“No, I am not going back. Not this time.” A mist seemed to fall before my eyes. I could hardly see the girl standing by the closed door of the Pempeiian room with extended hand, as if turned to stone. But my voice was firm enough. “Not this time,” I repeated, and became aware of the great noise of the wind amongst the trees, with the lashing of a rain squall against the door.
“Perhaps some other time,” I added.
I heard her say twice to herself: “Mon Dieu! Mon, Dieu!” and then a dismayed: “What can Monsieur expect me to do?” But I had to appear insensible to her distress and that not altogether because, in fact, I had no option but to go away. I remember also a distinct wilfulness in my attitude and something half-contemptuous in my words as I laid my hand on the knob of the front door.
“You will tell Madame that I am gone. It will please her. Tell her that I am gone—heroically.”
Rose had come up close to me. She met my words by a despairing outward movement of her hands as though she were giving everything up.
“I see it clearly now that Madame has no friends,” she declared with such a force of restrained bitterness that it nearly made me pause. But the very obscurity of actuating motives drove me on and I stepped out through the doorway muttering: “Everything is as Madame wishes it.”
She shot at me a swift: “You should resist,” of an extraordinary intensity, but I strode on down the path. Then Rose’s schooled temper gave way at last and I heard her angry voice screaming after me furiously through the wind and rain: “No! Madame has no friends. Not one!”
PART FIVE
CHAPTER I
That night I didn’t get on board till just before midnight and Dominic could not conceal his relief at having me safely there. Why he should have been so uneasy it was impossible to say but at the time I had a sort of impression that my inner destruction (it was nothing less) had affected my appearance, that my doom was as it were written on my face. I was a mere receptacle for dust and ashes, a living testimony to the vanity of all things. My very thoughts were like a ghostly rustle of dead leaves. But we had an extremely successful trip, and for most of the time Dominic displayed an unwonted jocularity of a dry and biting kind with which, he maintained, he had been infected by no other person than myself. As, with all his force of character, he was very responsive to the moods of those he liked I have no doubt he spoke the truth. But I know nothing about it. The observer, more or less alert, whom each of us carries in his own consciousness, failed me altogether, had turned away his face in sheer horror, or else had fainted from the strain. And thus I had to live alone, unobserved even by myself.