Page:The Old Countess (1927).pdf/354

 He remembered that window. How curiously it had affected him when he first saw it. Should he now, suddenly, see Marthe appear at the turning of the stair? Or would it be the demented figure of Madame de Lamouderie? Or a figure in black, with a patch over its eye? Yes. This house had always terrified him. He knew that now. Had there not been terror, from the first, in his love for Marthe Ludérac? Had he not felt her, from the first, a ghost?—a corpse? What was he doing, standing here in this house of death? What had he come to seek? Where was Jill?—and life?—safe, sweet life?

He mastered the sickness of his blood. He went forward and opened the drawing-room door. The room was empty. The shrouded harp stood in the recess. His easel leaned in its place and he noted the gashed canvas, though he did not move forward to examine its destruction. But by the fire the footstool had been pushed away from the bergère and on the little table was the white earthenware basin that had been so inopportunely visible when he and Jill had first found the old lady; on a day of ill-omen. Madame de Lamouderie had been there, then; and recently.

He went outside and stood. 'Joseph!' he called. Dismally the walls and corridors of the old house answered his call, echoing back its challenge impotently. And as he heard the echo and the silence, another fear smote upon him; a natural, not a supernatural fear. Where was Marthe, then?

He went up the stair. He found the green baize