Page:Eekhoud - The New Carthage.djvu/141

Rh tongue burned like that of a mute whom one word will relieve, but whom pitiless nature prevents from pronouncing that word. A hundred times, too, upon the point of writing to Door, he let the pen drop from his hand. He would have preferred to sign his death warrant.

Having left for Odessa, Bergmans sent two or three business letters from the shores of the Black Sea so that people would not comment upon his prolonged eclipse. The anguish of the Dobouziez' was so great that they paid no attention to their ward's convulsed face and extraordinary manner.

Laurent, who did not feel able to talk to Gina, resolved one evening to tell everything to her father the next day. "She will never love me!" he said to himself, like a stoic refining his torture in order the less to feel it. "And am I sure that I love her? Is it not envy that blinds me, and which makes me, because I am gloomy and without inheritance, hostile to the good fortune of everyone else?" In spite of all the effort that he made to persuade himself that such was the case, in the presence of Dobouziez he could not speak one word, and all his spiritual grandeur foundered in the abyss of his love.

He went and sat beside the invalid, in the orangery, among the intoxicating and perverse flowers with which she persisted in surrounding herself. Since her illness she had accustomed herself to Laurent's presence and care as she would have to those of a trained nurse. Generally he read to her, and she took pleasure in finding fault with him. On this particular morning he stammered and stuttered outrageously.

"What is the matter with you, Laurent?" she asked. "I can no longer understand, one word, that you are, reading!"