Page:The Old Countess (1927).pdf/267



HE drawing-room at the Manoir had not been put in readiness for his visit. That would have been to give Madame de Lamouderie a suspicion of the errand on her behalf. There were thin white tulips on the mantelpiece, but they glimmered, half effaced, in the shade of the oil lamp that stood beneath them; and there, in the circle of dreary light, sat the old lady, huddled together, like a disabled bat, under the folds of a long black shawl. Unaware, she sat, sunken in a drowsy, bitter torpor, and seeing her Graham remembered that he had once smelt a bat. The memory of the smell came back to him; bitter, sour, drowsy.

But the eyes that Madame de Lamouderie raised were not like a bat's eyes. He had walked up through the forest in bright, silver moonlight, and they made him think of the night; of melancholy, silver blackness.

The days of her loneliness had hollowed her face and strewn it with ashes; but her eyes were beautiful; and as he looked into them she was at once loathsome and attractive to his mind. She had struck at her own heart as deeply as at his.

 ' C ' est vraiment vous?—Je pensais ne plus vous revoir, '  was what she said.