“Poor Aunt Catherine,” she said. . . . “Put your arm round me, Eugéne. . . . She can do nothing. She used to follow me with her eyes always. She thought I didn't notice, but I did. And now she seems unable to look me in the face. Peyrol too, for that matter. He used to follow me with his eyes. Often I wondered what made them look at me like that. Can you tell, Eugéne? But it's all changed now.”
“Yes, it is all changed,” said Réal in a tone which he tried to make as light as possible. “Does Catherine know you are here?”
“When we went upstairs this evening I lay down all dressed on my bed and she sat on hers. The candle was out, but in the moonlight I could see her quite plainly with her hands on her lap. When I could lie still no longer I simply got up and went out of the room. She was still sitting at the foot of her bed. All I did was to put my finger on my lips and then she dropped her head. I don't think I quite closed the door. . . . Hold me tighter, Eugène, I am tired. . . . Strange, you know! Formerly, a long time ago, before I ever saw you, I never rested and never felt tired.” She stopped her murmur suddenly and lifted a finger recommending silence. She listened and Réal listened too, he did not know for what; and in this sudden concentration on a point, all that had happened since he had entered the room seemed to him a dream in its improbability and in the more than life-like force dreams have in their inconsequence. Even the woman letting herself go on his arm seemed to have no weight as it might have happened in a dream.
“She is there,” breathed Arlette suddenly, rising on tiptoe to reach up to his ear. “She must have heard you go past.”
“Where is she?” asked Réal with the same intense secrecy.
“Outside the door. She must have been listening to the murmur of our voices . . . .” Arlette breathed into his ear as if relating an enormity. “She told me one day that I was one of those who are fit for no man's arms.”
At this he flung his other arm round her and looked into her enlarged as if frightened eyes, while she clasped him with all her strength and they stood like that a long time, lips pressed on lips without a kiss, and breathless in the closeness of their contact. To him the stillness seemed to extend to the limits of the universe. The thought “Am I going to die?” flashed through that stillness and lost itself in it like a spark flying in an everlasting night. The only result of it was the tightening of his hold on Arlette.
An aged and uncertain voice was heard uttering the word “Arlette.” Catherine, who had been listening to their murmurs, could not bear the long silence. They heard her trembling tones as distinctly as though she had been in the room. Réal felt as if it had saved his life. They separated silently.
“Go away,” called out Arlette.
“Arl ——— . . .”
“Be quiet,” she cried louder. “You can do nothing.”
“Arlette,” came through the door, tremulous and commanding.
“She will wake up Scevola,” remarked Arlette to Réal in a conversational tone. And they both waited for sounds that did not come. Arlette pointed her finger at the wall. “He is there, you know.”
“He is asleep,” muttered Réal. But the thought “I am lost” which he formulated in his mind had no reference to Scevola.
“He is afraid,” said Arlette contemptuously in an undertone. “But that means little. He would quake with fright one moment and rush out to do murder the next.”
Slowly, as if drawn by the irresistible authority of the old woman, they had been moving towards the door. Réal thought with the sudden enlightenment of passion: “If she does not go now I won't have the strength to part from her in the morning.” He had no image of death before his eyes but of a long and intolerable separation. A sigh verging upon a moan reached them from the other side of the door and made the air around them heavy with sorrow against which locks and keys will not avail.
“You had better go to her,” he whispered in a penetrating tone.
“Of course I will,” said Arlette with some feeling. “Poor old thing. She and I have only each other in the world, but I am the daughter here, she must do what I tell her.” With one of her hands on Réal's shoulder she put her mouth close to the door and said distinctly:
“I am coming directly. Go back to your room and wait for me,” as if she had no doubt of being obeyed.
A profound silence ensued. Perhaps Catherine had gone already. Réal and Arlette stood still for a whole minute as if both had been changed into stone.
“Go now,” said Réal in a hoarse, hardly audible voice.
She gave him a quick kiss on the lips and again they stood like a pair of enchanted lovers bewitched into immobility.
“If she stays on,” thought Réal, “I shall never have the courage to tear myself away, and then I shall have to blow my brains out.” But when at last she moved he seized her again and held her as if she had been his very life. When he let her go he was appalled by hearing a very faint laugh of her secret joy.
“Why do you laugh?” he asked in a scared tone.
She stopped to answer him over her shoulder.
“I laughed because I thought of all the days to come. Days and days and days. Have you thought of them?”
“Yes,” Réal faltered, like a man stabbed to the heart, holding the door half open. And he was glad to have something to hold on to.
She slipped out with a soft rustle of her silk skirt, but before he had time to close the door behind her she put back her arm for an instant. He had just time to press the palm of her hand to his lips. It was cool. She snatched it away and he had the strength of mind to shut the door after her. He felt like a man chained to the wall and dying of thirst, from whom a cold drink is snatched away. The room became dark suddenly. He thought, “A cloud over the moon, a cloud over the moon, an enormous cloud,” while he walked rigidly to the window, insecure and swaying as if on a tight rope. After a moment he perceived the moon in a sky on which there was no sign of the smallest cloud anywhere. He said to himself, “I suppose I nearly died just now. But no,” he went on thinking with deliberate cruelty, “Oh, no, I shall not die. I shall only suffer, suffer, suffer . . . .”
“Suffer, suffer.” Only by stumbling against the side of the bed did he discover that he had gone away from the window. At once he flung himself violently on the bed with his face buried in the pillow, which he bit to restrain the cry of distress about to burst through his lips. Natures schooled into insensibility when once overcome by a mastering passion are like vanquished giants ready for despair. He, a man on service, felt himself shrinking from death and that doubt contained in itself all possible doubts of his own fortitude. The only thing he knew was that he would be gone to-morrow morning. He shuddered along his whole extended length, then lay still gripping a handful of bedclothes in each hand to prevent himself from leaping up in panicky restlessness. He was saying to himself pedantically, “I must lie down and rest, I must rest to have strength for to-morrow, I must rest,” while the tremendous struggle to keep still broke out in waves of perspiration on his forehead. At last sudden oblivion must have descended on him because he turned over and sat up suddenly with the sound of the word “Ecoutez” in his ears.
A strange, dim, cold light filled the room; a light he did not recognize for anything he had known before, and at the foot of his bed stood a figure in dark garments with a dark shawl over its head, with a fleshless predatory face and dark hollows for its eyes, silent, expectant, implacable. . . . Is this death?” he asked himself, staring at it terrified. It resembled Catherine. It said again: “Ecoutez.” He took away his eyes from it and glancing down noticed that his clothes were torn open on his chest. He would not look up at that thing, whatever it was, spectre or old woman, and said:
“Yes, I hear you.”
“You are an honest man.” It was Catherine's unemotional voice. “The day has broken. You will go away.”
“Yes,”