Page:The Old Countess (1927).pdf/275

 He led her up and she sighed in going, stretching out her hand for the rail. She had aged terribly, he felt it anew, in these last eight days, and on his hard heart there fell a blow of pity, of self-reproach.

At the top of the stair he pushed aside a swinging baize door that gave on a dark passage; airless, thick with the smell of beeswax.

'Now to the right. There is a little flight of stairs,' said Madame de Lamouderie, and as they turned a corner the moonlight flooded in from a small high window and showed him the way. The passage beyond the three stairs, leading down, turned to darkness again, but an open lighted door was before them. The old lady's room waited in readiness for her. When he led her to the threshold he saw that two candles were burning on the toilet-table, a table all looped with muslin over pink and tied with wide pink ribbons. What a picture that would make, the old black figure before the pink, bedizened toilet-table.

And there they paused on the threshold, and Madame de Lamouderie was looking up at him.

'If you would kiss me, once.'

He did not give himself time to think. Had he thought, he might have been guilty of a graceless retreat or a lame apology. Immediately he said, 'But I am honoured,' and though, as he bent to her, he had time for a horrid vision of gripping old hands seizing him, withered old lips searching for his lips, he found, as he kissed her forehead, and then her cheek, holding her by the hand, that he had wronged her indeed. She stood mute; still; as if under an accolade.