tenacity of my sentiment that held that woman’s
body, extended and tranquil above the flood. But when I ventured at last
to look at her face I saw her flushed, her teeth clenched—it was
visible—her nostrils dilated, and in her narrow, level-glancing eyes a
look of inward and frightened ecstasy. The edges of the fur coat had
fallen open and I was moved to turn away. I had the same impression as
on the evening we parted that something had happened which I did not
understand; only this time I had not touched her at all. I really didn’t
understand. At the slightest whisper I would now have gone out without a
murmur, as though that emotion had given her the right to be obeyed. But
there was no whisper; and for a long time I stood leaning on my arm,
looking into the fire and feeling distinctly between the four walls of
that locked room the unchecked time flow past our two stranded
personalities.
And suddenly she spoke. She spoke in that voice that was so profoundly
moving without ever being sad, a little wistful perhaps and always the
supreme expression of her grace. She asked as if nothing had happened:
“What are you thinking of, _amigo_?”
I turned about. She was lying on her side, tranquil above the smooth
flow of time, again closely wrapped up in her fur, her head resting on
the old-gold sofa cushion bearing like everything else in that room the
decoratively enlaced letters of her monogram; her face a little pale now,
with the crimson lobe of her ear under the tawny mist of her loose hair,
the lips a little parted, and her glance of melted sapphire level and
motionless, darkened by fatigue.
“Can I think of anything but you?” I murmured, taking a seat near the
foot of the couch. “Or rather it isn’t thinking, it is more like the
consciousness of you always being present in me, complete to the last
hair, to the faintest shade of expression, and that not only when we are
apart but when we are together, alone, as close as this. I see you now
lying on this couch but that is only the insensible phantom of the real
you that is in me. And it is the easier for me to feel this because that
image which others see and call by your name—how am I to know that it is
anything else but an enchanting mist? You have always eluded me except
in one or two moments which seem still more dream-like than the rest.
Since I came into this room you have done nothing to destroy my
conviction of your unreality apart from myself. You haven’t offered me
your hand to touch. Is it because you suspect that apart from me you are
but a mere phantom, and that you fear to put it to the test?”
One of her hands was under the fur and the other under her cheek. She
made no sound. She didn’t offer to stir. She didn’t move her eyes, not
even after I had added after waiting for a while,
“Just what I expected. You are a cold illusion.”
She smiled mysteriously, right away from me, straight at the fire, and
that was all.