Before he had made up his mind the door in front of him opened fairly wide, but he could not see the person till he had entered an anteroom with narrow red and gilt settees ranged along its white walls. The door shut behind him and, turning round, he confronted a dark, plump mulatto woman who was staring at him with an expression of intense admiration. She clapped her hands in ecstasy and, opening her mouth, exhibited her white teeth in a low cackling laugh.
“Bonjour, Aglae,” said Cosmo readily.
The woman laughed again in sheer delight. “You remember my name, Mr. Cosmo! You quite frighten me, you grow so big. I remember you climb tree and throw nice ripe apple to the black girl. …” Her eyes gleamed and rolled absurdly.
Cosmo was so strangely touched by this extremely slight reminiscence of his tree-climbing boyhood, that when she added, “That was a good time,” he was quite ready to agree, thereby provoking another burst of delightful laughter. But Aglae was controlling herself obviously. Her laughter was subdued. It had not the unbounded freedom of sound that used to reverberate exotically in the dark passages at the back of Latham Hall; though there, too, Aglae tried to subdue it in view of rebukes or sarcastic comments in the servants’ hall. It stopped suddenly and Aglae in a tone of sober respect wanted to know how the Seignior was. Cosmo said that his father was very well.
“He a very-great gentleman,” commented Aglae. “I always tremble when I see him. You very fine gentleman too, Mr. Cosmo.”
She moved to one of the inner doors, but as Cosmo was following her she raised her hand to prevent him and opened the door only a little way, then came back and said in a lower tone, “It’s to hear the bell better when it rings. … Will you wait a little bit here?” she asked anxiously.
“I will,” said Cosmo, “but surely you don’t want to tremble before me. What is the matter?”
“Nothing at all is the matter.” Aglae tossed her head, tied up in a bandana handkerchief, with something of the spirit of the old days.
Cosmo was amused. “I no tremble before you,” she continued. “I always like you very much. I am glad with all my heart to see you here.”
All the time she turned her ear to the door she had left the least bit ajar. She had on a high-waisted white calico dress, white stockings, and Genoese slippers on her feet. Her dark brown hands moved uneasily.
“And how is Madame la Comtesse?” asked Cosmo.
“Miss Adèle very well. Anyway she never says anything else. She very great lady now. All the town come here, but she wants to see you alone after all these years.”
“It’s very kind of her,” said Cosmo. “I was wondering whether she remembered me at all.”
Now the excitement of seeing him had worn off, he was surprised at the careworn expression of the mulatto’s face. For a moment it seemed to him like a tragic mask, then came the flash of white teeth, strangely unlike a smile.
“She remember everything,” said Aglae. “She … she … Mr. Cosmo, you no boy now. I tell you that Miss Adèle had not a moment’s peace since she drive away from your big home in the country one very cold day. I remember very well. Little birds fall dead off the tree. I feel ready to fall dead myself.”
“I was away at school,” said Cosmo. He remembered that on his return the disappearance of those people had not produced a very strong impression on him. In fact, the only thing he had missed was, in the evening, the fair head of the stranger Adèle near the dark head of his sister Henrietta. And the next evening he had not even missed that!
While these thoughts were passing through his head he waited, looking at Aglae with a faint smile of which he was not aware. The mulatto girl seemed to have concentrated all her faculties on listening for the sound of a bell. It came at last. Cosmo heard it, too, very distant, faint and prolonged. A handbell.
“Now,” said Aglae under her breath, and Cosmo followed her through a suite of rooms, magnificent but under-furnished, with the full light excluded by half-closed jalousies. The vista was terminated by a white and gold door at which Aglae stopped and looked back at him over her shoulder with an air of curiosity, anxiety, or was it hesitation? But certainly without a smile. As to his own it had stiffened permanently on his lips. Before turning the handle of the door the mulatto listened for a moment. Then she threw it open, disclosing a room full of light indeed but which Cosmo could not see in its full extent because of a screen cutting off the view. His last thought as he crossed the threshold was, “It will be interesting,” and then he heard the door shut behind him, leaving him as it were alone with the heavy screen of figured velvet and three windows through which sunshine poured in a way that almost blinded him after his long experience of half lights.
He walked clear of the screen, and he was surprised at the vast size of the room. Here and there were other screens and a quite unexpected quantity of elegant furniture amongst which he felt for a moment as if lost. All this shone and gleamed and glowed with colour in the freshness and brilliance of the sunny morning. “Why, there’s nobody here,” he thought with a mingled sense of disappointment and relief. To his left above a
