...
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 cold 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 or 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 any thing 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 roomsall 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's 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 lingering
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 of the Madonna, and yet, through her
white arms, I saw the pale azure vein, the 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 come 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 my not to leave the house until he could get back; he could not tell
my 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 by
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 canvasses 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 hall-way 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.
FINIS
