“O Dieu Très-haut, réveille-toi! Réveille-toi, mon Dieu!” Then in a tone of amazement and pathos, “Mary, Mother of Sorrows,” she said, “do I have to explain to God?”
She paused a moment while despair rose like a swelling flood; then through the darkness and the night went up a bitter cry: “Seigneur Dieu! Tout-puissant Dieu! sois attentif à ma prière: tu m’arrosarez avec l’hysope, et je serai purifiée; vous me laveras, et je deviendrai plus blanche que la neige! Plus blanche que la neige, mon Dieu! Plus blanche que la neige! Gabrielle, ma fille, mon Dieu! plus blanche que la neige! Forgive in her my transgressions; pardon in her my sins; deliver her from her inheritance.... O my God!... let her be white!”
A tremendous gust blew through the house; the wind sucked in the chimney with a sound like awful laughter; the blinds recoiled with thunderous shock; but from Heaven there was no answer.
At this she cried out pitifully as He who long ago cried out the cry, which through unending ages shall stand archetype of despair: “Mon Dieu, mon Dieu! pourquoi m’as-tu abandonné?”
The wind screamed round about her with the sound of many voices; far off arose a tumult as of many people running; borne on the wind came a torrent of hideous sound, not mad music, but awful dissonance, swiftly nearing, suddenly checked: after the clamor a silence like death; the room was fantastically still. Margot clung to the foot of the crucifix. “Pourquoi, O Dieu, rejettes-tu?” she asked in a voice grown shriveled and thin. She crouched a moment, motionless, her head on one side, listening. There was no reply. Heaven maintained its brassy silence. Her face went gray; her eyes were hard as stones; she turned her back on the crucifix, saying, “I will call upon You no more!”
There was a queer shuffling sound as of footsteps in the entry. The candles sank to dull blue sparks devoid of radiance; yet, instead of darkness there was light. Outside was darkness, vast, pitmirk; inside, appalling light. All the place was stunned and blinded by an overwhelming light which cast no shadows anywhere, but, vehemently streaming, searched crack and cranny; not a crevice escaped. It lapped and flowed like waves, and penetrated everything; even the gross material of the walls, saturated by that flame, gave back a superfluous glow, a white excess of light, and every pointed thing within the room was peaked and capped with flame. Round and round the room a bewildered host of moths in little wavering flights and drops went fluttering, with a light rustle of powdery wings, and, among them, bats splashed through the light with a low, continuous whirr. Round and round, like froth-clots on flood-water swinging around a vortex, whirled slantbat and moth in a dizzy, irregular ring, in the midst of which, crouched in a high-backed chair, sat a shriveled, dead-alive, mummy-like figure, as thin and fleshless as a skeleton,—an apparition, sinister, white, and wasted as a corpse new-risen from the grave.
Its chin upon its folded hands, its hands about one knee, the knee upheld by the heel crooked at the chair-seat’s edge, the other gaunt leg dangling across the upraised foot, the specter smiled on Margot a bleak, Saturnine smile. Its face was greatly wasted; all the life of it seemed gathered into the brilliant, terrible eyes, which blazed with infernal light, in splendid scorn, without remorse, sardonical; a countenance such as God alone endures to look upon unmoved; a figure terrible.... Deity, deformed, might look like this, grotesquely majestical, hideous, baleful, glorious, accursed, malign; an archangel, fallen, outcast, depraved: Satan, god of the discontent.
A twisted smile wreathing his evil lips, with his chin hooked over his hands,—a smile of cool confidence mingled with nonchalance, “Why not try me?” he said.
Staring into the abyss of blinding terror and light which encircled that thunder-scarred visage, with its thin, sleepless eyelids and twisted, ironic smile, Margot shrank against the wall, shivering as with cold; one hand shielding her blinded eyes, one groping along the wall, she listened, breathlessly.