Chapter 27

Matthiette sat brooding in her room, as the night wore on. She was pitifully frightened, numb. There was in the room, she dimly noted, a heavy silence that sobs had no power to shatter. Dimly, too, she seemed aware of a multitude of wide, incurious eyes which watched her from every corner, where panels snapped at times with sharp echoes. The night was well-nigh done when she arose.

“After all,” she said, wearily, “it is my manifest duty.” Matthiette crept to the mirror and studied it.

“Madame de Puysange,” said she, without any intonation; then threw her arms above her head, with a hard gesture of despair. “I love him!” she cried, in a frightened voice.

Matthiette went to a great chest and fumbled among its contents. She drew out a dagger in a leather case, and unsheathed it. The light shone evilly scintillant upon the blade. She laughed, and hid it in the bosom of her gown, and fastened a cloak about her with impatient fingers. Then Matthiette crept down the winding stair that led to the gardens, and unlocked the door at the foot of it.

A sudden rush of night swept toward her, big with the secrecy of dawn. The sky, washed clean of stars, sprawled above⁠—a leaden, monotonous blank. Many trees whispered thickly over the chaos of earth; to the left, in an increasing dove-colored luminousness, a field of growing maize bristled like the chin of an unshaven Titan.

Matthiette entered an expectant world. Once in the tree-chequered gardens, it was as though she crept through the aisles of an unlit cathedral already garnished for its sacred pageant. Matthiette heard the querulous birds call sleepily above; the margin of night was thick with their petulant complaints; behind her was the monstrous shadow of the Château d’Arnaye, and past that was a sullen red, the red of contused flesh, to herald dawn. Infinity waited a-tiptoe, tense for the coming miracle, and against this vast repression, her grief dwindled into irrelevancy: the leaves whispered comfort; each tree-bole hid chuckling fauns. Matthiette laughed. Content had flooded the universe all through and through now that yonder, unseen as yet, the scarlet-faced sun was toiling up the rim of the world, and matters, it somehow seemed, could not turn out so very ill, in the end.

Matthiette came to a hut, from whose open window a faded golden glow spread out into obscurity like a tawdry fan. From without she peered into the hut and saw Raoul. A lamp flickered upon the table. His shadow twitched and wavered about the plastered walls⁠—a portentous mass of head upon a hemisphere of shoulders⁠—as Raoul bent over a chest, sorting the contents, singing softly to himself, while Matthiette leaned upon the sill without, and the gardens of Arnaye took form and stirred in the heart of a chill, steady, sapphire-like radiance.

Sang Raoul:

“Lord, I have worshipped thee ever⁠—

Through all these years

I have served thee, forsaking never

Light Love that veers

As a child between laughter and tears.

Hast thou no more to afford⁠—

Naught save laughter and tears⁠—

Love, my lord?

“I have borne thy heaviest burden,

Nor served thee amiss:

Now thou hast given a guerdon;

Lo, it was this⁠—

A sigh, a shudder, a kiss.

Hast thou no more to accord!

I would have more than this,

Love, my lord.

“I am wearied of love that is pastime

And gifts that it brings;

I entreat of thee, lord, at this last time

“Inèffable things.

Nay, have proud long-dead kings

Stricken no subtler chord,

Whereof the memory clings,

Love, my lord?

“But for a little we live;

Show me thine innermost hoard!

Hast thou no more to give,

Love, my lord?”