"Well, fancy that," cried he again and again in a kind of surprise. "I was right all the time!"
He sat late at night, coatless and collarless, at a table over the diary, Mrs. Clarke in the next room long since asleep, London asleep, the very night asleep from earth right up to heaven. Four days before a black cat had been adopted into the household. Surely it was that which had brought him the luck to get hold of the diary!—so easily, so unexpectedly. Pussie was now perched on the table, her purr the sole sound in the quietude, and Clarke, who would have scoffed at a hint of superstition, was stroking her, as he read for the third time those last pages written on the day of her death by the unhappy Frenchwoman.
... I so seldom dream, that it has become the subject of remark, and Dr. Naurocki of the Institute said once that it is because I am such a "perfect animal." It is well to be a perfect something: but that much I owe only to my father and mother. I am afraid I am not a perfect anything else. A perfect liar, perhaps; a perfect adventuress; using as stepping-stones those whose fond hearts love me; shallow, thin within; made of hollow-ringing tin from my skin to the tissue of my liver. Oh, perhaps I might have done better for myself! Suppose I had stayed with Marguerite and le pre Armaud on the farm, and helped to milk the two cows, and met some rustic lover at the stile at dusk, and married him in muslin? It might have been as well! There is something in me that is famished and starved, and decayed, something that pines and sighs because of its utter thinness—I suppose it is what they call "the soul." I have lied until I am become a lie, an unreality, a Nothing. I seem to see myself clearly to-day; and if I could repent now, I'd say "I will arise and go to my father, and will say to him 'Father.'"
Too late now, I suppose. Marguerite would draw her skirts away from touching me, though the cut of the skirt would set me smiling; and, if the fatted calf was set before me on a soiled table-cloth, I should be ill.
Too late! You can't turn back the clock's hands: the clock stops. God help me, I feel horribly remorseful. Why should I have dreamt it? I so seldom dream! and I have never, I think, dreamt with such living vividness. I thought I saw my father and Marguerite standing over my dead body, staring at me. I saw them, and I saw myself, and my face was all bruised and wounded; and Marguerite said: "Well, she sought for it," and my father's face twitched, and suddenly he sobbed out: "I wish to Heaven I had died for her!" and my dead ears on the bed heard, and my dead heart throbbed just once again at him, and then was dead for ever.
Clarke did not know that he was reading literature, but he did know that this was more exciting than any story he had ever set eyes on. He stopped, lit a pipe, and resumed.
I saw it, I heard it, though it was in a black world that it happened, a world all draped in crape; black, black. But what is the matter with me to-day? Is there any other woman so sad in this great city, I wonder? I have opened one of the bottles of Old Veuve, so there are only seven left now; and I have drunk two full glasses of it. But it has made no difference; and I have to dine with Lady Knox-Florestan, and go with her to the opera; and Osborne may be coming. They will think me a death's-head, and catch melancholy from me like a fever. I do not know why I dreamt it, and why I cannot forget. It seems rather strange. Is anything going to happen to me, really? Oh, inside this breast of mine there is a bell tolling, and a funeral moving to the tomb this afternoon. It is as if I had drunk of some lugubrious drug that turns the human bosom to wormwood. Is it my destiny to die suddenly, and lie in an early grave? No, not that! Let me be in rags, and shrunken, with old, old eyes and toothless gums, but give me life! Let me say I am still alive!
"By Jove!" growled Clarke, chewing his pipe, "that rings in my ears!"
Yet I have had curious tokens, hints, fancies, of late. Four nights ago, as I was driving down Pall Mall from Lady Sinclair's diner dansant—it was about eleven-thirty—I saw a man in the shadow at a corner who I could have sworn for a moment was F. I didn't see his face, for as the carriage approached him, he turned his back, and it was that turning of the back, I think, that made me observe him. Suppose all the time F. knows of me?—knows who Rose de Bercy is! I never wanted to have that Academy portrait painted, and I must have been mad to consent in the end. If F. saw it? If he knows? What would he do? His nature is capable of ravaging flames of passion! Suppose he killed me? But could a poor woman be so unlucky? No, he doesn't know, he can't, fate is not so hard. Then there is that wretched Pauline—she shan't be in this house another week. My quarrel with her this morning was the third, and the most bitter of all. Really, that girl knows too much of me to permit of our living any longer under one roof; and, what is more, she has twice dropped hints lately which certainly seem to bear the interpretation that she knows of my work in Berlin for the Russian Government. Oh, but that must only be the madness of my fancy! Two persons, and two only, in the whole world know of it—how could she, possibly? Yet she said in her Friday passion: "You will not be a long liver, Madame, you have been too untrue to your dupes." Untrue to my dupes! Which dupes? My God, if she meant the Anarchists!
Clarke's face was a study when he came to that word. It wore the beatific expression of the man who is justified in his own judgment.
Just suppose that she knows! For that she is mixed up with some of them to some uncertain extent I have guessed for two years. And if they knew that I have actually been a Government agent; they would do for me, oh, they would, I know, it would be all up with me. Three months ago Sauriac Paulus in the promenoire at Covent Garden, said to me: "By the way, do you know that you have been condemned to death?" I forget à propos of what he said it, and have never given it a thought from that day. He was bantering me, laughing in the lightest vein, but—God! it never struck me like this before!—Suppose there was earnest under the jest, deep-hidden under? He is a deep, deep, evil beast, that man. Those were his words—I remember distinctly. "By the way, do you know that you have been condemned to death?" "By the way:" his heavy face shook with chuckling. And it never once till now entered my head!—Oh, but, after all, I must be horribly ill to be having such thoughts this day! The beast, of course, didn't mean anything. Think, though, of saying, "by the way?"—the terrible, evil beast. Oh, yes, I am ill. I have begun to die. This night, may be, my soul shall be required of me. I hear Marguerite saying again, "Well, she sought for it," and my father's bitter sobbing, "I wish to Heaven I had died for her!" But, if I am killed this day, it will be by ... or by C. E. F....
That last dash after the "F." was not, Clarke saw, meant as a dash, for it was a long curved line, as if her elbow had been struck, or she herself violently startled. She had probably intended, this time, to write the name in full, but the interruption stopped her.