The Twilight of the Souls Part 29

"Dorine? Living with me? No, no, I won't have her in the house with me.

Why should I?"

"You're so lonely; and, though you've had the servants a long time, somebody ... to sit with you, you know...."

"Somebody sitting with me all day long? No, no...."

"We should like to see it, Mamma."

"Well, you won't see it."

And the old woman remained obstinate.

Another afternoon, Adeline said:

"Mamma dear, Constance asked me to tell you that she won't be able to see you for a day or two."

"And why not? What's the matter with Constance?"

"Nothing, Mamma dear, but she's been sent for to Driebergen...."

"To Driebergen?..."

"Yes, dear. Old Mrs. van der Welcke hasn't been quite so well lately...."

"Is she dead?"

"No, no, Mamma. ... She's only a little unwell...."

The old woman nodded her head comprehendingly. She had already seen Constance standing yonder by the dying woman's sickbed, but she did not say so ... because Adeline would have refused to believe it....

Another afternoon, Cateau said:

"Mamma ... it's ve-ry sad, but _old_ Mrs. Friese-steijn...."

"Oh, I haven't seen her ... for ever so long; and...."

"Yes. And it's ve-ry sad, Mam-ma, because she _was_ a friend of yours.

And, Mam-ma, peo-ple are saying that she's _ill_ and that she won't last very _long_."

The old woman nodded knowingly:

"Yes, I knew about it," she said.

"Oh?" said Cateau, round-eyed. "Has somebody _told_ you?..."

"No, but...."

The old lady had seen her, had seen her old friend dying; and she nearly committed herself, nearly betrayed herself to Cateau.

"What?" asked Cateau.

"I suspected it," said the old lady. "When you are old, old people die round you...."

"Mam-ma, we should ve-ry much like...."

"What?"

"Adolph-ine would like it ... and so would Ka-rel."

"What?"

"If you would take a compan-ion to live with you."

"No, no, I don't want a companion."

"Or Do-rine. She's ve-ry nice _too_...."

"No, no. Not Dorine either."

And the old woman remained obstinate.... The old people were dying around her; she was constantly hearing of contemporaries who had gone before her. Her old family-doctor was dead, the man who had brought all her children into the world, in Java; now an old friend was gone; the next to go would be Henri's old mother, who had been unkind to Constance and none the less had sent for Constance to come to her.... Who else was gone? She couldn't remember them all: her brain was sometimes very hazy; and then she forgot names and people, just as the old sisters always forgot and muddled things. She did not want to muddle things; but she could not help forgetting.

"So I sha'n't see Constance for quite a long time?" she said to Cateau.

"Con-stance?"

"Yes, you said she was going to Driebergen."

"No, Mam-ma, I never men-tioned Con-stance."

The old woman nodded her understanding nod. Nevertheless she no longer remembered who it was that had told her about Constance; but she preferred not to ask....

And she thought it over, for hours....

CHAPTER XVII

An icy shudder swept over Constance when she arrived at Driebergen and saw the carriage waiting outside the station, with the coachman and the footman:

"How is mevrouw?" she asked, as she stepped in.

But she hardly heard the answer, although she grasped it. She shuddered, icy cold. She s.h.i.+vered in her fur cloak. It had rained steadily for days upon the dreary, wintry trees, out of a sky that hung low but tremendously wide and heavy, as oppressive as a pitiless darkness.

Drearily the wintry roads shot forward as the carriage rattled along them. Drearily, in their bare gardens, the houses rose, very sadly, because they were deserted summer dwellings, in the ice-cold winter rain.

The day was almost black. It was three o'clock, but it was night; and the rain, grey over the road and grey over the houses and gardens, was black over the misty landscapes which could be dimly descried through the bare gardens. The dreary trees looked dead and lived only in the despairing gestures of their branches when a wind, howling up from the distance, blew through them and moved them.

The carriage turned into the bare front-garden, round the beds with the straw-shrouded rose-bushes. Constance had driven in like this only a few times before, with the careful coachman always describing the same accurate curve round the flower-beds: the first time, when she came back from Brussels, and two or three times since, after the old woman had been to the Hague, on one of Henri's birthdays. And suddenly a strange presentiment flashed through the black day right into her, a presentiment that she was destined very often, so many times that she could not count them, to drive with that curve round those beds....