“Oh, poor girl!” she cried—“Oh, poor, unhappy, misguided girl!”
I stared at her gloomily. It seemed to me very strange that she should weep for sorrows not her own. There was a fire in my brain,—a confused trouble in my thoughts,—I looked at my dead wife with her fixed gaze and evil smile, sitting rigidly upright, and robed in the mocking sheen of her rose-silk peignoir, showered with old lace, after the costliest of Paris fashions,—then at the living, tender-souled, earnest creature, famed for her genius throughout the world, who knelt on the ground, sobbing over the stiffening hand on which so many rare gems glistened derisively,—and an impulse rose in me stronger than myself, moving me to wild and clamorous speech.
“Get up, Mavis!” I cried—“Do not kneel there! Go,—go out of this room,—out of my sight! You do not know what she was—this woman whom I married,—I deemed her an angel, but she was a fiend,—yes, Mavis, a fiend! Look at her, staring at her own image in the glass,—you cannot call her beautiful—now! She smiles, you see,—just as she smiled last night when, ... ah, you know nothing of last night! I tell you, go!” and I stamped my foot almost [p 395] furiously,—“This air is contaminated,—it will poison you! The perfume of Paris and the effluvia of death intermingled are sufficient to breed a pestilence! Go quickly,—inform the household their mistress is dead,—have the blinds drawn down,—show all the exterior signs of decent and fashionable woe!”—and I began laughing deliriously—“Tell the servants they may count upon expensive mourning,—for all that money can do shall be done in homage to King Death! Let everyone in the place eat and drink as much as they can or will,—and sleep, or chatter as such menials love to do, of hearses, graves and sudden disasters;—but let me be left alone,—alone with her;—we have much to say to one another!”
White and trembling, Mavis rose up and stood gazing at me in fear and pity.
“Alone? ...” she faltered—“You are not fit to be alone!”
“No, I am not fit to be, but I must be,”—I rejoined quickly and harshly—“This woman and I loved—after the manner of brutes, and were wedded or rather mated in a similar manner, though an archbishop blessed the pairing, and called upon Heaven to witness its sanctity! Yet we parted ill friends,—and dead though she is, I choose to pass the night with her,—I shall learn much knowledge from her silence! To-morrow the grave and the servants of the grave may claim her, but to-night she is mine!”
The girl’s sweet eyes brimmed over with tears.
“Oh you are too distracted to know what you are saying,” she murmured—“You do not even try to discover how she died!”
“That is easy enough to guess,”—I answered quickly, and I took up a small dark-coloured bottle labelled ‘Poison’ which I had already perceived on the toilet-table—“This is uncorked and empty. What it contained I do not know,—but there must be an inquest of course,—people must be allowed to make money for themselves out of her ladyship’s rash act! And see there,—” here I pointed to some loose sheets of note-paper covered with writing, and partially concealed [p 396] by a filmy lace handkerchief which had evidently been hastily thrown across them, and a pen and inkstand close by—“There is some admirable reading prepared for me doubtless!—the last message from the beloved dead is sacred, Mavis Clare; surely you, a writer of tender romances, can realize this!—and realizing it, you will do as I ask you,—leave me!”
She looked at me in deep compassion, and slowly turned to go.