Part 3 (2/2)

She ”romanticises” everything. I should not be at all surprised if some day she decked her kitchen range with wreaths of roses and hung up works of art between the stewpans.

I am really glad I did not bring Samuel the footman with me. He could not have waited on me better than Jeanne, and at any rate I am free from his eyes, which, in spite of all their respectful looks, always reminded me of a fly-paper full of dead and dying flies.

Jeanne's look has a something gliding and subtle about it that keeps me company like a witty conversation. It is really on her account that I dress myself well. But I cannot converse with her. I should not like to try, and then to be disillusioned.

Men have often a.s.sured me that I was the only woman they could talk with as though I were one of themselves. Personally I never feel at one with menkind. I only understand and admire my own s.e.x.

In reality I think there is more difference between a man and a woman than between an inert stone and a growing plant. I say this ... I who ...

What business is it of mine? We were not really friends. The fact of her having confided in me makes no demands on my feelings. If this thing had happened five years ago, I should have taken it as a rather welcome sensation--nothing more. Or had I read in the paper ”On the--inst., of heart disease, or typhoid fever,” my peace of mind would not have been disturbed for an hour.

I have purposely refrained from reading the papers lately. Chancing to open one to-day, after a month's complete ignorance of all that had been happening in the world, I saw the following headline: Suicide of a Lady in a Lunatic Asylum.

And now I feel as shaken as though I had taken part in a crime; as though I had had some share in this woman's death.

I am so far to blame that I abandoned her at a moment when it might still have been possible to save her.... But this is a morbid notion! If a person wants ”to shuffle off this mortal coil” it is n.o.body's duty to prevent her.

To me, Agatha Ussing's life or death are secondary matters; it is only the circ.u.mstances that trouble me.

Was she mad, or no? Undoubtedly not more insane than the rest of us, but her self-control snapped like a bowstring which is overstrained. She saw--so she said--a grinning death's head behind every smiling face.

Merely a bee in her bonnet! But she was foolish enough to talk about it; and when people laughed at her words with a good-natured contempt, her glance became searching and fixed as though she was trying to convince herself. Such an awful look of terror haunted her eyes, that at her gaze a cold s.h.i.+ver, born of one's own fears and forebodings, ran through one.

She compelled us to realise the things we scarcely dare foresee....

I shall never forget a letter in which she wrote these words in a queer, faltering handwriting:

”If men suspected what took place in a woman's inner life after forty, they would avoid us like the plague, or knock us on the head like mad dogs.”

Such a philosophy of life ended in the poor woman being shut up in a madhouse. She ought to have kept it to herself instead of posting it up on the walls of her house. It was quite sufficient as a proof of her insanity.

I cannot think what induced me to visit her in the asylum. Not pure pity. I was prompted rather by that kind of painful curiosity which makes a patient ask to see a limb which has just been amputated. I wanted to look with my own eyes into that shadowy future which Agatha had reached before me.

What did I discover? She had never cared for her husband; on the contrary she had betrayed him with an effrontery that would hardly have been tolerated outside the smart world; yet now she suffered the torments of h.e.l.l from jealousy of her husband. Not of her lovers; their day was over; but of him, because he was the one man she saw. Also because she bore his name and was therefore bound to him.

On every other subject she was perfectly sane. When we were left alone together she said: ”The worst of it is that I know my 'madness' will only be temporary. It is a malady incident to my age. One day it will pa.s.s away. One day I shall have got through the inevitable phase. But how does that help me now?”

No, it was no more help to her than the dreadful paint with which she plastered her haggard features.

It was not the least use to her....

Her death is the best thing that could have happened, for her own sake and for those belonging to her. But I cannot take my thoughts off the hours which preceded her end; the time that pa.s.sed between the moment when she decided to commit suicide until she actually carried out her resolve.

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