II.
One day Marguerite entered his room with the announcement that some one wished to see him.
At first he made no reply. He lay stretched on a low couch with the immobility of a corpse and his upper eyelids met the lower in two fine pencilled lines like the eyes of the dead. His hair and beard, framing skin of deathly pallor, were also lifeless. His beautifully shaped right hand, thin almost to the point of transparency, rested limply on his coverlet.
Marguerite repeated: “Albert, there is some one who wants to see you.”
His figure suddenly stirred as if convulsed.
“I suppose another countryman to view my remains and then go back to Germany and lie about me!” A bitter smile appeared on his bloodless lips as he uttered these words with an irritable sneer. “I am sick of all visitors. They come here out of curiosity. The swine! What stories they have fabricated about me. I want friends, not visitors. And friends come only when one has something to give them!” He emitted a sigh. “Why should they come?” he soon added more bitterly. “Who wants to see misery!”
“This is a woman, Albert. She says she comes from Vienna——”
“From Vienna—she is perhaps bringing me word that the director of the Royal theatre is to present one of my tragedies—he has promised me. Send her in.”
The next instant the corner of his mouth twitched, the crease between his eyes flattened, and digging his right elbow into the downy pillow underneath him, he raised his right side to a half-sitting posture and leaned against the prop of pillows at his head. A panting sigh betrayed the great effort of raising himself.
Presently a girl of about twenty-two stepped in, and as she caught sight of the half-blind, half-paralyzed figure her breathing almost stopped. For a bare second she halted as if she meant to retreat, but her blue eyes filled with tears and she whispered. “Bon jour.”