She looked at herself for a minute or two, then seemed to relapse into her painful reverie. The village clock chimed the quarter past the hour; but still she did not stir. You would almost have said that she was asleep, asleep with her eyes open, unwinking. Presently, however, her eyes grew less vague, as they gazed fixedly at something in the mirror over her shoulder. Just as it sometimes happens in a dream that one’s ideas, thronging and incoherent, crystallize into one idea more and more precise, into an image more and more clear, so it happened to her now. What was that disconcerting image that she seemed to perceive, to which she tried vainly to grow used? It was in the alcove in which the bed was set, the walls of which were hung all round with curtains. Between those curtains and the wall there must have been a space, for one would have said that a hand was moving them.
Then a hand actually appeared, then an arm, then, above the arm, a head.
Josephine, accustomed to spiritist séances in which phantoms were materialized, gave a name to this spirit which her terrified imagination had summoned from the shadows. It was clothed in white; she could not be sure whether its lips were wreathed with an affectionate smile, or drawn back in an angry snarl.
She stammered: “Ralph—Ralph—what do you want of me?”
The phantom parted the curtains and came round the bed. Josephine shut her eyes with a groan, then opened them again. The hallucination was still there; and the phantom drew nearer with movements which moved a chair and made a noise. She wished to fly, but could not. Then she felt on her shoulder the grip of a hand which was certainly not that of a spirit; and a cheerful voice said:
“My dear Josephine, I should really advise you to get Prince Lavosneff to take you for a short, restful cruise. You need one, my dear Josephine. What? You take me for a ghost, me, Ralph d’Andresy! I may be in pants and a nightshirt, nevertheless you ought to know me.”
He began to put on his clothes quickly. She stared at him and muttered: “You? You?”
“Goodness, yes: me.”
He laughed gently at her frowning face and went on in a jeering tone. “Now, don’t go pitching into Prince Lavosneff under the impression that he has let me escape again. He has not. What he and his friends carried away was simply a dummy stuffed with bran, rolled up in my blankets and mattress. As for me, I did not stir from the shelter in which I took refuge as soon as you left your post on the other side of the shutters.”
Josephine remained inert and as incapable of taking action as if she had been beaten to a jelly.
“Hang it! You don’t seem to be quite yourself,” he went on, in the same jeering tone. “Would you like a little glass of liquor to buck you up? I quite understand that you’re very much upset and I admit that I should not like to be in your place—all your little play fellows gone—no help possible for quite a while—securely shut up in this room with a gentleman named Ralph. It certainly is not a time to see the world in rose-color. Unlucky Josephine. What a mess you have made of it!”
He stooped down and picked up the photograph of Clarice: “How pretty my fiancée is, isn’t she? It gave me the greatest pleasure to see how you were admiring her just now. You know that we’re going to get married in a few days?”
“She’s dead,” said Josephine.
“As a matter of fact, I heard about that,” he said calmly. “Your little friend who was here just now stabbed her in her bed, didn’t he?”
“Yes.”
“With a dagger, wasn’t it?”
“Three times—through the heart,” she said.
“Once ought to have been enough, you know,” he suggested.
She said slowly, as if striving to assure herself of the fact: “She’s dead. She’s dead.”
He chuckled: “What can you expect? It happens everyday. But you can’t expect me to change all my plans for a little thing like that. Dead or alive, I’m going to marry her. And we must manage as best we can. You managed splendidly.”
“What do you mean?” said Josephine sharply, beginning to grow yet more uneasy at his careless bantering tone.
“What do I mean? Why look at you. First of all the Baron drowned you, next you were blown up and then drowned in the wreck of your vessel the Glowworm. But all that drowning doesn’t prevent you from being here. Therefore the fact that Clarice has been stabbed through the heart three times is no reason for my not marrying her. Besides are you quite sure that your statement is accurate?”
“One of my own men stabbed her,” she said.
“Or at any rate he told you that he’d stabbed her.”
“Why should he have lied?”
“Why, to get hold of the ten banknotes you handed over to him.”
“Dominique is incapable of betraying me! He would not betray me for a hundred thousand francs! Besides he knows quite well that I can lay hands on him. He’s waiting for me with the others,” she said fiercely.
“Are you quite sure that he’s waiting for you, Josine?” said Ralph; and the jeering note in his voice was louder.
She shivered. She had a feeling that she was struggling in a narrowing circle.
He shook his head and said thoughtfully: “It’s odd, the blunders we’ve made, you and I, with regard to one another. You must be uncommonly
