"Miss Agatha was not in the cabbon. She was not wetted, indeed. She had not so much as her skirrt wetted, sir. She is within, sir."
"Do you think she would see me?"
"Come in, sir. I will ask."
He stepped in, feeling stunned. His mind gave him an image of something hauled ashore. There was an image of a dripping thing being carried by men up the drive, the gravel crunched under their boots—crunch—crunch in slow time, then a rest at the door, and then, slowly, into the hall, and drip, drip, up the stairs to the darkened bedroom. Then out again, reverently, fumbling their hats, to talk about it with the cook. He did not realise what had happened. Here he was in the room. There was his photograph. There was the Oriental bowl full of potpourri. Ottalie had been drowned. Ottalie was lying upstairs, a dead thing, with neither voice nor movement. Ottalie was dead. She had sat with him in that very room. The old precise sofa was her favourite seat. How could she be dead? She had been in London, asking for him, only two days before. Her letter was in his pocket. There was her music. There was her violin. Why did she not come in, as of old, with her smiling daintiness, and with her hands in great gardening gauntlets clasping tulips for the jars? That beauty was over for the world.
He was stunned by it. He did not know what was happening; but there was Agatha, motioning to him not to get up. He said something about pity. "I pity you." After a minute, he added, "My God!" He was trying to say something to comfort her. The change in her told him that it was all true. It branded it into him. Ottalie was dead, and this was what it meant to the world. This was death, this horror.
His mind groped about like a fainting man for something to clutch. Baudelaire's lines rose up before him. The sentiment of French decadence, with its fancy of ingratitude, made him shudder. A turmoil of quotations seethed and died down in him, "And is old Double dead?" "Come away, death," with a phrase of Arne's setting. A wandering strange phrase of Grieg.
He went up to Agatha and took her hands.
"You poor thing; you poor thing," he repeated. "My God, you poor women suffer!" The clock was ticking all the time. Some one was bringing tea to the next room. The lines in the Persian rug had a horrible regularity. "Agatha," he said. Afterwards he believed that he kissed her, and that she thanked him.
"I don't know. I don't know," she said. "Oh, I'm so very wretched. So wretched. So wretched. And I can't die." She shook in a passion of tears.
"She was wonderful," he said, choking. "She was so beautiful. All she did."