THE ICE GIVES WAY.
María had not gone more than half a mile when a terrible reflection
occurred to her--a thought at once so serious and so obvious that she
was on the point of turning back. It struck her that her dress, having
been chosen with a view to an afternoon drive, was unsuitable for so
early a visit--nay, ridiculous not to say “loud.” How could she have
overlooked this when she was dressing? Why had she not chosen other and
simpler things, more suitable according to all the accepted laws of
society for morning wear? She was really upset and distressed; however,
there was now no remedy; so, though she was vexed to think that on
such an occasion she should not be a model of good taste, she consoled
herself with the reflection that beauty lays down the laws of fashion
and has never been its slave. Other and more important matters soon put
all thoughts of dress out of her head. As she drove along she tried to
compose and remember appropriate phrases and speeches. She knew exactly
what her husband would say, and how she, as the outraged wife, ought to
reply. Sentence after sentence surged up in her brain as readily as if
it were the crucible of the Spanish Academy. Now and then an adjective
seemed too weak and she substituted a stronger one; here and there a
statement of fact gave way to a hypothesis; and thus anticipating the
utterance of her wrath and injuries, she grew so excited that she spoke
aloud to herself.
She paid no heed to the road along which she was being carried, nor to
any object she passed. At the same time, as frequently happens when
the mind is full of a fixed group of ideas, María, while she took no
conscious note of the more important details, involuntarily absorbed
certain trivial and minute ones. She observed a dead bird lying by the
road, and a tavern sign-board in which the letter A was missing; as she
passed the tram-car she perceived that the driver was blind of one eye.
This is one of the commonest and oddest of mental phenomena.
At length she reached the hamlet, or rather detached suburb--neither
town nor country, but an irregular medley of mansions and dung-hills.
Not knowing precisely which way to go, she enquired of some women who
civilly directed her; the man drove on. Now she was near the house--it
must be quite close. Her heart throbbed wildly, and all the speeches
she had so laboriously prepared deserted her at once.
The carriage stopped ... she could hardly stand. She saw a gate leading
into a large court-yard, full of furniture cases, and an iron bed
packed for moving. There was a woman too, talking to some one she could
not see. María went in and approached her; then, to her horror, she saw
that she was talking to herself; was she mad? But María asked for Don
Leon Roch.
“Don Leon Roch?” said Facunda with a good-humoured smile after a pause
of astonishment. “He is up there.” And she pointed to a door through
which a staircase was visible.
María hurried up, but about half way she was forced to stop for breath.
At the top she went into a large light room; there was no one there.
She saw books, articles of furniture that she recognised, all in
confusion as packed for removal, but no one ... no one.
Suddenly, like a bird that hops out of a hedge at the sound of a voice,
a little girl appeared from behind a table. She held a broken doll and
was eating a piece of bread. She was warmly wrapped up, and on her head
she wore a little white hood, very much like a nun’s. Her face was that
of a cherub, if a cherub can be supposed to have a little wet nose from
a cold sharp morning. Monina fixed her eyes on the dazzling vision
that had suddenly appeared in the doorway and stared at it speechless
and motionless. This was not a lady; it was a doll, a very large doll
dressed like a lady, and the child’s astonishment soon changed to
alarm. She saw the figure come slowly towards her without taking her
eyes off her ... and such eyes! Monina turned white and would have
cried out but she was too frightened. This enormous doll came slowly up
to her without seeming to walk, and when it had reached her it stooped
down ... the poor little thing was too much terrified to scream;
those eyes had turned her to stone. It put out a hand and laid it on
Monina’s shoulder. Then, clutching the little arm, it squeezed it
tighter--tighter--like an iron vice, while in a voice which Monina did
not recognise as human, but rather as the strange croak which dwells in
a doll’s body and utters “papa” and “mamma,” it asked her:
“Who are you? What is your name?”
The instinct of self preservation conquered her terrors, and at last
poor Ramona found her voice. She gave a shrill cry and pulled away her
arm. Leon Roch came to the door of the adjoining room where he too
stood still, like a statue in a niche. Unlike St. Thomas, he saw but
he could not believe. For a minute or two he could not shake off his
dismay and astonishment, seeing clearly the dilemma in which he was
placed. Her appearance there was extraordinary no doubt, but anything
rather than absurd; what was absurd, was her coming fashionably
bedizened with such extravagant elegance at this hour of the morning.
It was a phenomenon which had formed no factor in his calculations and
which was, so far, perfectly inexplicable. Having presently mastered
his feelings and determined to face the scene that was evidently
inevitable, Leon, before saying a word to his wife, took Monina’s
hand, went to the top of the stairs and called some one to whom he
entrusted the child; then, turning back into the room, he shut the door
resolutely, like a lion-tamer who locks himself in with the savage
favourites, who, to him, are, after all, only part of his family.
María had seated herself; in fact she could hardly stand.
“You did not expect me?” she said tremulously.
“No, I certainly did not.”
“You thought you were free! poor man ... free to pursue ... without
a road ... free, I mean, to pursue the road of infamy without let or
hindrance. No, no! you must account to ... to me....”
All the speeches that María had in fancy delivered with so much unction
had evaporated, word by word. She made a desperate effort to remember
a single effective phrase; in vain! they were gone. She could hardly
catch at a word as they whirled through her brain, and she could only
cry out in a husky voice:
“Guilty wretch!”
Leon smiled slightly and María went on: “Wretch! I am here to apprehend
you.”
“Very well,” said Leon calmly accepting the idea. “But allowing that I
am guilty, and a wretch, and that you are the police--you have no chain
to fetter me with because you yourself have broken it.”
María had prepared her rejoinders on the supposition that her husband
would answer her as she had imagined; but as Leon said something quite
different she was in the position of an actor who has lost his cues.
“The chain,” she murmured, not at the instant understanding what he
meant, “and I, you say, have broken it.”
“Yes, you. Who but you gave me my liberty?”
“You are a wretch, a libertine, a villain!” cried María dropping
into the vulgar recrimination of every angry wife. “Liberty? What
do you mean by it? You have none. You are my husband--tied to me by
a bond that none but God can sever, since it was He who bound us.
You abominable materialists think that the ordinance of matrimony is
a thing to be played fast and loose with. I tell you it is a divine
institution.”
“And a human institution as well. But we need not bandy words María.
Tell me what did you come here for?”
“And now he dares to ask me what I came for!” she exclaimed, her
nervousness giving way to a frenzy of wrath. “I will tell you. I came
to require of you an account of your criminal behaviour, to surprise
you in your lair, to put you to open shame, and then--and then to scorn
you.”
“But you could have scorned me without coming here.”
“I wished to see whether you had a remnant of shame and decency;
whether I could surprise you, face to face; if you would dare to
confess your sin....”
“You have, you see, surprised me somewhat,” said Leon raising his eyes.
“As regards my sins, if I have committed any, it is not to you that I
owe a confession.”
“What audacious impudence!... But I came for something more,” added
María livid with rage. “I came in the hope of finding here that
abandoned woman, and of giving her the name she deserves; to ...” She
clenched her fists and her eyes glared.
“What woman?”
“The hypocrite can ask! I do not name her for it would stain my lips
... do you dare to tell me that you are not on terms of disgraceful--of
criminal intimacy with her?”
“With whom?”
“With her....” And she pointed in the direction of Suertebella.
“María” said Leon gravely and turning pale, “I do not like to see
you a propagator of base slander. I should find it very difficult to
cease to respect you; but if you wish that I should never fail in the
consideration which I owe to you, never repeat that question. Be silent
... go ... leave me. You do not want my love since your religion is
all in all to you; go, serve your altars, and leave me alone with my
conscience.”
María drew herself up, clenching her arms against her breast like a
wild beast preparing to spring; her eyes for a moment seemed dimmed,
but the next instant they flashed fire.
“Coward, villain!” she exclaimed. “Do you dare to tear yourself away
from me, your lawful wife, the wife to whom you belong and whom you
shall never escape!... No, never--since God has pronounced us one? Who
are you, a miserable wretch, to desecrate a sacrament and disobey the
Father of us all?”
“Desecrate a sacrament? I ... I?” Leon stood up and went close to his
wife. “It is not I,” he said, “who desecrate the sacrament.”
“Who then?”
“You,” he said, pointing with his finger so close to her face that it
was as if he meant to put out her eyes.
“I?”
“You.--You cast it to the winds. When I was trying to save our home and
peace you said to me: ‘My God requires me to say that I do not love
you.’”
For a second María was abashed and silent; her wrath had abated a
little.
“It is true that I said that. And, after all, if you desire my love,
why do you not try to merit it by becoming a Christian and a Catholic.
In spite of your wicked atheism I cannot say that I do not love you ...
a little. But oh! why are you not like me? Why do you not imitate my
piety?”
“Because it is beyond me,” he retorted sarcastically, “because there
are forms of piety so unnatural, so insane, so absurd, silly and
irrational.... But at least you must admit that it was you, you
yourself who desecrated the sacrament.”
“But I,” replied his wife, catching at a cogent argument. “I have been
faithful and you have not.”
Leon was staggered for an instant.
“I have been faithful too,” he said. “I swear it before God and by
the sacred memory of my father and mother! Faithful, tender and kind
to the last extremity--even when you, carried away by a sickly piety,
and by the example and ardent warnings of your hapless brother, built
up a wall of ice between your soul and mine. You refused to bestow on
me even the commonplaces of affection, the gentle words and tones
which may take the place of love when love is dead; you humiliated me
with your senseless scruples and cruel recriminations, that bore a
hideous resemblance to vulgar abuse; you made my home empty and dark,
casting a gloom over it that oppressed my heart, dried my brain, and
embittered my blood; you took a delight in neglecting your person to
the extent even of sluttishness; to annoy me more deeply you dressed
in absurd and shapeless clothes, and took a pride in making yourself
repulsive and odious. Every word I spoke you regarded as blasphemy,
and all my thoughts and feelings were crimes worthy to be punished by
the inquisition. You were mad and blind! If you felt called to such
a career of sanctity why did you not try to imitate the patience--a
saintly patience, surely--with which I endured your proud assumption
of humility, your unchristian bitterness, and your devotion, which for
insolence, vexatiousness and recalcitrancy was for all the world like
the pranks of a troup of demons playing the part of angels with masks
on.
“And you come to me--to me who have borne all this--to me whom you have
hated and tormented--to me! and call me to account instead of asking
my forgiveness. ‘Pardon,’ María is the only word that it becomes you
to utter this day! after all your bigotry, and hypocrisy, and insults,
you desire me to account to you ... for what? A woman who has told her
husband that she does not love him cannot call him to account. I have
been more than considerate in not declaring our marriage as void, in
still acknowledging you as my wife, in regarding myself as still bound
to you by some invisible tie, in asking not for liberty but only for
peace--not for compensation but only for respite!”
“You might indeed lodge some complaint against me,” retorted María,
“if, since that time, you had been as faithful to me as I have been to
you. But you have not; nay you have long, long been false to me.”
“It is not true.”
“Yes, false and faithless,” she insisted, clinging to the statement
with feverish vehemence. “And instead of defending yourself you turn
upon me! Those are the tactics of every clever criminal.... I was
blind, ignorant of your perfidy. You have cheated me shamefully!”
“It is not true.”
“For a long time, for years.”
“Not true.”
“But at last it has all come to my knowledge. I have discovered the
whole truth. You cannot deny it, for the present throws light on
the past and your crime of to-day betrays that of yesterday. You
have lost all decency; you do not even hide the distant date of your
intimacy--and here, in this house, where you have buried yourself to
revel in your sin, you pass whole days playing with that child ... with
that sniffling little brat!...”
Leon glared at his wife with a terrible expression; his eyes darted
arrows of wrath. María drew a deep breath and added in a hoarse voice:
“With her child--which is yours.”
With livid lips and a murderous glare in his eyes, looking as an
assassin may in the very act, Leon went up to his wife and seizing her
by the arm he shook her in his fury:
“It is a calumny,” he said, “a lie....”
Then he let her go, swallowing down the rest of the words that were on
his tongue.
María stung and devoured by all the serpents of jealousy, had no words
for the rage that burned within her; for when jealousy has reached
a certain pitch it cannot find utterance--it must act. Her revenge
could not be satisfied with anything less than the destruction of the
innocent cause of her indignation. To tear Monina limb from limb was
what her passion prompted her to do, and without a moment’s hesitation
she acted on the impulse; she snatched up the doll that Monina had left
on a chair and tore it to pieces--arms, legs, hair--the trembling hands
of the outraged wife wreaked her vengeance on the senseless toy. Then,
flinging the fragments away, she exclaimed in broken gasps:
“There ... that ... that is how your lawful wife ought to treat her ...
her....” She was almost choking.
Leon, recovering his self-command, spoke again.
“I should have thought you incapable of becoming the mouthpiece of such
an infamous slander. Of what use is piety if it leaves you in ignorance
of the first elements of charity? You never can have had any feelings!”
“Oh yes, I had once,” said María exhausted by her own rage. “But I can
thank God that I have not transmitted them to any child of yours. He
has blessed me in making me childless, as He has blessed other women in
giving them children. He could not grant a family to an atheist!”
“Your blasphemy appals me,” said Leon, who could endure no more. “Can
a sacrament be more utterly annulled, or a bond more effectually cut?
Between you and me, María, there is a great gulf--bottomless and
infinite; a space of endless desert in which, try as I may, I cannot
see a single idea or feeling that we can have in common. Let us part
forever; do not try to bring together two distinct worlds which cannot
approach each other without tempest and lightnings. If there ever were
two irreconcilable beings, we are they. For I too am a fanatic; you
have taught me to be, like you, a bigot--an ardent, even a relentless
bigot. We will part, each to his own shore, and let the waste that lies
between us be as the ocean of oblivion. Nay, to soothe our consciences,
I will say the ocean of forgiveness. Each may forgive; both may forget
... good-bye.”
While he was speaking María’s feelings of anger and revenge had
given way to other and very different sentiments, calmer and more
contemplative, which by degrees took absolute possession of her
agitated mind. She looked at her husband and found him--why should she
deny it?--worthier than ever to be the friend and companion of a loving
wife. His face had a charm of its own, with the dark beard that gave it
an indefinable expression of romantic melancholy, with the eager eyes
and broad brow, on which a reflected gleam of sunshine at that moment
fell, like a beam of glory on that wise and intelligent head. This mute
contemplation of his manly good looks appealed directly to her heart
and made it beat with excitement. Her first and only love revived;
she remembered the happiness of the early days of their marriage and
against the background of these memories the fact stood out that
the man was interesting, attractive, and--why not confess it?--very
good-looking; she could not take her eyes off his face. ‘But not for
her--for another woman!’ This was the spark that fired the whole
edifice, that scathed and rent her soul, so that all her piety leaked
out, so to speak. This was the diabolical idea that turned her ice to
fire, her scorn to a tenderer passion and all that was harsh in her
nature to gentleness--that lent grace and elegance even to her absurd
dress. She was desperately in love, in short, from jealousy rather than
from sympathy. It was a fearful blow to her to hear herself calmly
dismissed--with a friendly pardon, it is true--but still definitely
dismissed. She could have borne to accept her dismissal and part from
him for ever; she might even forget him, and forgive him for having
ceased to love her ... but that he should love another....
“No, never, never!” she exclaimed, as the result of her reflections;
and her eyes sparkled through tears. But she would not confess the
weakness, and hastily drying her eyes she went on:
“One night you asked me....”
“Yes, I asked you....”
“And I told you that God forbid my love for you ... and it is true; God
did forbid it. I felt it in my soul, but yet ... you see, you should
not have taken the answer. You should have asked once more.”
“But I had asked you so often, and in so many different ways.”
“Well, now I ask you,” and she went up to him and laid her hands on his
shoulders; “I ask you: ‘Do you still love me?’” Leon’s nature rebelled
against a lie. He paused to question his conscience. For an instant he
thought that a generous falsehood would be the nobler course; but then
he revolted against the notion of a mock devotion. Almost before he had
thought out the matter the truth broke from his lips.
“No.... My God ... mine, María, compels me to say No.”
She dropped back into her seat. It was with a sort of roar that she
exclaimed:
“Your God is a fiend!”
“You have no claim to anything more than my respect.”
“You love some one else?” she went on, gnawing the corner of her
handkerchief, “tell me the truth.... I know you are truthful ...
confess it and I will leave you in peace for ever.”
“But I deny your right to ask,” said Leon after a moment’s hesitation.
“Deny my right if you will; but reply.”
Leon was on the point of saying: “Well then I do.” But there are cases
in which the truth is a form of murder; when it is baser than a lie.
“Well then,” he said, “no.”
“Your face betrays you, it is false!” said María starting up.
“My face?”
“You never used to tell lies.... I know that you never told lies. But
this minute you prove to me that you have lost even that grace!”
Leon made no reply, and María, after a short pause, went on:
“I have no further business here....” Still he said nothing; he did
not even look at her. “None, none,” she said. “I blush to think that
I should ever have crossed the threshold of this abode of scandal and
wickedness.”
She moistened her parched lips with her tongue, but there was a bitter
dryness on both, compared to which aloes are as honey for sweetness.
Her impulse was to spit out something ... to spit out that other She
whose name was as the savour of fruits plucked in the court of hell.
She stammered some inarticulate words and bit her lips till the blood
came.
“It is a shame ... a disgrace!” she muttered. “To have fallen to such
depths ... to have flung myself at the feet of this wretch ... a woman
like me ... a woman!...” She was too angry to shed tears--even tears of
rage. “Scorned ... despised....”
“Despised, no,” said her husband, moving towards her with an impulse of
generosity.
“Despised as if I were a....”
“Never despised....”
“Not even....”
“Well?”
“Not worthy of your consideration.”
“Consideration, certainly ...” said Leon who was as much disturbed as
she was; but she was going through a phase of reaction into the depths
of dejection.
“To you,” she went on, “I am not even good to look at. You hate the
sight of me; I have lost....”
“No,” said Leon “I swear to you that, since I first met you, I have
never seen you so beautiful as you are to-day.”
“And yet,” she cried writhing in her chair, “and yet you do not love
me....”
“You,” retorted Leon “you who have so much cultivated the spiritual
life must surely know that beauty of face and person is not what can
best captivate the soul!”
“And to you my nature is hideous?” And she struck her forehead with
a wild groan, as though she had suddenly remembered some vital fact
or had come to her right mind after an interval of mental delusion.
“How should it be otherwise when I am a Christian and you a reprobate
atheist? Of course, of course ... and I have been so mad--mad do I
say?--So wicked, as to take my eyes for a moment away from my Lord and
Saviour to gaze on you--an infidel. I have put off my black serge to
dress myself in this frippery, fit only for a lost woman, with the
base purpose of pleasing--of courting you. My God! canst Thou ever
forgive me?”
She snatched off her hat in delirious rage, and tearing it to fragments
strewed them about the floor. In her haste she pulled down her hair
which she had not fastened securely; the black locks fell about her
temples and over her shoulders. She looked like a mad creature as she
went close up to her husband and said to him in a low voice:
“I am as bad as you. I am an unworthy wretch. I forgot my God, my
duty, and my dignity for your sake.... Wretch! I do not deserve to be
called a saint, for a saint....” She glanced at her handsome dress with
horror. “Women who devote themselves truly to God would not have put
on this livery of sin. I am ashamed to see myself so tricked out. Away
with you, for filthy rags!”
She tore the trimmings with unnatural strength, rending the stuff and
ripping off the buttons, and at length she threw off her cloak and
gloves and flung them into a corner.
“Enough, enough; I have stooped too low. I will return to God--to my
seclusion and indifference to this world. I will curse my beauty for
having pleased you. I will return to the peaceful practice of religion.
No worldly humiliations can touch me then; I will find rest in sacred
meditations, conversing with God and seeing the angels, and hearing the
music of their songs in Heaven; I will go back to my peaceful life
where, at any rate, I may be so happy as to forget you! In its gloom
you will not come to curse my sight.... I have sinned and am unworthy
of the least of the Lord’s mercies. Forgive, O Lord! Forgive! Never
again will I sin thus.”
She fell on her knees and melted into tears that flowed in a ready
torrent, while she covered her face with her trembling hands. They
trickled through her fingers, and down on to her bosom, where she had
torn her dress open. Leon was alarmed; the pathetic, helpless attitude
and bitter fit of weeping touched him deeply. He bent over her and
raising her in his arms placed her in a seat.
“María for God’s sake do not go mad,” he said. “Compose
yourself--control yourself.” But she kept her hands clasped over her
face.
Leon laid his hand on her shoulder, tried to rearrange her disordered
hair and pull her dress round her--for she had really half-undressed
herself in her fury. Suddenly she threw her arm round his neck with a
convulsive energy and he felt her burning lips close to his cheek, but
she did not kiss him; in a husky faint voice she said:
“I will strangle you--I will murder you if you love any one else.--Am
I not handsomer, am I not more beautiful than she is?... Mine! you
are mine.... Mine only....” But her grasp relaxed and her arms fell
helplessly by her side; her head drooped on her breast, her hair
veiling her face; a spasmodic quiver passed over her throat and
neck--a shiver of the skin; he heard a faint murmur from her lips:
“Dying--sinful....” And she sat in a heap speechless and unconscious.
He felt her heart--her pulse; there was no perceptible flutter.
He rushed to the stairs, shouting for help. No sooner had he opened
the door than the room was full of people. Curiosity had brought the
neighbours together, for they had heard loud voices; the cries they
knew were uttered by the wife of Señor Leon Roch, and a wife who cries
out is a legitimate object of sympathy and curiosity. They rushed up
into the room, and with them the Marquis de Fúcar, who had come to give
Leon his little commission for Paris. But they all stood in helpless
astonishment.
“Take her to my house at once,” said Fúcar. “Have you any brandy, any
spirit? The first thing is to put her to bed, to send for a doctor....
Take her to my house.”
“No, the doctor can come here,” said Leon.
“But you have no bed,” said Fúcar looking round at the dismantled room.
“There is my bed,” said Facunda. “A king has not got a better.”
“Move away all of you--let me see. I think her heart is still beating.”
“Yes, yes, it is certainly beating,” exclaimed Leon hopefully.
“It will be nothing--merely a fainting fit--and all for a squabble! You
see the consequences of exageration.... But we must get her to bed.
Wrap her in a cloak--get me a cloak.”
The Marquis de Fúcar was an invaluable person in these emergencies,
when prompt decision, energy, and a tone of command are indispensable.
Four strong arms lifted María, wrapped her carefully in a cloak, and
carried her down stairs. It was like carrying a body to be buried. Leon
looked on and allowed them to act, as he would have looked on at any
other step Fúcar might have taken. It was like a scene in a dream, and
for some time he failed to remember that this arrangement, which from
one point of view was the best thing that could be done, from another
was the very reverse; but by that time the little procession had
started.
Pepa’s astonishment on seeing this inanimate figure brought into her
house can easily be imagined.... “Merciful Heaven! María Sudre!” and
what a state she was in. She could understand the fainting fit, but it
was not so easy to account for the torn dress and dishevelled hair.
They carried her into the first bed-room they came to and laid her on
the bed.
“You have forgotten the most important thing of all,” said Pepa. “To
undo her stays.”
“To be sure. How stupid of us!”
And, as he spoke, Don Pedro cut the laces with his pocket-knife. The
village doctor now came in; he spoke of congestion of the brain, and
regarded the case as serious. A messenger was at once despatched to
bring the most celebrated consulting physician of Madrid. Presently,
however, an improvement was evident; María turned over, opened her
eyes, and breathed more easily. If it were but a fainting fit after all.
But María as she recovered her faculties was evidently delirious; she
took no heed of where she was or of those who stood by her side, not
recognising her husband. After talking feebly but wildly for a few
minutes she fell asleep; silence, perfect silence, was indispensable.
The doctor gave some instructions and prescriptions.
“Now,” he said, “leave her in silence and darkness. There is at any
rate no immediate danger; but you must not allow the slightest sound in
this room or in those adjoining; and she is better alone than with more
than one person in the room.” He went away.
Pepa with her finger to her lips enjoined silence. Leon and the Marquis
Fúcar stood speechless, gazing at the patient. At the end of half an
hour Pepa said:
“She is sound asleep and seems to be comfortable. When she wakes I will
come and sit with her; I will see that she has everything she needs.”
“No, no,” Leon interposed eagerly. “I beg--I entreat you not to come
into the room at all.” Pepa bowed her head and she and her father went
away on tiptoe.
Leon sat down by the bed. He was still under the influence of the
horror and alarm of the first shock, and even now had no clear idea of
the position in which he and his wife stood to each other. María lay
still, sleeping as if she were quite tired out; the hapless husband
looked vaguely round the room. He sighed. There was something eerie
in the air. Presently Pepa returned through a door concealed by some
hangings; Leon looked up, startled and vexed; but she came nearer
evidently puzzled and inquisitive. She was paler even than María--as
pale as death. Her footfall was inaudible on the thick carpet and she
might have been a ghost. She took no notice of Leon’s anxious gesture
of warning but came close to the bed, and looked down fixedly at the
sleeping woman as if she were studying the most interesting, but at
the same time the most appalling, object in the universe. At her
heels crept Monina, as softly as a kitten that steals in and out, and
clutching at her mother’s skirts in visible alarm, she pointed to the
bed and whispered: “Big dolly dead.”