The old woman's stiff arm fell slowly to her side, as she stood.... But she was still staring and shrinking back, slowly....
She no longer seemed to see Ottilie in her horror at what she did see. And all that she said, with unseeing eyes, though the rest of her consciousness remained, was:
"To bed!... To bed!..."
She said it as though she were very, very tired. They put her to bed, Anna and the companion. She remained silent, with her thin lips pressed together and her eyes still staring. Her heart had seen and ... she knew. She knew that he, Takma, Emile—the man whom she had loved above everything, above everybody, in the dead, dead years—that he was dead, that he was dead....
[CHAPTER XXVII]
"Come," said Lot, gently, one morning, sitting with Elly in the sitting-room where he came so often to chat and have tea with her in the old days before they were married, "come, let us talk sensibly. It put both of us out to be dragged back from Italy, from our work, while—very foolishly—we never thought that this might easily happen one day. Dear old Grandpapa was so very old! We thought that he would live for ever!... But now that we are here, Elly, and Steyn has told us that all the affairs are settled, we may as well come to a sensible decision. You don't want to stay in this house; and it is, no doubt, too big, too gloomy, too old.... To live with Mamma ... well, I did hint at it the other day, but Mamma talked of it so vaguely, as though she really didn't much care about it.... Now that Hugh is with her she's quite 'off' me: it's Hugh here and Hugh there. It was always like that: it was like that in 'Mr.' Trevelley's time, when I was a boy and Hugh a child. John and Mary didn't count for much either; and it's just the same now.... So we won't talk of setting up house together.... But what shall we do, Elly? Look out for a smaller house and settle down? Or go abroad again, go back to Italy?... You enjoyed it, after all, and we were working together so pleasantly.... We were very happy there, weren't we, Elly?"
His voice sounded gentle, as it always did, but there was a note almost of entreaty in it now. His nature, his fair-haired person—was he not turning a little grey at the temples?—lacked physical vitality and concealed no passionate soul; but there was a great gentleness in him: under that touch of laughing bitterness and vanity and superficial cynicism he was kind and indulgent to others, with no violent longings for himself. Under his feminine soul lay the philosophy of an artist who contemplates everything around and within himself without bursting into vehemence and violence about anything whatever. He had asked Elly to be his wife, perhaps upon her own unspoken suggestion that she needed him in her work and in her life; and, often in jest and once in a way in earnest, he had asked himself why he was getting married, why he had got married and whether liberty and independence did not suit him better. But, since he had seen his sister's happiness with Aldo at Nice and had also felt his own, softer-tinted happiness, very fervent and very true in his wistfully-smiling, neutral-tinted soul, which withdrew itself almost in panic under his fear of old age; since he had been able to seize the moment, carefully, as he would have seized a precious butterfly: since then it had all remained like that, since then his still, soft happiness had remained with him as something very serious and very true, since then he had come to love Elly as he never thought that he could love any one. And it had been a joy to him to roam about Italy with Elly, to watch her delight in that beautiful past which lay so artistically dead and, on returning to Florence, to plunge at her instance into earnest studies of the Medici period. How they had rooted and ransacked together, taking notes as they worked; how he had written in the evenings, feeling so utterly, so fondly happy in their sitting-room at the pension where they stayed! Two lamps, one beside Elly, one beside himself, shed a light over their papers and books; vases of fragrant flowers surrounded them; photographs pinned to the walls shadowed back the beauties of the museums in the gathering dusk. But, amid the beauties of that land and of that art, amid his happiness, amid the sunshine, an indolence had stolen over him; he often proposed a trip into the country, a drive, a walk to Fiesole, to Ema; he loved looking at the life of the people in the street, smiling at it with gladness: the Archives were cold and dusty; and he simply could not keep on working so regularly. And in the evening he would gaze across the Arno and sit blissfully smoking his cigarette at the window, until Elly also shut up her books and the Medicis drifted away in the changing lights of early evening outside and grew indistinct....
He had at first not noticed her disappointment. When he did, he was unwilling to pain her and he went back to his research. But he did it against the grain. That regular work did not suit him. It tired his brain; behind his forehead he plainly felt a reluctancy, a barrier that prevented something from entering ... just as he had felt when, at school, he had to do a sum and failed, twice and thrice over.... In addition, he was burning to write ephemeral essays: he had a superabundance of material, about the Medicis, about Benozzo Gozzoli's frescoes at the Palazzo Riccardi, for instance.... Oh, to write an essay like that from afar, all aglow, with azure jewels and gold! But he dared not write the article, because Elly had once said:
"Don't go cutting up into articles all that we have discovered."