“What is it? What is it?” she asked. “Am I deluding myself, or is it so? I feel it so …”
It was very vague, and yet so very clear …
It seemed to her as if there was an apparition, a haze of light behind all that had happened there. Behind Amélie, and Jules, and Quaerts, and that book he had just held in his hand … Did those apparitions of light mean anything, or …
But she shook her head.
“I am dreaming, I am giving way to fancy,” she laughed within herself. “It was all very simple; I only make it complicated because I take pleasure in doing so.”
But as soon as she thought this, there was something that denied the thought absolutely; an intuition which should have made her guess the essence of the truth, but which did not succeed in doing so. For sure there was something, something behind all that, hiding away, lurking as the shadow lurks behind the thing …
Her thoughts still wandered over the company she had had, then halted finally at Taco Quaerts. She saw him sitting there again, bending slightly forward towards her, his hands locked together hanging between his knees, as he looked up to her. A barrier of aversion had stood between them like an iron bar. She saw him sitting there again, though he was gone. That again was past; how quickly everything moved; how small was the speck of the present!
She rose, sat down at her writing-table, and wrote:
“Beneath me flows the sea of the past, above me drifts the ether of the future, and I stand midway upon the one speck of reality, so small that I must press my feet firmly together not to lose my hold. And from the speck of my present my sorrow looks down upon the sea, and my longing up to the sky.
“It is scarcely life to stand upon this ledge, so small that I hardly appreciate it, hardly feel it beneath my feet, and yet to me it is the one reality. I am not greatly occupied about it: my eyes only follow the rippling of those waves towards the distant haven, the gliding of those clouds towards the distant spheres: vague manifestations of endless mutability, translucent ephemeras, visible incorporeities. The present is the only thing that is, or rather that seems to be; but not the sea below nor the sky above; for the sea is but memory, and the air but an illusion. Yet memory and illusion are everything: they are the wide inheritance of the soul, which alone can escape from the speck of the moment to float away upon the sea towards the haven which forever retreats, to rock upon the clouds towards the spheres which retreat and retreat …”
Then she reflected. How was it she had written so, and why? How had she come to do it? She went back upon her thoughts: the present, the speck of the present, which was so small … Quaerts, Quaerts’ very attitude, rising up before her just now. Was it in any way owing to him that she had written down these sentences? The past a sorrow, the future an illusion … Why, why illusion?
“And Jules, who likes him,” she thought. “And Amélie, who spoke of him … but she knows nothing. What is there in him, what lurks behind him, what is he himself? Why did he come here? Why do I dislike him so? Do I dislike him? I cannot see into his eyes.”
She would have liked to do this once; she would have liked to make sure that she disliked him, or that she did not – whichever it might be. She was curious to see him once more, to know what she would think and feel about him then …
She had risen from her writing-table, and now lay at full length on the chaise-longue, her arms folded behind her head. She no longer knew what she dreamed, but she felt peacefully happy. Dolf and Christie were coming down the stairs. They came in, it was dinner-time.
“Jules was naughty just now, really, was he not, Mamma?” asked Christie again, with a doubtful face.
She drew the frail little fellow softly to her, took him tightly in her arms, and gently kissed his moist, pale mouth.
“No, really not, my darling!” she said. “He was not naughty, really …”
CHAPTER II
Cecile passed through the long hall, which was almost a gallery: servants stood by the doorway, a hum of voices came from behind it. The train of her dress rustled against the leaves of a palm fern, and this sound gave a sudden jar to the strung cords of her sensitiveness. She was a little nervous; her eyelids quivered slightly, and her mouth had a very earnest fold.
She walked in; there was much light, but very subdued, the light of candles. Two officers stepped aside for her as she hesitated. Her eyes glanced quickly round in search of Mrs Hoze. She observed her standing with two or three of her guests, with her grey hair, her kindly and yet haughty expression, rosy and smooth, with scarcely a wrinkle. Mrs Hoze advanced towards her.
“How charming of you not to have disappointed me!” she said, pressing Cecile’s hand, effuse in the urbane amiability of her hospitality.
She introduced Cecile here and there; Cecile heard names, which immediately afterwards escaped her.
“General, allow me … Mrs Van Even,” Mrs Hoze whispered, and left her, to speak to someone else. Cecile answered the general cursorily. She was very pale, and her eyelids quivered more and more. She ventured to throw a glance round the room.
She stood next to the general, forcing herself to listen, so as not to give strikingly silly replies; she was tall, slender and straight, her shoulders, blonde as marble in sunlight, blossoming out of a sombre vase of black: fine black trailing tulle, sprinkled over with small jet spangles: glittering black upon dull, transparent black. A girdle with tassels of jet, hanging low, was wound about her waist. So she stood, blonde; blonde and black, a little sombre amid the warmth and light of other toilettes; and, for unique relief, two diamonds in her ears, like dewdrops.
Her thin suede-covered fingers trembled as she manipulated her fan, a black tulle transparency, on which the same jet spangles glittered with black lustre. Her breath came short behind the strokes of the translucent fan as she talked with the general, a spare, bald, distinguished man, not in uniform, but wearing his decorations.
Mrs Hoze’s guests walked about, greeting one another here and there, a continuous humming of voices. Cecile saw Taco Quaerts come up to her; he bowed before her; she bowed coldly in return, not offering him her hand. He lingered a moment by her, exchanged a single word, then passed on, greeting other acquaintances.
Mrs Hoze had taken the arm of an old gentleman; a procession formed itself slowly. The servants threw back the doors; a table glittered beyond. The general offered Cecile his arm, and she looked behind her with a slow movement of her neck. She closed her eyelids a moment, to prevent the quivering which oppressed them. Her eyebrows contracted slightly with a disappointment, but smilingly she laid the tips of her fingers on the general’s arm, and with her closed fan smoothed away a crease from the tulle of her train.
II
When Cecile was seated she found Quaerts sitting on her right. Her disappointment vanished, the disappointment she had felt at not being taken in to dinner by him; but when she addressed him her look remained cold, as usual. She had what she wished; the expectation with which she had accepted this invitation was now fulfilled. Mrs Hoze had seen Cecile at the Van Attemas, and had gladly undertaken to restore the young widow to society. Cecile knew that Quaerts was one of Mrs Hoze’s visitors; she had heard from Amélie that he was among the invited, and she had accepted. That Mrs Hoze, remembering Cecile had met Quaerts before, had placed him next to her, was easy to understand.