“Are you asleep?”
Hortense shook her head as if she wished to drive something away:
“No, I was not asleep, and yet I was dreaming—I was dreaming that I am going to die. I was just on the borders of this world and leaning over into the other. Yes, leaning over enough to fall. I could see you still and some parts of my room, but all the same I was quite over on the other side, and what struck me most was the silence of this life in comparison with the tremendous sound that the dead were making. A sound of a beehive, of flapping wings and the low rustling of an ant-heap—the murmur which the sea leaves in the heart of its shells. It was just as if the realms of death were far more thickly peopled and encumbered than life. And all this noise was so intense that it seemed to me my ears heard for the first time and that I had discovered in me a new sense.”
She talked slowly in her rough and hissing voice. After a silence she employed whatever there was left in the way of strength in that broken and wretched instrument:
“O! my head is always on the journey.—First prize for imagination—Hortense Le Quesnoy of Paris.” A sob was heard which was drowned in the noise of a shutting door.
“You see,” said Rosalie, “Mamma had to leave the room. You hurt her feelings so.”
“On purpose—every day a little—so that she shall have less to suffer at the last,” answered the young girl in a whisper. The mistral was galloping through the big corridors of the old Provençal mansion, groaning under the doorways and shaking them with furious blows. Hortense smiled.
“Do you hear that? O, I love that, it makes me feel as if I were far away—off in the country. Poor darling,” added she, taking her sister’s hand and carrying it with a weary gesture as far as her mouth, “what a mean trick I have played you without intending to—here is your little one coming who’ll be a Southerner all through my fault—and you will never forgive me for it, Franciote!” Through the clamor of the wind the whistle of a locomotive reached her and made her shiver.
“Ah, ha, the seven o’clock train!”
Like all sick people and prisoners, she knew what the slightest sounds about her meant and mingled them with her motionless existence, just as she did the horizon before her, the grove of pines and the old weather-beaten Roman tower on the slope. From that moment on she became anxious and agitated, watching the door at which at last a servant appeared.