That seemed to me a very natural thing to say, and I returned his courtesy:
“Good night, Monsieur!”
He went away. I listened to his footsteps as they clacked on the tiles of the six steps, and then on the pavement of the passage. Finally I heard the door into the anteroom swing to, and, less to my surprise than to my alarm, the great iron bolts slide back into their places: the grating sound they made, however slight, was quite audible in the absolute silence of the mansion.
I sat down on the wicker chair at the foot of the plain pine bedstead.
In sitting down I had intended to collect my thoughts if possible, bring a little order into the chaos of impressions, suspicions and fears that were whirling in my bewildered brain. But I had hardly touched the seat, when an unexpected sensation put an end to my reflections.
I had cast my eyes about the four walls of the room where I now was—four walls cheaply papered in a stock design of loud colors. Again the miserable poverty of the furnishings had impressed me, with the exception of the antique candlestick. The place, indeed, in its present condition, had all the appearances of a spare room, roughly fitted up with these few odd and ill-matched articles. I should not have thought it strange had I detected there the close musty odor that one always meets in apartments long unoccupied and rarely aired.
But that was not the smell that came to my nostrils. Quite the contrary in fact! The room was suddenly fragrant with a warm living perfume, a perfume that now reminded me of the one I had vaguely perceived in the draught from under the closed door of the anteroom. It was not the same perfume, by any means, though it was of the same general kind, one of those essences which float about every house where women are, combining the most diverse aromas into a single fragrance that is the alluring fragrance of feminine beauty.
I brought all my senses to bear upon it. “Heliotrope,” I analyzed, ... “and rose”! The isolation of these two essences seemed all at once to sharpen my memory of the earlier perfume; the latter, unmistakably, had been a lily of the valley.
“Muguet,” I said aloud, “lily of the valley!”
All a-quiver I leapt to my feet, terrified, stunned, but ferociously determined. Of course! Of course! The two syllables of that French word, muguet, had brought a flood of light into my clouded mind. Of course! Muguet! Her perfume! Madeleine! Madeleine!