There was a knock at the door. He did not move. Another knock. He had forgotten to lock the door. Rosa came in. She cried out on seeing him stretched on the floor and stopped in terror. He raised his head angrily:
“What? What do you want? Leave me!”
She did not go: she stayed, hesitating, leaning against the floor, and said again:
“Christophe. …”
He got up in silence: he was ashamed of having been seen so. He dusted himself with his hand and asked harshly:
“Well. What do you want?”
Rosa said shyly:
“Forgive me … Christophe … I came in … I was bringing you. …”
He saw that she had something in her hand.
“See,” she said, holding it out to him. “I asked Bertold to give me a little token of her. I thought you would like it. …”
It was a little silver mirror, the pocket mirror in which she used to look at herself for hours, not so much from coquetry as from want of occupation. Christophe took it, took also the hand which held it.
“Oh! Rosa! …” he said.
He was filled with her kindness and the knowledge of his own injustice. On a passionate impulse he knelt to her and kissed her hand.
“Forgive … Forgive …” he said.
Rosa did not understand at first: then she understood only too well: she blushed, she trembled, she began to weep. She understood that he meant:
“Forgive me if I am unjust. … Forgive me if I do not love you. … Forgive me if I cannot … if I cannot love you, if I can never love you! …”
She did not withdraw her hand from him: she knew that it was not herself that he was kissing. And with his cheek against Rosa’s hand, he wept hot tears, knowing that she was reading through him: there was sorrow and bitterness in being unable to love her and making her suffer.
They stayed so, both weeping, in the dim light of the room.
At last she withdrew her hand. He went on murmuring:
“Forgive! …”
She laid her hand gently on his hand. He rose to his feet. They kissed in silence: they felt on their lips the bitter savor of their tears.
“We shall always be friends,” he said softly. She bowed her head and left him, too sad to speak.
They thought that the world is ill made. The lover is unloved. The beloved does not love. The lover who is loved is sooner or later torn from his love. … There is suffering. There is the bringing of suffering. And the most wretched is not always the one who suffers.
Once more Christophe took to avoiding the house. He could not bear it. He could not bear to see the curtainless windows, the empty rooms.
A worse sorrow awaited him. Old Euler lost no time in reletting the ground floor. One day Christophe saw strange faces in Sabine’s room. New lives blotted out the traces of the life that was gone.
It became impossible for him to stay in his rooms. He passed whole days outside, not coming back until nightfall, when it was too dark to see anything. Once more he took to making expeditions in the country. Irresistibly he was drawn to Bertold’s farm. But he never went in, dared not go near it, wandered about it at a distance. He discovered a place on a hill from which he could see the house, the plain, the river: it was thither that his steps usually turned. From thence he could follow with his eyes the meanderings of the water down to the willow clump under which he had seen the shadow of death pass across Sabine’s face. From thence he could pick out the two windows of the rooms in which they had waited, side by side, so near, so far, separated by a door—the door to eternity. From thence he could survey the cemetery. He had never been able to bring himself to enter it: from childhood he had had a horror of those fields of decay and corruption, and refused to think of those whom he loved in connection with them. But from a distance and seen from above, the little graveyard never looked grim, it was calm, it slept with the sun. … Sleep! … She loved to sleep! Nothing would disturb her there. The crowing cocks answered each other across the plains. From the homestead rose the roaring of the mill, the clucking of the poultry yard, the cries of children playing. He could make out Sabine’s little girl, he could see her running, he could mark her laughter. Once he lay in wait for her near the gate of the farmyard, in a turn of the sunk road made by the walls: he seized her as she passed and kissed her. The child was afraid and began, to cry. She had almost forgotten him already. He asked her:
“Are you happy here?”
“Yes. It is fun. …”
“You don’t want to come back?”
“No!”
He let her go. The child’s indifference plunged him in sorrow. Poor Sabine! … And yet it was she, something of her. … So little! The child was hardly at all like her mother: had lived in her, but was not she: in that mysterious passage through her being the child had hardly retained more than the faintest perfume of the creature who was gone: inflections of her voice, a pursing of the lips, a trick of bending the head. The rest of her was another being altogether: and that being mingled with the being of Sabine was repulsive to Christophe though he never admitted it to himself.
It was only in himself that Christophe could find the image of Sabine. It followed him everywhere, hovering above him; but he only felt himself really to be with her when he was alone. Nowhere was she nearer to him than in this refuge, on the hill, far from strange eyes, in the midst of the country that was so full
