There had been nothing much in life then, and one could always find a short way out of it via the water or an overdose of something.
But now the world was changed, and he craved for Life and the fulness of Life, for he had tasted happiness and stood for a moment in the outer courts of the House of Love. He had no friends who could have helped him, and no qualifications for earning his living at any other trade or profession. He had begun life with a luxurious home, a refined and useless education, and the mind of a dreamer, an idealist. None of these things were valuable assets in his present career.
Like Arithelli he spoke several languages more or less fluently, and like her again possessed both understanding and a love of horses, but what avail were these things when he had neither money, references nor influence, and as a further disadvantage he was known to be an associate of the revolutionaries, and his tendency to consumption would keep him out of many kinds of employment.
He turned over the few coins in his hand. Just enough to keep him for a week and then—the deluge!
He waited, prowling up and down the street, impatiently until Emile appeared in the distance.
A few minutes later, the two men were at the door of Arithelli's lodgings. The landlady met them on the stairs, hag-like in the disarray of the early morning, and evidently terrified out of such humanity as she possessed by the fear of infection. She had gone up with the early morning coffee and found Arithelli raving aloud and tearing at her throat. Her first thought had been to turn the girl out of doors, or, as she was obviously incapable of moving, to send for a priest and a nursing sister, and have her taken to the public hospital. A wholesome fear of Emile prevented her from giving utterance to these charitable impulses.
She invoked every saint in the calendar, whose name she could remember, and crossed herself with automaton-like energy.
She could not, she protested, be expected to nurse such a dangerous case of fever as this undoubtedly was. There was her son, the adored of her old age. Santa Maria! If he also were stricken!
Emile pushed her on one side. "I'll talk to you presently," he said in her own dialect. "If you are going into hysterics with fright you'll catch anything that is catching. If you behave sensibly you won't."
The window was fully open and the green shutters thrown back, and the fierce sunlight streamed into Arithelli's room, which showed more than its normal disorder. The tray with the café complet was on the floor where the landlady had left it on her hasty stampede downstairs, half-a-dozen turquoise rings lay strewn over a little table, where they had been thrown when they were dragged off, boys' clothes trailed over the back of one chair, and a blue skirt over another. The only orderly thing visible was the immaculate row of fine kid boots, long, narrow, pearl-grey, tan and champagne-coloured.