第11章

He went on board his schooner.She lay white, and as if suspended, in the crepuscular atmosphere of sunset mingling with the ashy gleam of the vast anchorage.He tried to keep his thoughts as sober, as reasonable, as measured as his words had been, lest they should get away from him and cause some sort of moral disaster.

What he was afraid of in the coming night was sleeplessness and the endless strain of that wearisome task.It had to be faced however.

He lay on his back, sighing profoundly in the dark, and suddenly beheld his very own self, carrying a small bizarre lamp, reflected in a long mirror inside a room in an empty and unfurnished palace.

In this startling image of himself he recognised somebody he had to follow - the frightened guide of his dream.He traversed endless galleries, no end of lofty halls, innumerable doors.He lost himself utterly - he found his way again.Room succeeded room.At last the lamp went out, and he stumbled against some object which, when he stooped for it, he found to be very cold and heavy to lift.

The sickly white light of dawn showed him the head of a statue.

Its marble hair was done in the bold lines of a helmet, on its lips the chisel had left a faint smile, and it resembled Miss Moorsom.

While he was staring at it fixedly, the head began to grow light in his fingers, to diminish and crumble to pieces, and at last turned into a handful of dust, which was blown away by a puff of wind so chilly that he woke up with a desperate shiver and leaped headlong out of his bed-place.The day had really come.He sat down by the cabin table, and taking his head between his hands, did not stir for a very long time.

Very quiet, he set himself to review this dream.The lamp, of course, he connected with the search for a man.But on closer examination he perceived that the reflection of himself in the mirror was not really the true Renouard, but somebody else whose face he could not remember.In the deserted palace he recognised a sinister adaptation by his brain of the long corridors with many doors, in the great building in which his friend's newspaper was lodged on the first floor.The marble head with Miss Moorsom's face! Well! What other face could he have dreamed of? And her complexion was fairer than Parian marble, than the heads of angels.

The wind at the end was the morning breeze entering through the open porthole and touching his face before the schooner could swing to the chilly gust.

Yes! And all this rational explanation of the fantastic made it only more mysterious and weird.There was something daemonic in that dream.It was one of those experiences which throw a man out of conformity with the established order of his kind and make him a creature of obscure suggestions.

Henceforth, without ever trying to resist, he went every afternoon to the house where she lived.He went there as passively as if in a dream.He could never make out how he had attained the footing of intimacy in the Dunster mansion above the bay - whether on the ground of personal merit or as the pioneer of the vegetable silk industry.It must have been the last, because he remembered distinctly, as distinctly as in a dream, hearing old Dunster once telling him that his next public task would be a careful survey of the Northern Districts to discover tracts suitable for the cultivation of the silk plant.The old man wagged his beard at him sagely.It was indeed as absurd as a dream.

Willie of course would be there in the evening.But he was more of a figure out of a nightmare, hovering about the circle of chairs in his dress-clothes like a gigantic, repulsive, and sentimental bat.

"Do away with the beastly cocoons all over the world," he buzzed in his blurred, water-logged voice.He affected a great horror of insects of all kinds.One evening he appeared with a red flower in his button-hole.Nothing could have been more disgustingly fantastic.And he would also say to Renouard: "You may yet change the history of our country.For economic conditions do shape the history of nations.Eh? What?" And he would turn to Miss Moorsom for approval, lowering protectingly his spatulous nose and looking up with feeling from under his absurd eyebrows, which grew thin, in the manner of canebrakes, out of his spongy skin.For this large, bilious creature was an economist and a sentimentalist, facile to tears, and a member of the Cobden Club.

In order to see as little of him as possible Renouard began coming earlier so as to get away before his arrival, without curtailing too much the hours of secret contemplation for which he lived.He had given up trying to deceive himself.His resignation was without bounds.He accepted the immense misfortune of being in love with a woman who was in search of another man only to throw herself into his arms.With such desperate precision he defined in his thoughts the situation, the consciousness of which traversed like a sharp arrow the sudden silences of general conversation.