“But, Mummy, can’t we do something, oughtn’t we to do something?”
“No—come—it’s nothing—I mean she’s used to it.” I dragged Jinny away.
The next morning, the people in the hotel were informed that the Princess was dead. She had died in the night of an overdose of morphine.
It was Marie, Jinny’s maid, who burst in on her with the news, while she was having her café au lait in bed. I heard Jinny give a shriek and ran in to her—she had fainted.
Isn’t it strange the way it all happened? One would think that God had a hand in it, but if there is a God, why should He want my child to believe that I had committed a murder? It is that that I do not understand.
Jane’s narrative was ended with those words. She had talked that last night of my visit to her in St. Mary’s Plains, until nearly morning. Her forehead grew damp as she talked and her lips dry and her words carried along the sustained note of her voice like little frightened sounds.
And during all those hours that she talked, I remember hearing no other sound. I heard no voice in the street, nor the sound of trams going by nor of dogs barking. In our concentration we were as cut off from contact with the living world as if the whole city of St. Mary’s Plains had been turned to stone.
That was just a year ago today. I suppose she is still there in that meagre faded room, I can see her there, sitting in the high wooden chair that belonged once upon a time to Patience Forbes. The wind is hurrying across the immense prairies of her awful wide empty country. It rattles the windows of that frail wooden house. She is alone there.
Last night we talked of Jane in Ludovic’s rooms. Clémentine was there and Felix, we had been to Cocteau’s ballet. Jane would have enjoyed it, they said; she would have understood the joke, and perceived the beauty.
Clémentine moved restlessly about. “What is she doing now, I wonder? Surely she is doing something—”