Page:The Novels and Tales of Henry James, Volume 2 (New York, Charles Scribner's Sons, 1907).djvu/418

THE AMERICAN the awkward tablets planted about. They were all sordid and hideous, and he could feel only the hardness and coldness of death. He got up and came back to the inn, where he found M. Ledoux having coffee and a cigarette at a little green table which he had caused to be carried into the small garden. Newman, learning that the doctor was still sitting with Valentin, asked if he might n't be allowed to relieve him; he had a great desire to be useful to their patient. This was, through M. Ledoux, easily arranged; the doctor was very glad to go to bed. He was a youthful and rather jaunty practitioner, but he had a clever face and the ribbon of the Legion of Honour in his buttonhole; Newman listened attentively to his instructions and took mechanically from his hand an old book that had lain on the windowseat of the inn, recommended by him as a help to wakefulness and which proved an odd volume of "Les Liaisons Dangereuses."

Valentin still lay with his eyes closed and without visible change of condition. Newman sat down near him and for a long time narrowly watched him. Then he let his vision stray with his consciousness of his own situation—range away and rest on the chain of the Alps disclosed by the drawing of the scant white cotton curtain of the window, through which the sunshine passed and lay in squares on the red-tiled floor. He tried to interweave his gloom with strains of hope, but only half succeeded. What had happened to him was violent and insolent, like all great strokes of evil; unnatural and monstrous, it showed the hard hand of the Fate that rejoices in the groans and the blood 388