“Good-morning, madama,” he said. “Is your husband at home? We desire the honour of a word with him.”
“You have come to arrest him?”
The voice was as lifeless as the face.
“Madama is too precipitate,” answered the detective. “A word is not necessarily a warrant.”
“I have always been waiting for it to come,” she went on, in the same cold low tone, and with the same hot vision always challenging something beyond us that we could not see. “I have always expected and lived for this moment. Now, is it not in the eternal curse of things that it has come too late? Too precipitate. O, yes! too precipitate.”
She gave a frozen little laugh—horrible, because the muscles of her mouth, the breath of her bosom did not seem to stir to it.
“He killed my husband, my dear first love, did he not?” she asked.
Not one of us could find words to answer her.
“O, I know it!” she said. “I have always known it. Voices and visions used to come to me—they were for ever coming. One was of a little child I bore; but it went, and I knew then that it was not of the dead. Only the dead speak to me. The others are like murmurs behind a wall. I hear them as the dead hear the steps and laughter overhead. He killed him out of love of me—he struck him through my heart and killed my heart. The rest was his to take. He could not gain back what he had killed. His will was strong, but that was beyond it. And he made a passionate wooer, too. But it wanted more than his warmth to melt that dead stone of my heart. The children of his passion—they were born with the chill of it on them, and they too died, one by one.”
Not once did her voice rise above that lifeless current of sound. She stood like one speaking in an hypnotic trance, compelled to say the things she said. Now, in a pause, Valombroso spoke again: