IV
The same evening I took the keys and went into the
house I had known so well. Everything was in order, but the silence was
terrible. Though I went twice to the door of the marble room, I could not force
myself to enter. It was beyond my strength.
I went into the smoking-room and
sat down before the spinet. A small lace handkerchief lay on the keys, and I
turned away, choking. It was plain I could not stay, so I locked every door,
every window, and the three front and back gates, and went away. Next morning
Alcide packed my valise, and leaving him in charge of my apartments I took the
Orient express for Constantinople. During the two years that I wandered through
the East, at first, in our letters, we never mentioned Geneviève and Boris, but
gradually their names crept in. I recollect particularly a passage in one of
Jack's letters replying to one of mine—
"What you tell me of seeing Boris bending over
you while you lay ill, and feeling his touch on your face, and hearing his
voice, of course troubles me. This that you describe must have happened a
fortnight after he died. I say to myself that you were dreaming, that it was
part of your delirium, but the explanation does not satisfy me, nor would it
you."
Toward the end of the second year a letter came from
Jack to me in India so unlike anything that I had ever known of him that I
decided to return at once to Paris. He wrote: "I am well, and sell all my
pictures as artists do who have no need of money. I have not a care of my own,
but I am more restless than if I had. I am unable to shake off a strange
anxiety about you. It is not apprehension, it is rather a breathless
expectancy—of what, God knows! I can only say it is wearing me out. Nights I
dream always of you and Boris. I can never recall anything afterward, but I
wake in the morning with my heart beating, and all day the excitement increases
until I fall asleep at night to recall the same experience. I am quite
exhausted by it, and have determined to break up this morbid condition. I must
see you. Shall I go to Bombay, or will you come to Paris?"
I telegraphed him to expect me by the next steamer.
When we met I thought he had changed very little; I,
he insisted, looked in splendid health. It was good to hear his voice again,
and as we sat and chatted about what life still held for us, we felt that it
was pleasant to be alive in the bright spring weather.
We stayed in Paris together a week, and then I went
for a week to Ept with him, but first of all we went to the cemetery at Sèvres,
where Boris lay.
"Shall we place the 'Fates' in the little grove
above him?" Jack asked, and I answered—
"I think only the 'Madonna' should watch over
Boris' grave." But Jack was none the better for my home-coming. The dreams
of which he could not retain even the least definite outline continued, and he
said that at times the sense of breathless expectancy was suffocating.
"You see I do you harm and not good," I
said. "Try a change without me." So he started alone for a ramble
among the Channel Islands, and I went back to Paris. I had not yet entered
Boris' house, now mine, since my return, but I knew it must be done. It had
been kept in order by Jack; there were servants there, so I gave up my own
apartment and went there to live. Instead of the agitation I had feared, I
found myself able to paint there tranquilly. I visited all the rooms—all but
one. I could not bring myself to enter the marble room where Geneviève lay, and
yet I felt the longing growing daily to look upon her face, to kneel beside
her.
One April afternoon, I lay dreaming in the smoking-room,
just as I had lain two years before, and mechanically I looked among the tawny
Eastern rugs for the wolf-skin. At last I distinguished the pointed ears and
flat cruel head, and I thought of my dream where I saw Geneviève lying beside
it. The helmets still hung against the threadbare tapestry, among them the old
Spanish morion which I remembered Geneviève had once put on when we were
amusing ourselves with the ancient bits of mail. I turned my eyes to the
spinet; every yellow key seemed eloquent of her caressing hand, and I rose,
drawn by the strength of my life's passion to the sealed door of the marble
room. The heavy doors swung inward under my trembling hands. Sunlight poured
through the window, tipping with gold the wings of Cupid, and lingered like a
nimbus over the brows of the Madonna. Her tender face bent in compassion over a
marble form so exquisitely pure that I knelt and signed myself. Geneviève lay
in the shadow under the Madonna, and yet, through her white arms, I saw the
pale azure vein, and beneath her softly clasped hands the folds of her dress
were tinged with rose, as if from some faint warm light within her breast.
Bending, with a breaking heart, I touched the marble
drapery with my lips, then crept back into the silent house.
A maid came and brought me a letter, and I sat down in
the little conservatory to read it; but as I was about to break the seal,
seeing the girl lingering, I asked her what she wanted.
She stammered something about a white rabbit that had
been caught in the house, and asked what should be done with it. I told her to
let it loose in the walled garden behind the house, and opened my letter. It
was from Jack, but so incoherent that I thought he must have lost his reason.
It was nothing but a series of prayers to me not to leave the house until he
could get back; he could not tell me why, there were the dreams, he said—he
could explain nothing, but he was sure that I must not leave the house in the
Rue Sainte-Cécile.
As I finished reading I raised my eyes and saw the
same maid-servant standing in the doorway holding a glass dish in which two
gold-fish were swimming: "Put them back into the tank and tell me what you
mean by interrupting me," I said.
With a half-suppressed whimper she emptied water and
fish into an aquarium at the end of the conservatory, and turning to me asked
my permission to leave my service. She said people were playing tricks on her,
evidently with a design of getting her into trouble; the marble rabbit had been
stolen and a live one had been brought into the house; the two beautiful marble
fish were gone, and she had just found those common live things flopping on the
dining-room floor. I reassured her and sent her away, saying I would look about
myself. I went into the studio; there was nothing there but my canvases and
some casts, except the marble of the Easter lily. I saw it on a table across
the room. Then I strode angrily over to it. But the flower I lifted from the
table was fresh and fragile and filled the air with perfume.
Then suddenly I comprehended, and sprang through the
hallway to the marble room. The doors flew open, the sunlight streamed into my
face, and through it, in a heavenly glory, the Madonna smiled, as Geneviève
lifted her flushed face from her marble couch and opened her sleepy eyes.
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