Her gentleness had the effect of evening light. I was soothed. Her confidence in her own power touched me profoundly. I suppose my love was too great for madness to get hold of me. I can’t say that I passed to a complete calm, but I became slightly ashamed of myself. I whispered:
“No, it was not from affection, it was for the love of you that I brought him here. That imbecile H. was going to send him to Tolosa.”
“That Jacobin!” Dona Rita was immensely surprised, as she might well have been. Then resigned to the incomprehensible: “Yes,” she breathed out, “what did you do with him?”
“I put him to bed in the studio.”
How lovely she was with the effort of close attention depicted in the turn of her head and in her whole face honestly trying to approve. “And then?” she inquired.
“Then I came in here to face calmly the necessity of doing away with a human life. I didn’t shirk it for a moment. That’s what a short twelvemonth has brought me to. Don’t think I am reproaching you, O blind force! You are justified because you
Horror darkened her marvellous radiance. Then her face became utterly blank with the tremendous effort to understand. Absolute silence reigned in the house. It seemed to me that everything had been said now that mattered in the world; and that the world itself had reached its ultimate stage, had reached its appointed end of an eternal, phantom-like silence. Suddenly Dona Rita raised a warning finger. I had heard nothing and shook my head; but she nodded hers and murmured excitedly,
“Yes, yes, in the fencing-room, as before.”
In the same way I answered her: “Impossible! The door is locked and Therese has the key.” She asked then in the most cautious manner,
“Have you seen Therese to-night?”
“Yes,” I confessed without misgiving. “I left her making up the fellow’s bed when I came in here.”
“The bed of the Jacobin?” she said in a peculiar tone as if she were humouring a lunatic.
“I think I had better tell you he is a Spaniard—that he seems to know you from early days. . . .” I glanced at her face, it was extremely tense, apprehensive. For myself I had no longer any doubt as to the man and I hoped she would reach the correct conclusion herself. But I believe she was too distracted and worried to think consecutively. She only seemed to feel some terror in the air. In very pity I bent down and whispered carefully near her ear, “His name is Ortega.”
I expected some effect from that name but I never expected what happened. With the sudden, free, spontaneous agility of a young animal she leaped off the sofa, leaving her slippers behind, and in one bound reached almost the middle of the room. The vigour, the instinctive precision of that spring, were something amazing. I just escaped being knocked over. She landed lightly on her bare feet with a perfect balance, without the slightest suspicion of swaying in her instant immobility. It lasted less than a second, then she spun round distractedly and darted at the first door she could see. My own agility was just enough to enable me to grip the back of the fur coat and then catch her round the body before she could wriggle herself out of the sleeves. She was muttering all the time, “No, no, no.” She abandoned herself to me just for an instant during which I got her back to the middle of the room. There she attempted to free herself and I let her go at once. With her face very close to mine, but apparently not knowing what she was looking at she repeated again twice, “No—No,” with an intonation which might well have brought dampness to my eyes but which only made me regret that I didn’t kill the honest Ortega at sight. Suddenly Dona Rita swung round and seizing her loose hair with both hands started twisting it up before one of the sumptuous mirrors. The wide fur sleeves slipped down her white arms. In a brusque movement like a downward stab she transfixed the whole mass of tawny glints and sparks with the arrow of gold which she perceived lying there, before her, on the marble console. Then she sprang away from the glass muttering feverishly, “Out—out—out of this house,” and trying with an awful, senseless stare to dodge past me who had put myself in her way with open arms. At last I managed to seize her by the shoulders and in the extremity of my distress I shook her roughly. If she hadn’t quieted down then I believe my heart would have broken. I spluttered right into her face: “I won’t let you. Here you stay.” She seemed to recognize me at last, and suddenly still, perfectly firm on her white feet, she let her arms fall and, from an abyss of desolation, whispered, “O! George! No! No! Not Ortega.”
There was a passion of mature grief in this tone of appeal. And yet she remained as touching and helpless as a distressed child. It had all the simplicity and depth of a child’s emotion. It tugged at one’s heart-strings in the same direct way. But what could one do? How could one soothe her? It was impossible to pat her on the head, take her on the knee, give her a chocolate or show her a picture-book. I found myself absolutely without resource. Completely at a loss.
“Yes, Ortega. Well, what of it?” I whispered with immense assurance.
CHAPTER VII
My brain was in a whirl. I am safe to say that at this precise moment there was nobody completely sane in the house. Setting apart Therese and Ortega, both in the grip of unspeakable passions, all the moral economy of Dona Rita had gone to pieces. Everything was gone except her strong sense of life with all its implied menaces. The woman was a mere chaos of sensations and vitality. I, too, suffered most from inability to get hold of some fundamental thought. The one on which I could best build some hopes was the thought that, of course, Ortega did not know anything. I whispered this into the ear of Dona Rita, into her precious, her beautifully shaped ear.
But she shook her head, very much like an inconsolable child and very much with a child’s complete pessimism she murmured, “Therese has told him.”
The words, “Oh, nonsense,” never passed my lips, because I could not cheat myself into denying that there had been a noise; and that the noise was in the fencing-room. I knew that room. There was nothing there that by the wildest stretch of imagination could be conceived as falling with that particular sound. There was a table with a tall strip of looking-glass above it at one end; but since Blunt took away his campaigning kit there was no small object of any sort on the console or anywhere else that could have been jarred off in some mysterious manner. Along one of the walls there was the whole complicated apparatus of solid brass pipes, and quite close to it an enormous bath sunk into the floor. The greatest part of the room along its whole length was covered with matting and had nothing else but a long, narrow leather-upholstered bench fixed to the wall. And that was all. And the door leading to the studio was locked. And Therese had the key. And it flashed on my mind, independently of Dona Rita’s pessimism, by the force of personal conviction, that, of course, Therese would tell him. I beheld the whole succession of events perfectly connected and tending to that particular conclusion. Therese would tell him! I could see the contrasted heads of those two formidable lunatics close together in a dark mist of whispers compounded of greed, piety, and jealousy, plotting in a sense of perfect security as if under the very wing of Providence. So at least Therese would think. She could not be but under the impression that (providentially) I had been called out for the rest of the
