“Well, well; but then at what time did this—the present phase begin? For some time at least, he must have been faithful to you.”
“Oh, yes, for a few months. Quite at the beginning. Though I myself was never happy.... First of all, during the six weeks before our wedding, I was constantly a prey to such mystic terrors that I came near losing my senses. You know that I do not admit any of those hackneyed maxims of morality—and yet I continually felt that some evil thing was afoot, and a day of reckoning close at hand. And besides, how intolerable then was the thought that now I had to marry him, however averse I might feel to the act; that now I had more at stake upon my side than he on his!”
“And afterwards, by the seaside?”
“Oh, then it was entrancing! I almost felt happy. But it lasted so short a time! Shortly after our arrival I fell sick, and grew unwieldy and weakly and plain. And then, if you can believe me, surrounded with all those marvels of nature and of art, I was always longing for Klosow, my own place!”
After a silence of a few minutes, she went on:
“I saw a drawing by Brenner. It was always in my thoughts; a woman who had died after an operation, stretched on a table, stark and stiff. There was a man bending over her, mourning; his hair was like Witold’s. And another picture, showing the tragedy of motherhood: a young mother has just breathed her last; on her bosom sits a naked child, a loathsome idiot, looking out at life with wide open, bewildered, lack-lustre eyes. I can’t help fancying that Orcio resembles that child.”
With a sudden abrupt movement, she rang for the man-servant.
“Ask the nurse why the child is not in bed yet. I hear it making a noise. Tell her she must put it to bed. Or else take it farther away from this room.”
When the servant had gone out, I said to her:
“Why, what made you speak so angrily to him.”