“But, Mrs. LeVallon——”
“And it’s something we can’t prevent,” she went on whispering, “neither of us—nor oughter prevent either—because it’s something we’ve got to do all three together.”
The intense conviction in her manner blocked utterance in me.
“Something I want to do, what’s more,” she continued, “because it’s sort of magnificent—if it comes off proper and as it should—magnificent for all of us, and like a great vision or something. You know what I mean. We are together in it, but this old valley and the whole world is somehow in it, too. I can’t quite understand. It’s very wonderful. Julius will suffer, too, only he’ll call it jest development.” Her voice sank lower still. “D’you know, Professor, I sometimes feel there’s something in Julius that seems to me like—God.”
She stood up as she said it, tall, erect, her figure towering above me; and as she rose her face passed out of the zone of yellow lamplight into comparative shadow, the eyes fixed always penetratingly upon my own. And I could have sworn that not alone their expression altered, growing as with fiery power, but that the very outline of her head and shoulders shifted into something else, something dark, remote and solemn as a tree at midnight, drawn almost visibly into larger scale.
She bent lower again a little over the table, leaning her hands upon the back of the chair she had just occupied. I knew exactly what she was going to say. The sentences dropped one by one from her lips just as I expected.
“I’ve always had a dread in me, ever since I can remember,” I heard this familiar thing close in my ear, “a sinking like—of some man that I was bound to meet—that there was an injury I’d got to put right, and that I’d have to suffer a lot in doing it. When I met Julius first I thought it might be him. Then I knew it wasn’t him, but that I’d meet the other—the right man—through him sooner or later.” She stopped and watched me for a second. Her eyes looked through and through me. “It’s you, Professor,” she concluded; “it’s you.”
She straightened up again and passed behind my chair. I heard her retreating steps. A thousand words rose up in me, but I kept silence. What should I say? How should I confess that I, too, had known a similar dread of meeting—her? A net encompassed me, a web was flung that tightened as it fell—a web of justice, marvellously woven, old as the stars and certain as the pull of distant planets, closing us all together into a pattern of actions necessary and inexorable.
I turned. I saw her against the window where she stood looking out into the valley, now thick with darkness about the little house. And for one passing instant it seemed to me that the entire trough of that dark valley brimmed with the forces of wind and fire that were waiting to come in upon us.
And Mrs. LeVallon turned and looked at me across the room. There was a smile upon her lips.