“She’s told Lupé that you’re here and thinks she wants to see you. She says she’s tried to speak, and, as far as she can follow, she’s under the impression that Lupé’s asked for you.”
It was a hateful suggestion to Jerry. He was shocked enough already without having to suffer seeing Lupé in this unfamiliar state. He detested sad things and kept them out of his life with the utmost care. But Newbury and the woman were watching him. He realized that they both expected him to go. Deep down in the inner places of his soul the thought that Lupé could not speak passed with a vibration of relief.
They followed Pancha up the softly carpeted stairs and along the passage. The woman passed through a doorway, making a gesture for them to wait, then put her head out and beckoned them in.
The darkness of evening had fallen and the large room was well-lighted. By the bed two gas jets, burning under ground-glass globes, threw a brilliant light over the sick woman. She was lying straight and stark on her back, the bed-clothes smooth over the undulations of her body and raised into points by her feet. Spreading over the pillow beside her, like the shadow of death waiting to cover her, was her hair, a black, dense mass, crossing the bed and falling over its edge. Her face was as white as the pillow, her eyes staring straight before her with a stern, frowning look. A stillness reigned in the room; death was without the door waiting to get in.
Newbury went toward her. Jerry hung back gazing fearfully at her. She was invested with a strange, alien terror, a being half initiated into awful mysteries. The inflexible sternness of her face did not soften as her husband bent over her and said gently:
“Dearest, Jerry came to see how you were. He’s here. Would you like to see him?”
She gave a low sound, undoubtedly an affirmative. Pancha, who was at the foot of the bed, enunciated a quick phrase in Spanish. Newbury stepped aside and beckoned Jerry forward. As her lover came within her line of vision her eyes softened, the stiffened lips expanded with difficulty into a slight smile.
“Of course she knows you,” Newbury said in a choked whisper. “Oh, my poor Lupé!”
His voice broke and he turned away convulsed and walked to the window. With the Mexican woman watching him from the foot-board, Jerry bent down and kissed her very softly on the forehead and both eyes. She made an effort to lift her face to his caress like a child, and as he drew back her eyes dwelt on his, full of the somber and unquenchable passion that had killed her. He tried to speak to her but found it impossible. Memories of the old days rushed upon him—of her resistance to his fiery wooing, of the first years of their intimacy and the tortures of her conscience that her love could never deaden, and now this ending amid the ruins of her anguish and his hard coldness.
He turned and groped his way out of the room. On the stairs Newbury joined him, touched beyond measure at the sight of his grief. With assurances that he would be up in the morning to inquire, Jerry escaped from the house and fled into the night, now dark and full of the chill of fog.