It was as in a rhythm of astonishment that she wearily mounted the stairs, higher and higher, in a silent surprise of sudden light.
“But I am fond of him, I love him, I love him!”
It sounded like a melody through her weariness.
She reached her dressing-room, where Greta had lighted the gas; she dragged herself inside. The door of the nursery stood half open; she went in, threw back the curtain of Christie’s little bed, dropped on her knees and looked at the child. The boy partly awoke, still in the warmth of a deep sleep; he crept a little from between the sheets, laughed, threw his arms about Cecile’s bare neck:
“Mummy dear!”
She pressed him tightly in the embrace of her slender, white arms; she kissed his raspberry mouth, his drowsed eyes. And meantime the refrain sang on in her heart, right across the weariness which seemed to break her by the bedside of her child:
“But I am fond of him, I love him, I love him, I love him...!”
5
The mystery! Suddenly, on the staircase, it had beamed open before her in her soul, like a great flower of light, a mystic rose with glistening petals, into whose golden heart she now looked for the first time. The analysis to which she was so much inclined was no longer possible: this was the riddle of love, the eternal riddle, which had beamed open within her, transfixing with its rays the very width of her soul, in the midst of which it had burst forth like a sun in a universe; it was too late to ask the reason why; it was too late to ponder and dream upon it; it could only be accepted as the inexplicable phenomenon of the soul; it was a creation of sentiment, of which the god who created it would be as impossible to find in the inner essence of his reality as the God who had created the world out of chaos. It was light breaking forth from darkness; it was heaven disclosed above the earth. And it existed: it was reality and not a fairy-tale! For it was wholly and entirely within her, a sudden, incontestable, everlasting truth, a felt fact, so real in its ethereal incorporeity that it seemed to her as if, until that moment, she had never known, never thought, never felt. It was the beginning, the opening out of herself, the dawn of her soul’s life, the joyful miracle, the miraculous inception of love, love focussed in the midst of her soul.