never mentioned Genevieve and Boris, but gradually their names crept in.
I recollect particularly a passage in one of Jack's letters replying to
one of mine--
"What you tell me of seeing Boris bending over you while you lay ill, and
feeling his touch on your face, and hearing his voice, of course troubles
me. This that you describe must have happened a fortnight after he died.
I say to myself that you were dreaming, that it was part of your
delirium, but the explanation does not satisfy me, nor would it you."
Toward the end of the second year a letter came from Jack to me in India
so unlike anything that I had ever known of him that I decided to return
at once to Paris. He wrote: "I am well, and sell all my pictures as
artists do who have no need of money. I have not a care of my own, but I
am more restless than if I had. I am unable to shake off a strange
anxiety about you. It is not apprehension, it is rather a breathless
expectancy--of what, God knows! I can only say it is wearing me out.
Nights I dream always of you and Boris. I can never recall anything
afterward, but I wake in the morning with my heart beating, and all day
the excitement increases until I fall asleep at night to recall the same
experience. I am quite exhausted by it, and have determined to break up
this morbid condition. I must see you. Shall I go to Bombay, or will you
come to Paris?"
I telegraphed him to expect me by the next steamer.
When we met I thought he had changed very little; I, he insisted, looked
in splendid health. It was good to hear his voice again, and as we sat
and chatted about what life still held for us, we felt that it was
pleasant to be alive in the bright spring weather.
We stayed in Paris together a week, and then I went for a week to Ept
with him, but first of all we went to the cemetery at Sevres, where Boris
lay.
"Shall we place the 'Fates' in the little grove above him?" Jack asked,
and I answered--
"I think only the 'Madonna' should watch over Boris' grave." But Jack was
none the better for my home-coming. The dreams of which he could not
retain even the least definite outline continued, and he said that at
times the sense of breathless expectancy was suffocating.
"You see I do you harm and not good," I said. "Try a change without me."
So he started alone for a ramble among the Channel Islands, and I went
back to Paris. I had not yet entered Boris' house, now mine, since my
return, but I knew it must be done. It had been kept in order by Jack;
there were servants there, so I gave up my own apartment and went there
to live. Instead of the agitation I had feared, I found myself able to
paint there tranquilly. I visited all the rooms--all but one. I could not
bring myself to enter the marble room where Genevieve lay, and yet I felt
the longing growing daily to look upon her face, to kneel beside her.
One April afternoon, I lay dreaming in the smoking-room, just as I had
lain two years before, and mechanically I looked among the tawny Eastern
rugs for the wolf-skin. At last I distinguished the pointed ears and flat
cruel head, and I thought of my dream where I saw Genevieve lying beside
it. The helmets still hung against the threadbare tapestry, among them
the old Spanish morion which I remembered Genevieve had once put on when
we were amusing ourselves with the ancient bits of mail. I turned my eyes
to the spinet; every yellow key seemed eloquent of her caressing hand,
and I rose, drawn by the strength of my life's passion to the sealed door
of the marble room. The heavy doors swung inward under my trembling
hands. Sunlight poured through the window, tipping with gold the wings of
Cupid, and lingered like a nimbus over the brows of the Madonna. Her
tender face bent in compassion over a marble form so exquisitely pure
that I knelt and signed myself. Genevieve lay in the shadow under the
Madonna, and yet, through her white arms, I saw the pale azure vein, and
beneath her softly clasped hands the folds of her dress were tinged with
rose, as if from some faint warm light within her breast.
