CHAPTER VII
THE VIGIL BY THE BIER
We looked at each other, Rosa and I, across the couch of Alresca.
All the vague and terrible apprehensions, disquietudes, misgivings, which the gradual improvement in Alresca's condition had lulled to sleep, aroused themselves again in my mind, coming, as it were, boldly out into the open from the dark, unexplored grottos wherein they had crouched and hidden. And I went back in memory to those sinister days in London before I had brought Alresca to Bruges, days over which a mysterious horror had seemed to brood.
I felt myself adrift in a sea of frightful suspicions. I remembered Alresca's delirium on the night of his accident, and his final hallucination concerning the blank wall in the dressing-room (if hallucination it was), also on that night. I remembered his outburst against Rosetta Rosa. I remembered Emmeline Smith's outburst against Rosetta Rosa. I remembered the vision in the crystal, and Rosa's sudden and astoundingly apt breaking in upon that vision. I remembered the scene between Rosa and Sir Cyril Smart, and her almost hysterical impulse to pierce her own arm with the little jewelled dagger. I remembered the glint of the dagger which drew my attention to it on the curb of an Oxford Street pavement afterwards. I remembered the disappearance of Sir Cyril Smart. I remembered all the inexplicable circumstances of Alresca's strange decay, and his equally strange recovery. I remembered that his recovery had coincided with an entire absence of communication between himself and Rosa.... And then she comes! And within an hour he is dead! "I love her. He has come again. This time it is—" How had Alresca meant to finish that sentence? "He has come again." Who had come again? Was there, then, another man involved in the enigma of this tragedy? Was it the man I had seen opposite the Devonshire Mansion on the night when I had found the dagger? Or was "he" merely an error for "she"? "I love her. She has come again." That would surely make better sense than what Alresca had actually written? And he must have been mentally perturbed. Such a slip was possible. No, no! When a man, even a dying man, is writing a message which he has torn out of his heart, he does not put "he" for "she" ... "I love her...." Then, had he misjudged her heart when he confided in me during the early part of the evening? Or had the sudden apparition of Rosa created his love anew? Why had she once refused him? She seemed to be sufficiently fond of him. But she had killed him. Directly or indirectly she had been the cause of his death.
And as I looked at her, my profound grief for Alresca made me her judge. I forgot for the instant the feelings with which she had once inspired me, and which, indeed, had never died in my soul.
"How do you explain this?" I demanded of her in a calm and judicial and yet slightly hostile tone.
"Oh!" she exclaimed. "How sad it is! How terribly sad!"
And her voice was so pure and kind, and her glance so innocent, and her grief so pitiful, that I dismissed forever any shade of a suspicion that I might have cherished against her. Although she had avoided my question, although she had ignored its tone, I knew with the certainty of absolute knowledge that she had no more concern in Alresca's death than I had.