I went out. When I was under the balcony, I cried:
"Juliana!"
She showed herself. I shall always retain in the eyes of my soul that silent, ghostly apparition, yet distinct as a living thing, her tall figure rendered still taller by the length of the amaranthine cloak, and, against this dark silhouette, that pale face, so pale! The words of Jacques to Amanda are indissolubly associated in my mind with that unchangeable vision:
"How pale you are to-night, Amanda! Have you opened your veins to tint your robe?"
She withdrew, or rather, to describe the sensation I felt, she evaporated. I advanced rapidly along the path, without full consciousness of what impelled me. I heard the sound of my own foot-falls resound in my brain. I was so preoccupied that I was obliged to stop to find out where I was. What caused this blind agitation in me? A simple physical cause, perhaps—a particular condition of my nerves. That is what I believed. Incapable of an effort of thought, of a methodical examination, of meditation, I submitted to the tyranny of my nerves, by which the external appearances were reflected, provoking phenomena of extraordinary intensity, as in hallucinations. But, like lightning-flashes, certain thoughts lit up all the rest, and increased the oppressive feeling that several unexpected incidents had already given rise to in me.
No, Juliana had not appeared to me to-day as I had imagined she would, as she should have done had she still been the same creature I knew before, "the Juliana of the old days." She had not assumed toward me the attitudes that I had expected, in certain circumstances. A strange element, something obscure, violent, and excessive had modified and deformed her personality. Must this change be attributed to the sickly condition of her organism? "I am ill, I am very ill," she had often repeated, as if in justification. Truly, illness produces profound changes, and may render a human being unrecognizable. But what was her malady? Was it the old one, not extirpated by the surgeon's steel, complicated perhaps, perhaps incurable? "Who knows if you will not see me die before long?" she had said in a singular tone, that may have been prophetic. She had spoken of death several times. She therefore knew that she carried within her a fatal germ? Was she dominated by this lugubrious thought? It was perhaps such a thought that had fired in her those sombre, almost hopeless, almost demented ardors, when she was in my arms? It was perhaps the great sudden light of happiness that had rendered more visible and more frightful the spectre that pursued her?
"Could it be possible that she might die? Could death strike her even while in my arms, in the midst of happiness?" I thought with a fright that froze me, that for several moments rooted me to the spot, as if the peril were immediate, as if Juliana had predicted truly when she had said:
"If, for instance, I were to die to-morrow?"
The twilight fell, slightly damp. Breaths of humid air ran over the bushes, causing a rustling like that which the rapid passage of animals through them would have produced. A few scattered swallows cleft the air with cries, like the flight of a stone propelled by a sling. At sunset, the horizon, still luminous, had the immense reverberations of a sinister forge.
I arrived at the bench, and found the parasol. I did not linger there, in spite of the recent memories, still keen, still warm, that disturbed my soul. It was there she had fallen fainting, vanquished; it was there I had spoken to her the supreme words, that I had made to her the intoxicating avowal: "You were in my house, while I sought you afar off"; there that I had gathered from her lips the breath that had ravished my soul to the supreme heights of joy; there that I had drunk her first tears, that I had heard her sobs, that I had uttered the obscure question: "It is too late, perhaps? Is it too late?"