If the dead knew—
“If they knew,” she said, “how we spoke about them, how we thought—”
If the dead knew—
If his mother had heard him; if she knew what he had been thinking; if she knew that he had wished her dead and that his wish had killed her—
If the dead knew—
“Happily for us and them, they don’t know,” he said.
And he began playing again. He was aware that Effie had risen and was now seated at the writing-table. As he played he had his back to the writing-table and the door.
The book on the piano ledge before him was Mendelssohn’s Lieder ohne Worte open as Effie had left it at Number Nine. He remembered that was the one his mother had loved so much. His fingers fell of their own accord into the prelude, into the melody, pressing out its thick, sweet, deliberate sadness. It wounded him, each note a separate stab, yet he went on, half-voluptuously enjoying the self-inflicted pain, trying to work it up and up into a supreme poignancy of sorrow, of regret.
As he stopped on the closing chord he heard somewhere behind him a thick, sobbing sigh.
“Effie—”