Chapter XII

It was a howling winter night of storm and rain. Addie was doing his lessons after dinner; and Van der Welcke had gone to sit by him with a book “because there was such a draught in his room.” Constance was all alone. And she loved the loneliness of it just then. She had taken up a book, a piece of needlework; but first one and then the other had slipped from her hands. And, in the soft light of the lace-shaded lamps, she lay back in her chair and listened to the melancholy storm outside, which seemed to be rushing past the house like some monstrous animal. She was in a mood of vague excitement, of mingled nervousness and depression; and, in her loneliness, she let this strange feeling take possession of her and gave herself up to the quite new luxury of thinking about herself, wondering dimly:

“Does that sort of thing really exist?”

She found no answer to her question; she heard only the storm raging outside, the hiss of its lash round the groaning trees; and those mournful voices of the night did not include the mystic voice which alone could have supplied the answer.

“Does that sort of thing really exist?” she asked herself again.

And, in that vague emotion, she was conscious of a sense of fear, of a rising anxiety, an increasing terror. When, after a lull, the storm burst into sudden fury again, she started violently, as she had started when Brauws’ hand rang the bell....

With each shriller howl of the raging storm she started; and each fresh alarm left her so nervous and so strangely despondent that she could not understand herself....

“Does that sort of thing really exist then?” she asked herself for the third time.

And the question seemed each time to echo through her soul like a refrain. She could never have thought, suspected or imagined that such things really existed. She did not remember ever reading about them or ever talking to anybody about them. It had never been her nature to attach much importance to the strange coincidences of life, because they had never harmonized in her life with those of other lives; at least, she did not know about them, did not remember them.... For a moment, it flashed through her mind that she had walked as the blind walk, all her life, in a pitch-dark night ... and that to-day suddenly a light had shone out before her and a ruddy glow had filtered through her closed eyelids.

“No,” she thought, “in those things I have always been very much of a woman; and I have never thought about them. If by chance I ever heard about them, they did not attract me. Then why do they strike me so forcibly now? And why do I feel so strange?...”

The wind suddenly cried aloud, like the martyred soul of some monster; and she started, but forced herself to concentrate her thoughts:

These thoughts, these doubts, these wonderings flashed through her; and, because she had never heard herself thinking and doubting and wondering so swiftly, she grew still more frightened in her loneliness, while the storm howled more furiously outside. And the silent lamps flickered so violently in her drawing-room—in a sort of passionate draught—that she suddenly rushed staggering to the door. She went up the stairs; and it was as though the storm would break the little villa to pieces with one blow of its angry wing....

She went to Addie’s room; her hand was on the door-handle; she turned it. She saw her boy working at his table and Van der Welcke smoking in the easy-chair. She gave a start, because he was there, and she looked deathly pale, with terrified, quivering eyes.

“Mamma!”

“My boy, I’m frightened; listen to the storm!...”

“Yes, did you ever see such weather?” asked Van der Welcke, through the clouds of his cigarette.

“Are you frightened, Mamma?”

“Yes, my boy, my Addie ... I’m frightened ... I’m frightened....”

“And shall your boy keep you safe, safe from the wind?”

“Yes, my darling, keep me safe!” she said, with a wan little laugh. “For I’m really, really frightened ... I’ve been sitting alone downstairs ... and it blew so, it blew so: the lamps blew and the shutters banged and I’m so frightened now!...”

The boy drew her on his knees and held her very tight:

“Silly Mummy! Are you really frightened?”

She made herself very small in his arms, between his knees, nestled up against him and repeated, as in a dream:

“Yes, I’m so frightened, I’m so frightened!...”

And, without a further glance at her husband sitting there clouded in the blue smoke of his cigarette, she as it were crept into the heart of her child, whispering, all pale and wan, with a wan smile and her eyes full of anxious wonder:

“I’m frightened, Addie! Save me! Protect me!...”