CHAPTER VII
Olive walked home to Ripetta. She felt tired and shaken, and unhappily conscious of some effort that must be made presently.
“He will be killed—and for me.” “For me.” “For me.” She heard that echo of her thought through all the clamour of the streets, the shrill cries, the clatter of hoofs, the rattling of wheels over the cobble stones. She heard it as she climbed the stairs to her room. When she had taken off her hat and coat she poured some eau-de-cologne with water into a cup and drank it—not this time to Italy or the joy of life. She lay down on her bed and stayed there for a while, not resting, but thinking or trying to think.
Was she really a sort of number thirteen, a grain of spilt salt, ill-omened, disastrous? Camille would not think so; but it seemed to her that she had never been able to make anyone happy, and that there must be some taint in her therefore, some flaw in her nature.
Now, here, at last, was a thing well worth doing. She must risk her soul, lose it, perhaps, or rather, exchange it for a man’s life. She had hoarded it hitherto, had been miserly, selfish, seeking to save the poor thing as though it were a pearl of price. Now she saw herself as the veriest rag of flesh parading virtue, useless, comfortless, helpless, clinging to her code, and justifying all the trouble she gave to others by a reference to the impalpable, elusive and possible non-existent immortal and inner self she had held so dear. She was ashamed. Ah, now at last she would give ungrudgingly. Her feet should not falter, nor her eyes be dimmed by any shadow of fear or of regret, though she went by perilous ways to an almost certain end.
Soon after noon she got up and prepared to face the world again, and towards three o’clock she returned to the Villa Medici. She had to ring the porter’s bell as the garden gate was shut, and the old man came grumblingly as usual.
“Monsieur Michelin will see no one. Did he not tell you so this morning?”
“But I have come for Monsieur Gontrand,” she said.
She hoped now above all things to find the black Gascon alone in his atelier near the Belvedere. The first move depended upon him, and there was no time to spare. She determined to await his return in the wood if he were out, but there was no need. He opened his door at once in answer to her knocking.
“I have come—may I speak to you for a moment?” she began rather confusedly. He looked tired and worried, and was so evidently alarmed at the sight of her, and afraid of what she was going to say next, that she could hardly help smiling. “I want to ask you two questions. I hope you will answer them.”