The Madonna bends
tenderly above her, and Geneviève smiles back into that calm face that
never would have been except for her." His voice broke, but he grasped my hand, saying, "Courage, Alec." Next
morning he left for Ept to fulfil his trust. IV

The same evening I took the keys and went into the house I had known so
well. Everything was in order, but the silence was terrible. Though I
went twice to the door of the marble room, I could not force myself to
enter. It was beyond my strength. I went into the smoking-room and sat
down before the spinet. A small lace handkerchief lay on the keys, and I
turned away, choking. It was plain I could not stay, so I locked every
door, every window, and the three front and back gates, and went away. Next morning Alcide packed my valise, and leaving him in charge of my
apartments I took the Orient express for Constantinople. During the two
years that I wandered through the East, at first, in our letters, we
never mentioned Geneviève and Boris, but gradually their names crept in. I recollect particularly a passage in one of Jack's letters replying to
one of mine--

"What you tell me of seeing Boris bending over you while you lay ill, and
feeling his touch on your face, and hearing his voice, of course troubles
me. This that you describe must have happened a fortnight after he died. I say to myself that you were dreaming, that it was part of your
delirium, but the explanation does not satisfy me, nor would it you." Toward the end of the second year a letter came from Jack to me in India
so unlike anything that I had ever known of him that I decided to return
at once to Paris. He wrote: "I am well, and sell all my pictures as
artists do who have no need of money. I have not a care of my own, but I
am more restless than if I had. I am unable to shake off a strange
anxiety about you. It is not apprehension, it is rather a breathless
expectancy--of what, God knows! I can only say it is wearing me out. Nights I dream always of you and Boris. I can never recall anything
afterward, but I wake in the morning with my heart beating, and all day
the excitement increases until I fall asleep at night to recall the same
experience. I am quite exhausted by it, and have determined to break up
this morbid condition. I must see you. Shall I go to Bombay, or will you
come to Paris?" I telegraphed him to expect me by the next steamer. When we met I thought he had changed very little; I, he insisted, looked
in splendid health. It was good to hear his voice again, and as we sat
and chatted about what life still held for us, we felt that it was
pleasant to be alive in the bright spring weather. We stayed in Paris together a week, and then I went for a week to Ept
with him, but first of all we went to the cemetery at Sèvres, where Boris
lay. "Shall we place the 'Fates' in the little grove above him?" Jack asked,
and I answered--

"I think only the 'Madonna' should watch over Boris' grave." But Jack was
none the better for my home-coming. The dreams of which he could not
retain even the least definite outline continued, and he said that at
times the sense of breathless expectancy was suffocating. "You see I do you harm and not good," I said. "Try a change without me." So he started alone for a ramble among the Channel Islands, and I went
back to Paris. I had not yet entered Boris' house, now mine, since my
return, but I knew it must be done. It had been kept in order by Jack;
there were servants there, so I gave up my own apartment and went there
to live. Instead of the agitation I had feared, I found myself able to
paint there tranquilly. I visited all the rooms--all but one. I could not
bring myself to enter the marble room where Geneviève lay, and yet I felt
the longing growing daily to look upon her face, to kneel beside her. One April afternoon, I lay dreaming in the smoking-room, just as I had
lain two years before, and mechanically I looked among the tawny Eastern
rugs for the wolf-skin. At last I distinguished the pointed ears and flat
cruel head, and I thought of my dream where I saw Geneviève lying beside
it. The helmets still hung against the threadbare tapestry, among them
the old Spanish morion which I remembered Geneviève had once put on when
we were amusing ourselves with the ancient bits of mail. I turned my eyes
to the spinet; every yellow key seemed eloquent of her caressing hand,
and I rose, drawn by the strength of my life's passion to the sealed door
of the marble room. The heavy doors swung inward under my trembling
hands. Sunlight poured through the window, tipping with gold the wings of
Cupid, and lingered like a nimbus over the brows of the Madonna. Her
tender face bent in compassion over a marble form so exquisitely pure
that I knelt and signed myself. Geneviève lay in the shadow under the
Madonna, and yet, through her white arms, I saw the pale azure vein, and
beneath her softly clasped hands the folds of her dress were tinged with
rose, as if from some faint warm light within her breast. Bending, with a breaking heart, I touched the marble drapery with my
lips, then crept back into the silent house. A maid came and brought me a letter, and I sat down in the little
conservatory to read it; but as I was about to break the seal, seeing the
girl lingering, I asked her what she wanted. She stammered something about a white rabbit that had been caught in the
house, and asked what should be done with it I told her to let it loose
in the walled garden behind the house, and opened my letter. It was from
Jack, but so incoherent that I thought he must have lost his reason. It
was nothing but a series of prayers to me not to leave the house until he
could get back; he could not tell me why, there were the dreams, he
said--he could explain nothing, but he was sure that I must not leave the
house in the Rue Sainte-Cécile. As I finished reading I raised my eyes and saw the same maid-servant
standing in the doorway holding a glass dish in which two gold-fish were
swimming: "Put them back into the tank and tell me what you mean by
interrupting me," I said. With a half-suppressed whimper she emptied water and fish into an
aquarium at the end of the conservatory, and turning to me asked my
permission to leave my service. She said people were playing tricks on
her, evidently with a design of getting her into trouble; the marble
rabbit had been stolen and a live one had been brought into the house;
the two beautiful marble fish were gone, and she had just found those
common live things flopping on the dining-room floor. I reassured her and
sent her away, saying I would look about myself. I went into the studio;
there was nothing there but my canvases and some casts, except the marble
of the Easter lily. I saw it on a table across the room. Then I strode
angrily over to it. But the flower I lifted from the table was fresh and
fragile and filled the air with perfume. Then suddenly I comprehended, and sprang through the hall-way to the
marble room.