It was the end.
It was the end of the Château Villebecq I had known, the end of the easeful days of bright comfort shot through with gay melodrama, the end of the Interlude. For two other women, mother and sister, it was the end for ever of this world's happiness; for the other herself too, as I learned long afterwards.
Madame de Florian crumpled up under the blow. All she had lived for—the honour of her name, the worldly success of her daughters—was lost. All her employment—the day-to-day strivings towards these two ends—was gone. In one night she seemed to shrivel up; to become at a stroke five times more wizened, more futile, more plaintive than before. Life, perhaps, had never had much to give her; now it held nothing. Her days were divided between regrets and self-reproachings, complaints, servant-scoldings and tears.
To me alone she confided her woe. I was the one kind soul she had ever known; Heaven had meant me to be her daughter! I gave her nothing from my soul—except pity, poor pity, and even this soon lost its first spontaneity; became conscious, conscientious—yet always I could see she was getting what I did not give: a sense of boundless sympathy and affection. In every mood and every mope she came to me for comfort, and—though I knew full well in my actress-heart that I was giving her nothing at all, no real love, no healing sympathy, only the shams and simulacra of these, served up with pity, luxurious self-comforting pity—always I saw that my shadow was her substance. She returned me a boundless gratitude; pathetic, delicious to my palate, cruelly undeserved.
"Ah Mademoiselle, there are not many like you! My life is over. I am a poor old woman alone. Only you understand. Stay with me, dear Mademoiselle."
And I did.
Elise took to her room, asked no comfort, refused what I proffered, railed at me for being the real cause of her losing her dear one, spent long days alone in her bedroom weeping, and would not be comforted. After a few weeks, when no news came of Suzanne, she took really ill. When sufficiently recovered to travel, she went for a long stay in the South of France, Gabrielle accompanying her. At leaving she refused to see me, even to say Good-bye.
The new steward did not live in the house, now a deserted place, damp and cold in the long winter that followed, inhabited by memories, haunted by fugitive joys. Through the long days and nights, echoes of happiness would ring aloud through the emptiness, and sometimes I heard Suzanne's laugh on the staircase or the quick feet of friendly approaches in the corridor. Now that joy had taken flight, the great house became, like Bear Lawn of old, an atmosphere I understood and responded to. It is thus that I have chiefly remembered it ever since, it is thus that I remember it now.
I had no plans except—vaguely "soon"—to go back to Devonshire for good. When I mooted this to the Countess, her pleadings were so pitiful, so flattering, that I registered then and there the vow that I would stay as long as she wanted me. It was the one return I could give for the kindness I had received, the one way I could display loyalty to the good past of yesterday: quite a good way also, maybe, of laying up for myself treasure in Heaven.
So for many long and lonely months I stayed. Except the Countess I saw no one. I was as lonely as in the far-away days of my childhood, and soon it was to my childhood that I returned. Imperceptibly, just as a year or two back the Bear Lawn life had vanished, the present glory of Villebecq taking its place, so now it was Villebecq (though my body remained there) that vanished, and Bear Lawn again that took its place. In bed at night, if my soul was thinking of Mary, the old dining-room or the cold blue attic formed the physical setting in which, as a person detached, I always saw her. In the darkness my bed would always revert to the Bear Lawn position, with the wall facing me as I lay on my right side, although in reality in the Villebecq room it was behind me. Even awake and in the day-time, the articles of furniture in my boudoir often changed as I watched them to the furniture of the old dining-room, the sense came over me that Villebecq was but a dream I had dreamt one night at Tawborough, a dream from which I was at this moment waking up, a dream that already I could not properly remember.... But—Bear Lawn too was a dream—I had only dreamt that I was Mary. Who was I? Was I any one? Oh, terror, was I God Himself? With a cry I fell on to my knees.... The fear passed, it was the Villebecq boudoir, I was rising awkwardly to my feet. (Had anybody seen?)