“O, no, there is nothing—except if you would let me see the rooms in which he lived.”
“Assuredly. It is a melancholy pleasure, at best, to recall the sorrows we have outlived, but the association will be less painful in your case since the—friend in whom you are interested was so speedily and so thoroughly restored to mental health. I take it that he has never had a relapse?”
“Never, thank God!”
“It was not likely, from the history of the case.”
He led the way across a vestibule and up-stairs to the second floor, where he showed Mrs. Greswold two airy rooms, sitting-room and bedroom communicating, overlooking the valley towards Cimies, with the white-walled convent on the crest of the hill, and the white temples of the dead clustering near it; cross and column, Athenian pediment and Italian cupola, dazzling white against the cloudless blue. The rooms were neatly furnished, and there was every appearance of comfort; no suggestion of Bedlam, padded walls, or strait-waistcoats.
“Had he these rooms all the time?” asked Mildred.
“Not all the time. He was somewhat difficult to deal with during the first few weeks, and he was in the main building, under the care of one of my subordinates, till improvement began. By that time I had grown interested in his case, and took him into my own house.”
“Pray let me see the rooms he occupied at first, monsieur; I want to know all. I want to be able to understand what his life was like in that dark dream.”
She knew now what his own dream meant.
Monsieur Leroy indulged her whim. He took her across the dusty garden to the great white house—a house of many windows and long corridors, airy, bare, hopeless-looking, as it seemed to that sad visitor. She saw the two iron-barred enclosures, and the restless creatures roaming about them, clinging to the bars, climbing like monkeys from perch to perch, hanging from the trapeze. The Spaniard had left off singing.