Their customary devout observances concluded, lights were extinguished, and the ladies kissed, and entered their beds.
Their beds were not homely to them. Dorothea thought that Virginia was long in settling herself. Virginia did not like the sound of Dorothea’s double sigh. Both listened anxiously for the doings of Tasso. He rested.
He was uneasy; he was rounding his basket once more; unaware of the exaggeration of his iniquitous conduct, poor innocent, he shook that dreadful coat of his! He had displaced the prophylactic cover of the scarf.
He drove them in a despair to speculate on the contention between the perfume and the stench in junction, with such a doubt of the victory of which of the two, as drags us to fear our worst. It steals into our nostrils, possesses them. As the History of Mankind has informed us, we were led up to our civilization by the nose. But Philosophy warns us on that eminence; to beware of trusting exclusively to our conductor, lest the mind of us at least be plunged back into barbarism. The ladies hated both the cause and the consequence, they had a revulsion from the object, of the above contention. But call it not a contention: there is nobility in that. This was a compromise, a degrading union, with very sickening results. Whether they came of an excess of the sprinkling, could not well be guessed. The drenching at least was righteously intended.
Beneath their shut eyelids, they felt more and more the oppression of a darkness not laden with slumber. They saw it insolidity; themselves as restless billows, driven dashing to the despondent sigh. Sleep was denied them.
Tasso slept. He had sinned unknowingly, and that is not a spiritual sin; the chastisement confers the pardon.
But why was this ineffable blessing denied to them? Was it that they might have a survey of all the day’s deeds and examine them under the cruel black beams of Insomnia?
Virginia said: ‘You are wakeful.’
‘Thoughtful,’ was the answer.
A century of the midnight rolled on.
Dorothea said: ‘He behaved very beautifully.’
‘I looked at the General’s portrait while he besought us,’ Virginia replied.
‘One sees him in Victor, at Victor’s age. Try to sleep.’
‘I do. I pray that you may.’
Silence courted slumber. Their interchange of speech from the posture of bodies on their backs, had been low and deliberate, in the tone of the vaults. Dead silence recalled the strangeness of it. The night was breathless; their open window a peril bestowing no boon. They were mutually haunted by sound of the gloomy query at the nostrils of each when drawing the vital breath. But for that, they thought they might have slept.
Bed spake to bed:
‘The words of Mr. Stuart Rem last Sunday!’ ‘He said: “Be just.” Could one but see direction!’
‘In obscurity, feeling is a guide.’
‘The heart.’
‘It may sometimes be followed.’
‘When it concerns the family.’
‘He would have the living, who are seeking peace, be just.’
‘Not to assume the seat of justice.’
Again they lay as tombstone effigies, that have committed the passage of affairs to another procession of the Ages.
There was a gentle sniff, in hopeless confirmation of the experience of its predecessors. A sister to it ensued.
‘Could Victor have spoken so, without assurance in his conscience, that his entreaty was righteously addressed to us? that we…’
‘And no others!’
‘I think of his language. He loves the child.’
‘In heart as in mind, he is eminently gifted; acknowledgeing error.’
‘He was very young.’
The huge funereal minutes conducted their sonorous hearse, the hour.
It struck in the bed-room: Three.
No more than three of the clock, it was the voice telling of half the precious restorative night-hours wasted.
Now, as we close our eyelids when we would go to sleep, so must we, in expectation of the peace of mind granting us the sweet oblivion, preliminarily do something which invokes, that we may obtain it.
‘Dear,’ Dorothea said.
‘I know indeed,’ said Virginia.
‘We may have been!’
‘Not designingly.’
‘Indeed not. But harsh it may be named, if the one innocent is to be the sufferer.’
‘The child can in no sense be adjudged guilty.’
‘It is Victor’s child.’
‘He adores the child.’
Wheels were in mute motion within them; and presently the remark was tossed-up:
‘In his coming to us, it is possible to see paternal solicitude’
Thence came fruit of reflection:
‘To be instrumental as guides to a tender young life!’
Reflection heated with visions:
‘Once our dream!’
They had the happier feeling of composure, though Tasso possessed the room. Not Tasso, but a sublimated offensiveness, issue of the antagonistically combined, dispersed to be the more penetrating; insomuch that it seemed to them they could not ever again make use of eau d’Arquebusade without the vitiating reminder. So true were the words of Mr. Stuart Rem: ‘Half measures to purification are the most delusive of our artifices.’ Fatigue and its reflections helped to be peacefuller. Their souls were mounting to a serenity above the nauseating degradation, to which the poor little dog had dragged them.
‘Victor gave his promise.’
‘At least, concession would not imply contact with the guilty.’
Both sighed as they took up the burden of the vaporous Tasso to drop him; with the greater satisfaction in the expelling of their breath.
‘It might be said, dear, that concession to his entreaty does not in any way countenance the sin.’
‘I can see, dear, how it might be read as a reproof.’
Their exchange of sentences followed meditative pauses; Dorothea leading.
‘To one so sensitive as Victor!’
‘A month or two of our society for the child!’
‘It is not the length of time.’
‘The limitation assures against maternal claims.’
‘She would not dare.’
‘He used the words: “her serious respect” for us. I should not wish to listen to him often.’
‘We listen to a higher.’
‘It may really be, that the child is like him.’
‘Not resembling Mr. Stuart Rem’s Clementina!’
‘A week of that child gave us our totally sleepless night.’ ‘One thinks more hopefully of a child of Victor’s.’
‘He would preponderate.’
‘He would.’
They sighed; but it was now with the relief of a lightened oppression.
‘If, dear, in truth the father’s look is in the child, he has the greater reason to desire for her a taste of our atmosphere.’
‘Do not pursue it. Sleep.’
‘One prayer!’
‘Your mention of our atmosphere, dear, destroys my power to frame one. Do you, for two. But I would cleanse my heart.’
‘There is none purer.’
‘Hush.’
Virginia spoke a more fervent word of praise of her sister, and had not the hushing response to it. She heard the soft regular breathing. Her own was in downy fellowship with it a moment later.
At the hour of nine, in genial daylight, sitting over the crumbs of his hotel breakfast, Victor received a little note that bore the handwriting of Dorothea Duvidney.
‘Dear Victor, we are prepared to receive the child for a month.
In haste, before your train. Our love. D. and V.’
His face flashed out of cloud.
A more precious document had never been handed to him. It chased back to midnight the doubt hovering over his belief in himself;—phrased to say, that he was no longer the Victor Radnor known to the world. And it extinguished a corpse-like recollection of a baleful dream in the night. Here shone radiant witness of his being the very man; save for the spot of his recent confusion in distinguishing his identity or in feeling that he stood whole and solid.—Because of two mature maiden ladies? Yes, because of two maiden ladies, my good fellow. And friend Colney, you know the ladies, and what the getting round them for one’s purposes really means.