Page:Once a Week Volume 7.djvu/264

256 relax from the set, stern expression it had assumed on my entrance. She gave me her hand.

“I thank you,” she said, “from my heart for these kind words. I feel you are my friend. I am only sorry that this poor woman’s unthinking affection for me should have detained you so long. I will now say farewell; but I owe to you, I owe to myself, some explanations of this scene; you shall have it. I will write to you. All women when accused assert they are more sinned against than sinning. God knows I am aware of sins which have merited and found their punishment; but the accusations which have been made against me are false, and the particular misconduct which has been attributed to me is the last of which I could be guilty. To sin is always to suffer; but, alas! to suffer is not always to sin.”

Her eyes fell on the casket on the table: it was a small triptych. On the left-hand leaf was the Virgin and Child; on the right hand the Virgin by the Cross; in the centre an Assumption. There was a vague resemblance in the figure of the Virgin to the woman beside me. I was to be reminded of this still more a little later.

I left her. I had a fierce longing to carry on the struggle which was warring in my heart of hearts, in solitude. If it were defeat, if it were victory, I was best alone.

I am one of those natures to whom pain is an excitement. In battle I could have continued fighting, insensible to wounds, till, riddled through and through with shot, I at last dropped down dead. The very anguish I suffered as I looked on this woman whom I had so loved, and who I must love no more, made me brave. My words were no vain, false cant. I would have literally died to make Santa happy. The self in me was destroyed as a worm is crushed beneath an iron heel.

There was that about Santa which repelled at once and for ever the thought of a sinful love. No evil could enter precincts hallowed by her presence. Goodness and a kind of crystalline passionlessness were the atmosphere of her being, and influenced all who approached her. Santa might love tenderly, fervently, deeply; but passionately—in the usual meaning of the word—never. Looking at her, the union of virgin purity and a warm, all-embracing motherhood was intelligible.

From the moment her grave eyes had met mine, and she had said, “I feel you are my friend,” there was no appeal possible. With the word “friend” she barred, as with a sword, the entrance into the Eden of Love.

next evening, as I sat alone in my room in a tumult of feeling, I suddenly took the resolution of going to the Rue du Puits. I feared she might need protection, that the priest might follow her, that she herself, exhausted as she appeared, might require assistance; but under all these good reasons I gave myself for going, the real motive was the passionate longing I had to see her once again. Must it all end thus? Had her eyes met mine, had my hand touched hers, for the last time? Would that presence which had fulfilled life for me never rise before me again? And yet what did it all avail? In a few brief days we should be separated, and perhaps for ever. The clocks, as they told the hour, had a mournful, funereal sound, and each time they struck my nerves I felt an acute physical pain. At midnight I went out. I reached the house. I rang: the porter admitted me, and I found myself in a small paved court. I walked boldly on. The faint glimmer of a lamp which swung across from wall to wall showed me where the stairs began. I ascended one or two and looked up. As well as I could pierce the darkness, I could make out that the stairs were in short flights, divided by landing-places on which opened the doors of the rooms of the several floors.

“I will wait,” I thought; “if she be not yet arrived, I shall see her as she passes up-stairs, if not, I will wait till she comes down. If I have not courage to speak to her, her dress may touch me for a moment; in short, I shall be near her once more.”

The house was a very noisy one. I heard a voice just above me, singing in a hoarse falsetto shrill tone a gay love song. It was a woman’s voice, and grated on the ears; the words were so mirthful, the tone so despairing. I heard loud talking, and a noise of plates and glasses as of persons supping, in some other room. In one quite near me I could hear a child’s sobs, evidently crying from pain or illness, every now and then stifled, as if some manual check had been administered to it.

My sense of hearing became at last painfully on the stretch. I think I should have heard the lightest sound on the topmost stair.

I had thus waited about an hour, when suddenly I heard a step slowly descending the stairs in a faltering, hesitating manner. I felt my heart beat. There was a pause on each landing-place as if there was a difficulty in getting further. Suddenly, there was a longer one. I thought I had been mistaken in my apprehension, deceived in my yearning. I then heard a fall. I rushed up two flights, and there, at my feet, I saw a woman had fallen. It was Santa. She had fainted. I carried her down stairs, and knocked gently at the porter’s door. Grumblingly he opened it; a bribe stopped his questions. I sent him for a fiacre and placed Madame Rabenfels on a miserable chair, the only one in the room. We were alone. I chafed her hands, loosened her bonnet, unfastened her mantle—but all seemed useless. She was as if dead. I was alarmed. I did not dare to send for a doctor, secrecy being evidently of importance to her. The time passed, I waited breathlessly—she had been insensible for hours—so long that the day was already dawning with a sickly light. The porter had returned with the fiacre, but had merely put his head in to announce it, and, muttering words I did not hear, had ascended the stairs and had not returned. The house was more quiet, but at times a bell had sounded and I had performed the office of porter, and pulled the string which opened the door. At last, with a few tremulous shivers, she shuddered back to life; the grey shadow passed from her face, and she opened her eyes with a forlorn, wandering, woful