Page:Dumas - Tales of Strange adventure (Methuen, 1907).djvu/24

12 " Ah yes, a letter! "

" A letter the postman left, and which Françoise asked me to bring up to you; here it is."

"Thank you. Now, do you mind just reaching out your hand and giving me a match? Really I feel quite dull and dazed still. If I were superstitious, I should think it a premonition."

He took the match I offered him and kindled it at the still faintly glowing embers in the hearth. As it burnt brighter, it became possible to distinguish objects in the room by the increasing light.

"Oh, good God!" I suddenly exclaimed.

"What is wrong with you? "Monsieur de Villenave asked me, proceeding to light the candle.

"Why, good God! your beautiful pastel, what has happened to it?"

"Ah, yes," returned Monsieur de Villenave sadly, " I have put it down there by the chimney-piece, as you see; I am expecting the glazier and the frame-maker.

"Yes, I see the frame is broken and the glass in a thousand pieces."

"Yes," said Monsieur de Villenave, looking disconsolately at the portrait, and forgetting all about his letter; "yes, the whole thing is incomprehensible."

"I suppose it met with an accident?"

"Just think; the day before yesterday I had been at work all the evening; it was a quarter before midnight, and I got into bed. Putting my candle on my night table, I am settling down to revise the proofs of a little pocket edition of my Ovid, when by chance my eyes fall upon my poor friend's portrait. I nod a goodnight to her, according to custom; there was a little wind blowing in at the window, which had no doubt been left partly open, and this wind sets the flame of my candle flickering so that the portrait -seems to answer my goodnight by a little nod of its own. You may suppose I regarded the idea as foolishness; still I do not know how it is, but I find my mind filled with the thought and my eyes unable to leave the picture. You know of course that this pastel goes back to the early days of my youth, and calls up many, many associations. So 1 am launched on a very sea of memories of five and twenty. I speak to my portrait. My memory answers for it, and though I knew this to be so, yet I seem to see the picture move its lips, the features blanch and the white face assume an expression of grief and sadness. At this moment midnight begins to strike from the tower of the Carmelites, and at the gloomy sound my poor friend's countenance grows even more and more grief-stricken. The wind was blowing outside. At the last stroke of midnight the window burst violently open, I hear a wailing cry, and the eyes of the pictured face appear to close. The nail sustaining the portrait breaks; the picture falls, and my candle goes out.

"I get up to relight it, not at all afraid, but yet deeply impressed. As ill luck will have it, I cannot find a match; it was too late to call anybody, and I did not know where to go for a light, so I shut the window of the closet and get to bed again in the dark.

"All these incidents had moved me; I felt sad and an extraordinary desire to weep possessed me. Then I thought I heard something like the rustling of a silk dress in the room. Several times over I asked: ' Is there anyone there? ' At last I went to sleep, but at a very late hour; when I woke, I found my poor pastel in the state you see."

"Strange, very strange," I said; " tell me, have you received your weekly letter, — the one the original of the portrait always writes you? "

"No, and that is just what troubles me, and the reason I told Fran9oise to bring up or send up without delay any letters that should come for me."

"Well, there is the one I brought. . ."

"It is not her way of folding hers."

"Ah!"

"But still, it is from Angers."

"The lady lives at Angers."

"Yes; oh, great God; it is sealed with black! Poor lady, can some evil have befallen her?"—and Monsieur de Villenave turned pale as he broke open the missive.

At the first words he read his eyes filled with tears.

He took up a second letter, that broke off at the fourth line and was enclosed in the first.

He lifted this broken letter to his lips and handed me the other.

"Read it," he said,—and I read as follows:

"Sir,—It is with grief on my own part, further increased by that which