He continued to speak. “If I have not wanted to know about your past, it has not been from cowardice nor from the fear of any man; but from distrust of my own heart, Mura, for fear lest my love for you should wane. Whereas it is my duty and my mission to love you, Marie Nicolaevna, to love and save you from your own weakness and the iniquity of the world. You are still so young—hardly less of a child than little Tioka—notwithstanding the storms of passion and sin that have passed over your head. All you need is to live among right-minded people who will love you. I shall love you, Mura; and my mother, gentle soul that she is, will take you to her heart; and so will my sisters. Then when you find yourself surrounded by such pure, kind and simple affections, you, too, will become simple, kind and pure again.”
His voice broke. “We shall be so happy; and Tioka and Grania will be happy; and so will your good old father. He shall come and live with us. How is it you never think of your father, Mura? The generous, broken-hearted old man in that desolate house of Otrada?”
Hot tears rushed to my eyes. My father! My stately father, with his venerable white hair, and his proud blue eyes—the “terrible O'Rourke,” living in that deserted house, widowed, desolate and alone. There was no one to coax him out of his grief or his anger; no arms went round his neck, no laughing voices cried to him: “Father, don't be the terrible O'Rourke!” I covered my face with my hands.
Kamarowsky bent over me. “Is it not wickedness, Mura, to throw away one's life as you do? To rush from place to place, from emotion to emotion, from misery to despair? Is it not more than wickedness—is it not madness?”
“Madness!” As if the word had rent a veil before my eyes, I looked my calamity full in the face. Yes, it was madness; it was the hereditary curse of my mother's people. I was like my mother's two wild-faced, frenzied sisters, whom we used to run away from and laugh at when we were children, Olga and I.... Madness! In my delicate blue veins it had taken root again, and now its monstrous flower opened its crashing petals in my brain. I was mad, there was no doubt of it and no help for it. I was mad.
I spoke the words softly to myself, and the very sound of them made me laugh. It amused me to think that no one knew my thoughts. I felt like a naughty little girl hiding in a dark cupboard while everybody is looking for her. The dark cupboard was my mind, and I had discovered madness there.
Undoubtedly I was bereft of reason; and my mother's sisters, now for so many years entombed in an asylum at Warsaw, were assuredly not more mad than I. The thought of this, also, made me laugh. I whispered to myself: “I am cleverer than they. I am as mad as they are, but no one shall ever know it!”
I have no other explanation to give, no other justification. I was demented, and I knew it. Sometimes in the night I started up wide awake, and the horror of the thought that I was alone with myself—with myself who was mad!—froze me into a statue of ice. As soon as I could stir a limb I would creep from my bed, steal out into the silent corridors of the hotel, and run with chattering teeth along the red-carpeted passages between the long double rows of boots, which to my eyes appeared like little monsters crouching at the thresholds; then up the great staircase, turning round every moment to look behind me, until I reached the fourth floor and the room of Elise and the children.
Softly I would tap at the door, and call:—“Elise!”
“Yes, madame.” Elise Perrier always answered immediately, as if she never slept.