Gabrielle St. Leger asked the question not because she wished to ask it, but because outward things forced her.
All disease is actually infecting, if not actively infectious, since contact with it disturbs the emotional and functional equilibrium, maintenance of which constitutes perfect health. Such disturbance is most readily and injuriously produced in persons of fine sensibility. Just now Madame St. Leger's faculties and feelings alike were in disarray. René Dax, his genius and the neurosis from which he suffered, his strange dwelling-place, all that which had happened in and—morally—adhered to it, combined to put compulsion upon her. In a sense, she knew the world. She was not inexperienced. But the amenities of a polished and highly civilized society, whose principal business it is to veil and mitigate the asperities of fact, had stood between her and direct acquaintance with the fundamental brutalities of life. Now she consciously met the shock of those brutalities, and met it single-handed. This exclusively man's world, the gates of which she had forced with wilful self-confidence, produced in her humiliation and helplessness, a sense of having projected herself into regions where accustomed laws are inoperative and direction-posts—for guidance of wandering feminine footsteps—agitatingly non-existent. Under this stress of circumstance her initiative deserted her. The vein of irony—running like a steel ribbon through her mentality—became suddenly and queerly worked out. She could not detach herself from the immediate position, stand aside, review it as a whole, and deal with it. That which made for individuality had gone under. Only her womanhood as womanhood—a womanhood sheltered, petted, moving ever in a gracefully artificial atmosphere—was left. She had come, intending to console, to minister, sagely to advise. It looked quite anxiously much as though, tyrannized by rude, unfamiliar forces, she would remain to yield and to obey. Thus, taking up the tag-end of René Dax's speech, she asked, unwillingly, almost fearfully:
"Unless—unless what?"
"Unless you consent to save me, Madame," he replied, with insinuating gravity and sweetness. "Unless you consecrate yourself to the work of my recovery, you and the delicious Mademoiselle Bette."
"But, my poor friend," she reasoned, "how is it possible for me to do that?"
"In a way very obvious and simple, wholly consonant to the most exalted aspirations of your nature," he returned. "I have planned it all out. No serious difficulties present themselves. Good will, Madame, on your part, some forethought on mine, and all is satisfactorily arranged. As to Mademoiselle Bette, she will find herself in a veritable paradise. You know her affection for me? And, putting aside my own gifts as a comrade, I have most pleasing little animals for her to play with. You have seen those in the aquarium? There is also Aristides. To my anguish I struck him last night with a hearth-brush during my pursuit of the red man, and Giovanni has charge of him in hospital to-day. The affair was purely accidental. I am convinced that he bears me no malice, poor cherished little cabbage; yet it cuts me to the quick to see his empty chair. But to return to your coming, Madame. For it is thus that you will save me—by coming here to remain permanently, by devoting yourself to me unremittingly, exclusively—by coming here—here to live."
The color rushed into Madame St. Leger's face and neck. Then ebbed, leaving her white to the lips, deathly white as against the black brocade of the chair-back. Here was a direction-post, at last, with information written upon it of—as it seemed to her—the very plainest and ugliest sort; the road which it signalized leading to well-known and wholly undesirable places, though trodden, only too frequently, by wandering feminine feet! For the moment she doubted his good faith; doubted whether he was not playing some infamous trick upon her; doubted whether his illness was not, after all, a treacherous fabrication. Her mouth and throat went dry as a lime-kiln. She could barely articulate.
"Monsieur," she said sternly, "I fear it is already too late to save you. In making such a proposition you show only too convincingly that you are already mad."
But the young man's expression lost nothing of its triumph or his manner of its sweetness.
"Madame, that is a very cruel speech," he said.