Half an hour later I slept deeply, peacefully, upon my bed in the big
stately chamber where the roses watched beside the latticed windows.
And to say I dreamed again is not correct, for it can only be expressed
by saying that I saw and knew. The figures round the bed were actual,
and in life. Nothing could be more real than the whisper of the
doctor’s voice--that solemn, grave-faced man who was so tall--as he
said, sternly yet brokenly, to some one: ‘You must say good-bye; and
you had better say it _now_.’ Nor could anything be more definite and
sure, more charged with the actuality of living, than the figure of
Marion, as she stooped over me to obey the terrible command. For I saw
her face float down towards me like a star, and a shower of pale spring
blossoms rained upon me with her hair. The perfume of old, old gardens
rose about me as she slipped to her knees beside the bed and kissed my
lips--so softly it was like the breath of wind from lake and orchard,
and so lingeringly it was as though the blossoms lay upon my mouth and
grew into flowers that she planted there.
‘Good-bye, my love; be brave. It is only separation.’
‘It is death,’ I tried to say, but could only feebly stir my lips
against her own.
I drew her breath of flowers into my mouth ... and there came then the
darkness which is final.
* * * * *
The voices grew louder. I heard a man struggling with an unfamiliar
language. Turning restlessly, I opened my eyes--upon a little, stuffy
room, with white walls whereon no pictures hung. It was very hot.
A woman was standing beside the bed, and the bed was very short. I
stretched, and my feet kicked against the boarding at the end.
‘Yes, he _is_ awake,’ the woman said in French. ‘Will you come in? The
doctor said you might see him when he woke. I think he’ll know you.’
She spoke in French. I just knew enough to understand.
And of course I knew him. It was Haddon. I heard him thanking her for
all her kindness, as he blundered in. His French, if anything, was
worse than my own. I felt inclined to laugh. I did laugh.
‘By Jove! old man, this is bad luck, isn’t it? You’ve had a narrow
shave. This good lady telegraphed----’
‘Have you got my ice-axe? Is it all right?’ I asked. I remembered
clearly the motor accident--everything.
‘The ice-axe is right enough,’ he laughed, looking cheerfully at the
woman, ‘but what about yourself? Feel bad still? Any pain, I mean?’
‘Oh, I feel all right,’ I answered, searching for the pain of broken
bones, but finding none. ‘What happened? I was stunned, I suppose?’
‘Bit stunned, yes,’ said Haddon. ‘You got a nasty knock on the head, it
seems. The point of the axe ran into you, or something.’
‘Was that all?’
He nodded. ‘But I’m afraid it’s knocked our climbing on the head.
Shocking bad luck, isn’t it?’
‘I telegraphed last night,’ the kind woman was explaining.
‘But I couldn’t get here till this morning,’ Haddon said. ‘The telegram
didn’t find me till midnight, you see.’ And he turned to thank the
woman in his voluble, dreadful French. She kept a little pension on
the shores of the lake. It was the nearest house, and they had carried
me in there and got the doctor to me all within the hour. It proved
slight enough, apart from the shock. It was not even concussion. I had
merely been stunned. Sleep had cured me, as it seemed.
‘Jolly little place,’ said Haddon, as he moved me that afternoon to
Geneva, whence, after a few days’ rest, we went on into the Alps of
Haute Savoie, ‘and lucky the old body was so kind and quick. Odd,
wasn’t it?’ He glanced at me.
Something in his voice betrayed he hid another thought. I saw nothing
‘odd’ in it at all, only very tiresome.
‘What’s its name?’ I asked, taking a shot at a venture.
He hesitated a second. Haddon, the climber, was not skilled in the
delicacies of tact.
‘Don’t know its present name,’ he answered, looking away from me across
the lake, ‘but it stands on the site of an old château--destroyed a
hundred years ago--the Château de Bellerive.’
And then I understood my old friend’s absurd confusion. For Bellerive
chanced also to be the name of a married woman I knew in Scotland--at
least, it was her maiden name, and she was of French extraction.