"OTTILIE."
Aunt Adèle remained sitting motionless, with the four pieces in her hand. She had read the letter: it was irrevocable. She wished that she had not read it. But it was too late now. And she knew....
The letter was dated from Tegal, sixty years ago. Flames no longer flickered out of the words, now that Aunt Adèle had read them, but the scarlet quivered before her terrified eyes. She sat huddled and trembling and her eyes stared at that quivering scarlet. She felt her knees shake; they would not let her rise from her chair. And she knew. Through a welter of hatred, passion, jubilation, madness, passionate love and passionate remorse, the letter was clear and conjured up—as in an unconscious impulse to tell everything, to feel everything over again, to describe everything in crimson clearness—a night of years and years ago, a night in silent mountains, by a dark jungle, by a river in flood, a night in a lonely pasangrahan, a night of love, a night of hatred, of surprise, of self-defence, of not knowing how, of rising terror, of despair to the pitch of madness.... And the words conjured up a scene of struggle and bloodshed in a bedroom, conjured up a group of three people who carried a corpse towards that river in flood, not knowing what else to do, while the pouring rain streamed and clattered down.... All this the words conjured up, as though suggested by a force from the outside, an impulse irresistible, a mystic violence compelling the writer to say what, logically speaking, she should have kept hidden all her life long; to describe in black on white the thing that was a crime, until her letter became an accusation; to scream it all out and to paint in bright colours the thing which it would have been safest to keep buried in a remorseful soul and to erase, so that not a trace remained to betray it....
And the simple, placid woman, grown to mature years in calmness of blood, sat dismayed at what had been revealed to her. At first, her dismay had shone red in front of her, dismay at an evocation of hatred and passionate love; and now, suddenly, there rose before her eyes the drawing-room of an old woman and the woman herself sitting at a window, brittle with the lasting years, and, opposite her, Takma, both silently awaiting the passing. The old woman sat there still; yonder, in the next room, lay the old man and he too awaited the morrow and the last honours: for to-day everything was past....
O God, so that was the secret of their two old lives! So vehemently had they loved, so violently hated, so tragic and ever-secret a crime had they committed in that lonely mountain night and such blood-red memories had they dragged with them, always and always, all their long, long lives! And now, suddenly, she alone knew what nobody knew!... She alone knew, she thought; and she shuddered with dread. What was she to do with that knowledge, what was she to do with those four pieces of yellow paper, covered with pale-red ink as though with faded letters of blood?... What was she to do, what was she to do with it all?... Her fingers refused to tear those four pieces into smaller pieces and to drop them into the paper-basket. It would make her seem an accomplice. And what was she to do with her knowledge, with what she alone knew?... That tragic knowledge would oppress her, the simple-minded woman, to stifling-point!...
Now at last she rose, shivering. It was very cold in the aired room. She went to the window to close it and felt her feet tottering, her knees knocking together. Her eyes staring in dismay, she shook her head to and fro, to and fro. Mechanically, with her duster in her hand, she dusted here and there, absent-mindedly, constantly returning to the same place, dusting two and three times over. Mechanically she put the chairs straight; and her habit of neatness was such that, when she left the room, she was still trembling, but the room was tidy. She had locked up the torn letter. She could not destroy it. And suddenly she was seized with a fresh curiosity, a fresh impulse from without, a strange feeling that compelled her: she wanted to see the old man.... And she entered the death-chamber on the tips of her slippered toes. In the pale dim light, the old man's head lay white on the white pillow, on the bed with its white counterpane. The eyelids were closed; the face had fallen away on either side of the nose and mouth in loose wrinkles of discoloured parchment; there were a few scanty grey hairs near the ears, like a dull silver wreath. And Aunt Adèle looked down upon him, with eyes starting from their sockets, and shook her head to and fro in dismay. There he lay, dead. She had known him and looked after him for years. She had never suspected that. There he lay, dead; and in his dead relics lay all the past passionate love and hatred; surely too the past remorse and remembrance. Or was there a hereafter yet to come, with more struggling and more remorse and penitence ... and punishment perhaps?...
Whatever he might have suffered within himself, he had not been fully punished here on earth. His life, outwardly, had flowed long and calmly. He had achieved consideration, almost riches. He had not had an ailing old age. On the contrary, his senses had remained unimpaired; and she remembered that he even used often to complain, laughing in his genial manner—which was too pronounced to be sincere—that he heard everything and was far from growing deaf with age, that in fact he heard voices which did not exist. What voices had he heard, what voice had he heard calling? What voice had called to him when the letter, half-destroyed and too long preserved, dropped from the hand that played him false?... No, in this world he had not been fully punished, unless indeed his whole life was a punishment.... A cold shiver passed through Aunt Adèle: that a person could live for years beside another and not know him and know nothing about him! How long was it? For twenty-three years, she, the poor relation, had lived with him like that!... And the old woman also lived like that....
Shaking her head in stupefaction, Aunt Adèle moved away. She clasped her hands together, gently, with an old maid's gesture. She saw the old woman in her imagination. The old woman was sitting, dignified and majestic, frail and thin, in her high-backed chair. She had once been the woman who was able to write that letter full of words red with passion and hatred and madness and the wish to forget, in a fusion of the senses with him, with him who lay there so insignificant, so small, so old, dead now, after years and years. She had once been able to write like that!...
The words still burnt before the eyes of the stupefied elderly woman, placid in soul and blood. That such things were, that such things could be!... Her head kept shaking to and fro....
[1] Kate, Kittie.