The thing reached a crisis late in the evening. There was a kind of winter-garden that one strolled in, a place of giant palms stretching up into a darkness of intense shadow. I was prowling about in the shadows of great metallic leaves, cursing under my breath, in a fury of nervous irritation; quivering like a horse martyrised by a stupidly merciless driver. I happened to stand back for a moment in the narrowest of paths, with the touch of spiky leaves on my hand and on my face. In front of me was the glaring perspective of one of the longer alleys, and, stepping into it, a great band of blue ribbon cutting across his chest, came de Mersch with her upon his arm. De Mersch himself hardly counted. He had a way of glowing, but he paled ineffectual fires beside her maenadic glow. There was something overpowering in the sight of her, in the fire of her eyes, in the glow of her coils of hair, in the poise of her head. She wore some kind of early nineteenth-century dress, sweeping low from the waist with a tenderness of fold that affected one with delicate pathos, that had a virgin quality of almost poignant intensity. And beneath it she stepped with the buoyancy—the long steps—of a triumphing Diana.
It was more than terrible for me to stand there longing with a black, baffled longing, with some of the base quality of an eavesdropper and all the baseness of the unsuccessful.
Then Gurnard loomed in the distance, moving insensibly down the long, glaring corridor, a sinister figure, suggesting in the silence of his oncoming the motionless flight of a vulture. Well within my field of sight he overtook them and, with a lack of preliminary greeting that suggested supreme intimacy, walked beside them. I stood for some moments—for some minutes, and then hastened after them. I was going to do something. After a time I found de Mersch and Gurnard standing facing each other in one of the doorways of the place—Gurnard, a small, dark, impassive column; de Mersch, bulky, overwhelming, florid, standing with his legs well apart and speaking vociferously with a good deal of gesture. I approached them from the side, standing rather insistently at his elbow.
“I want,” I said, “I would be extremely glad if you would give me a minute, monsieur.” I was conscious that I spoke with a tremour of the voice, a sort of throaty eagerness. I was unaware of what course I was to pursue, but I was confident of calmness, of self-control—I was equal to that. They had a pause of surprised silence. Gurnard wheeled and fixed me critically with his eyeglass. I took de Mersch a little apart, into a solitude of palm branches, and began to speak before he had asked me my errand.
“You must understand that I would not interfere without a good deal of provocation,” I was saying, when he cut me short, speaking in a thick, jovial voice.
“Oh, we will understand that, my good Granger, and then …”
“It is about my sister,” I said—“you—you go too far. I must ask you, as a gentleman, to cease persecuting her.”
He answered “The devil!” and then: “If I do not—?”
It was evident in his voice, in his manner, that the man was a little—well, gris. “If you do not,” I said, “I shall forbid her to see you and I shall …”
“Oh, oh!” he interjected with the intonation of a reveller at a farce. “We are at that—we are the excellent brother.” He paused, and then added: “Well, go to the devil, you and your forbidding.” He spoke with the greatest good humour.
“I am in earnest,” I said; “very much in earnest. The thing has gone too far, and even for your own sake, you had better …”
He said “Ah, ah!” in the tone of his “Oh, oh!”
“She is no friend to you,” I struggled on, “she is playing with you for her own purposes; you will …”
He swayed a little on his feet and said: “Bravo … bravissimo. If we can’t forbid him, we will frighten him. Go on, my good fellow …” and then, “Come, go on …”
I looked at his great bulk of a body. It came into my head dimly that I wanted him to strike me, to give me an excuse—anything to end the scene violently, with a crash and exclamations of fury.
“You absolutely refuse to pay any attention?” I said.
“Oh, absolutely,” he answered.
“You know that I can do something, that I can expose you.” I had a vague idea that I could, that the number of small things that I knew to his discredit and the mass of my hatred could be welded into a damning whole. He laughed a high-pitched, hysterical laugh. The dawn was beginning to spread pallidly above us, gleaming mournfully through the glass of the palm-house. People began to pass, muffled up, on their way out of the place.
“You may go …” he was beginning. But the expression of his face altered. Miss Granger, muffled up like all the rest of the world, was coming out of the inner door. “We have been having a charming …” he began to her. She touched me gently on the arm.
“Come, Arthur,” she said, and
