and fit to strike terror into the heart, ringing of a bell. At this sound the greatness of spaces departed. I felt the world close about me; the world of darkened walls, of very deep grey dusk against the panes, and I asked in a pained voice:
“Why did you ring, Rita?”
There was a bell rope within reach of her hand. I had not felt her move, but she said very low:
“I rang for the lights.”
“You didn’t want the lights.”
“It was time,” she whispered secretly.
Somewhere within the house a door slammed. I got away from her feeling small and weak as if the best part of me had been torn away and irretrievably lost. Rose must have been somewhere near the door.
“It’s abominable,” I murmured to the still, idol-like shadow on the couch.
The answer was a hurried, nervous whisper: “I tell you it was time. I rang because I had no strength to push you away.”
I suffered a moment of giddiness before the door opened, light streamed in, and Rose entered, preceding a man in a green baize apron whom I had never seen, carrying on an enormous tray three Argand lamps fitted into vases of Pompeiian form. Rose distributed them over the room. In the flood of soft light the winged youths and the butterfly women reappeared on the panels, affected, gorgeous, callously unconscious of anything having happened during their absence. Rose attended to the lamp on the nearest mantelpiece, then turned about and asked in a confident undertone.
“
I had lost myself with my elbows on my knees and my head in my hands, but I heard the words distinctly. I heard also the silence which ensued. I sat up and took the responsibility of the answer on myself.
“Impossible. I am going to sea this evening.”
This was perfectly true only I had totally forgotten it till then. For the last two days my being was no longer composed of memories but exclusively of sensations of the most absorbing, disturbing, exhausting nature. I was like a man who has been buffeted by the sea or by a mob till he loses all hold on the world in the misery of his helplessness. But now I was recovering. And naturally the first thing I remembered was the fact that I was going to sea.
“You have heard, Rose,” Dona Rita said at last with some impatience.
The girl waited a moment longer before she said:
“Oh, yes! There is a man waiting for Monsieur in the hall. A seaman.”
It could be no one but Dominic. It dawned upon me that since the evening of our return I had not been near him or the ship, which was completely unusual, unheard of, and well calculated to startle Dominic.
“I have seen him before,” continued Rose, “and as he told me he has been pursuing Monsieur all the afternoon and didn’t like to go away without seeing Monsieur for a moment, I proposed to him to wait in the hall till Monsieur was at liberty.”
I said: “Very well,” and with a sudden resumption of her extremely busy, not-a-moment-to-lose manner Rose departed from the room. I lingered in an imaginary world full of tender light, of unheard-of colours, with a mad riot of flowers and an inconceivable happiness under the sky arched above its yawning precipices, while a feeling of awe enveloped me like its own proper atmosphere. But everything vanished at the sound of Dona Rita’s loud whisper full of boundless dismay, such as to make one’s hair stir on one’s head.
“
She got down from the couch and walked to a window. When the lights had been brought into the room all the panes had turned inky black; for the night had come and the garden was full of tall bushes and trees screening off the gas lamps of the main alley of the Prado. Whatever the question meant she was not likely to see an answer to it outside. But her whisper had offended me, had hurt something infinitely deep, infinitely subtle and infinitely clear-eyed in my nature. I said after her from the couch on which I had remained, “Don’t lose your composure. You will always have some sort of bell at hand.”
I saw her shrug her uncovered shoulders impatiently. Her forehead was against the very blackness of the panes; pulled upward from the beautiful, strong nape of her neck, the twisted mass of her tawny hair was held high upon her head by the arrow of gold.
“You set up for being unforgiving,” she said without anger.
I sprang to my feet while she turned about and came towards me bravely, with a wistful smile on her bold, adolescent face.
“It seems to me,” she went on in a voice like a wave of love itself, “that one should try to understand before one sets up for being unforgiving. Forgiveness is a very fine word. It is a fine invocation.”
“There are other fine words in the language such as fascination, fidelity, also frivolity; and as for invocations there are plenty of them, too; for instance: alas, heaven help me.”
We stood very close together, her narrow eyes were as enigmatic as ever, but that face, which, like some ideal conception of art, was incapable of anything like untruth and grimace, expressed by some mysterious means such a depth of infinite patience that I felt profoundly ashamed of myself.
“This thing is beyond words altogether,” I said. “Beyond forgiveness, beyond forgetting, beyond anger or jealousy. . . . There is nothing between us two that could make us act together.”
“Then we must fall back perhaps on something within us, that—you admit it?—we have in common.”
“Don’t be childish,” I said. “You give one with a perpetual and intense freshness feelings and sensations that are as old as the world itself, and you imagine that your enchantment can be broken off anywhere, at any time! But it can’t be broken. And forgetfulness, like everything else, can only come from you. It’s an impossible situation to stand up against.”
