That was all he could keep saying. "She's not coming back." All the thousands of words were forgotten, the thousands it had taken him fifteen years to learn, and only four remained of his whole mother tongue: "She's not coming back."
She ventured into the room, bringing the lamp with her, and the light eddied and fluxed, before it had settled again. She set it down upon the table. She wrung her hands, and knotted parts of her dress in them, as if not knowing what to do with them.
At last she took a small part of her own skirt and wiped sadly at the edge of the table with it, from old habit, as if thinking she were dusting it. That was the only help she could give him, the only ease she could bring him: to dust an edge of the table in his room. But pity takes many forms, and it has no need of words.
And it was as though she had brought warmth into the room; warmth at least sufficient to thaw him, to melt the glacial casque that held him rigid. Just by being there, another human being, near him.
Then slowly he started to come back to life. The dead started to come back to life. It wasn't pleasurable to watch. Rebirth after death. The death of the heart.
Death-throes in reverse. Coming after the terminal blow, not before. When the heart dies, it should stay dead. It should be given the coup de grace, struck still once and for all, not allowed to agonize.
His knees broke their locked rigidity, and he dropped down at half-height beside the bed. His arms reached out across it, clawing in torment.
And one of the dresses stirred, as if under its own impulse,; rippled in serpentine haste across the bed top, and was sucked up into the maelstrom of his grief; his head falling prone upon it, his face burrowing into it in ghastly parody of kisses once given, that could never be given again, for there was no one there to give them to. Only the empty cocoon he pleaded with now.
"Julia. Julia. Be merciful."
The old woman's hand started toward his palsied shoulder in solace, then held itself suspended barely clear of touch.
"Hush, Mr. Lou," she said with guttural intensity. "Hush, poor man."
She raised her outstretched hand then, held it poised at greater height, up over his oblivious, gnawing head.
"May the Lawd have mercy on you. May He take pity on you. You weeping, but you ain't got nothing to weep for. You mourning, but you mourning for something you never had."
He rolled his head sideward, and looked up at her with sudden frightened intentness.
As if kindled into anger now by sight of his wasted grief, as if vindictive with long-delayed revelation, she went to the bureau that bad been Julia's. She threw open a drawer of it with such righteous violence that the whole cabinet shook and quivered.
She plunged her hand in, unerringly striking toward a hiding place she knew of from some past discovery. Then held it toward him in speechless portent. Within it was rimmed a dusty cake, a pastille, of cheek rouge.
She threw it down, anathema.
Again her hand burrowed into secretive recesses of the drawer. She held up, this time, a cluster of slender, spindly cigars.
She showed him, flung them from her.
Her hands went up overhead, quivered there aloft, vibrant with doom and malediction, calling the blind skies to witness.
She intoned in a blood-curdling voice, like some Old Testament prophetess calling down apocalyptic judgment.
"They's been a bad woman living in your house! They's been a stranger sleeping in your bed!"
19
Hatless, coatless, hair awry, just as the discovery had found him in his room moments before, he was running like someone demented through the quiet, night-lidded streets now, unable to find a coach and too crazed to stand still and wait for one in any one given place. Onward, ever onward, toward an address that had fortuitously recurred to him just now, when he needed it most. The house of the banker Simms, halfway across New 'Orleans. He would have run the whole distance on foot, to get there, if necessary.
But luckily, as he came to a four-way crossing, a gaslit post brooding over it in sulphurio yellow-green, he spied a carriage just ahead, returning idle from some recent hire, screaming after it and without waiting for it to come back and get him, ran down the roadway after it full tilt; floundered into it and choked out Simms' address.
At the banker's house he rang the bell like fury.
A colored servant led him in, showing an offended mien at his impetuosity.
"He's at supper, sir," she said disapprovingly. "If you'll have the patience to seat yourself just a few minutes and wait till he gets through--"
"No matter," he panted. "This can't wait! Ask him to come out here a moment--"
The banker came out into the hall, brow beetling with annoyance, still chewing food and with a napkin still trussed about his collar. When he saw who it was his face cleared.
"Mr. Durand!" he said heartily. "What brings you here at such an hour? Will you come in and join us at table?" Then noting his distracted appearance more closely as he came nearer, "You're all upset-- What's the matter, man? Bring him some brandy, Becky. A chair--"
Durand swept a curt hand offside in refusal of the offered restoratives. "My money--" he gasped out.
"What is it, Mr. Durand? What of your money?"
"Is it there--? Has it been touched--? When you closed at three, what was my balance on your ledgers-?"
"I don't understand you, Mr. Durand. No one can touch your money. It's safeguarded. No one but yourself and your wife-"
He caught an inkling of something from the agonized expression that had flitted across Durand's face just then.
"You mean--?" he breathed, appalled.
"I have to know-- Now, tonight-- For the love of God, Mr. Simms, do something for me, help me-- Don't keep me waiting like this-"
The banker wrenched off his napkin, cast it from him, in sign his meal was ended for that evening at least. "My chief teller," he said in quick-formed decision. "My chief teller would know. That would be quicker than going tO the bank; we'd have to open up and go over the day's transactions-"
"Where can I find him?" Durand was already on his way toward the door and out again.
"No, no, I'll go with you. Wait for me just a second--" Simms hurriedly snatched at his hat and a silken throat muffler. "What is it, what has happened, Mr. Durand?"
"I'm afraid to say, until I find out," Durand said desolately. "I'm afraid even to think--"
Simms had to stop first and secure his teller's home address; then they hurriedly left, climbed back into the same carriage that had brought Durand, and were driven to a frugal little squeezed-in house on Dumaine Street.
Simms got out, deterred Durand with a kindly intended gesture of his hand, evidently hoping to spare him as much as possible.
"Suppose you wait here. I'll go in and talk to him."
He went inside to be gone perhaps ten minutes at the most. To Durand it seemed he had been left out there the whole night.
At last the door opened and Simms had reappeared. Durand leaped, as though a spring had been released, to meet him, trying to read his face for the tidings as he went toward him. It looked none too sanguine.
"What is it? For God's sake, tell me!"
"Steady, Mr. Durand, steady." Simms put a supporting arm about him just below the turn of the shoulders. "You had thirty thousand, fifty-one dollars, forty cents in your check-cashing account and twenty thousand and ten in your savings account this morning when we opened for business--"
"I know that! I know that already! That isn't what I want to know--"
The teller had followed Simms out. The manager gestured to him surreptitiously, handing over to him the unwelcome responsibility of answering the question.
"Your wife appeared at five minutes of three to make a lastminute withdrawal," the teller said.
"Your balance at closing-time was fifty-one dollars, forty cents in the one account, ten dollars in the other. To have closed them both out entirely, your own signature would have been necessary."