BY PIERRE LOTI
Translated by R. W. Howes, 3d.
Copyright, 1907, by P. F. Collier & Son.
'Way at the farther end of a court they lived, in a modest little suite, the mother, the daughter, and a maternal parent already quite aged—their aunt and great-aunt—whom they had come to shelter.
The daughter was still very young, in the fleeting freshness of her eighteen years, when they were compelled, after a reverse of fortune, to withdraw there into the most secluded corner of their ancestral mansion. The rest of the familiar home, all the bright side that looked out on to the street, it had become necessary to let to some profane strangers, who changed there the aspect of things ancient and obliterated the cherished associations.
A judicial sale had stripped them of the most luxurious furniture of other days, and they had arranged their new little salon of recluses with objects a little incongruous: relics of ancestors, old things brought to light from the garret, the reserves of the house. But they fell in love with it at once, this salon so humble, which must now for years to come, on winter evenings, reunite all three around the same fire and around the same lamp. One found it comfortable there; it had an air cozy and intimate. One felt a little cloistered there, it is true, but without melancholy, for the windows, draped with simple muslin curtains, looked out on to a sunny court, whose walls, 'way at this farther end, were adorned with honeysuckle and roses.
And already were they forgetting the comfort, the luxury of other times, happy in their modest salon, when one day a communication was brought to them which left them in mournful consternation: the neighbor was about to raise his apartment two stories; a wall was going to rise there, in front of their windows, to steal away the air, to hide the sun.
And no means, alas! to turn aside that misfortune, more intimately cruel to their spirits than all the preceding disasters of fortune. To buy that house from their neighbor, a thing that had been easy at the time of their past affluence, was no longer to be dreamed of! Nothing to do, in their poverty, but to bow their heads.
And so the stories began to mount, line upon line; with anxiety they watched them grow; a silence of grief reigned among them, in the little salon, the depth of their melancholy measured day by day by the height of that obscuring object. And to think that that thing there, higher and still higher, would soon replace the background of blue sky or golden clouds, against which in days gone by the wall of their court trailed off in its network of branches!
In one month the masons had achieved their work: it was a glazed surface in freestone, which was next painted a grayish white, resembling almost a twilight sky of November, perpetually opaque, unchangeable and dead; and in the summers following the rose trees, the bushes of the court, took on their green again more palely in its shadow.