The Third Macabre Megapack Read Online Free

lost in his thoughts, with his only sentiment a hopeless longing, he had stayed all day long in the tomb. At six o’clock, when dusk fell, he had come out from the sacred enclosure. Closing the sepulchre, he had torn the silver key from the lock, and, stretching up on the topmost step of the threshold, he had cast it softly into the interior of the tomb. Through the trefoil over the doorway, he thrust it on to the pavement inside. Why had he done this? Doubtless from some mysterious resolve to return no more.
    And now he was viewing again the widowed chamber.
    The window, under the great drapings of mauve cashmere with their broideries of gold, stood open; one last ray of evening lit up the great portrait of the departed one in its frame of old wood. Looking around him, the Count saw the robe lying where, the evening before, it had been flung upon the chair; on the mantel lay the jewels, the necklace of pearls, the half-closed fan, the heavy flasks of perfume which She no longer inhaled. On the ebony bed with its twisted pillars, still unmade, beside the pillow where the mask of the divine, the adored head, was still visible amidst the lace, his eye fell on the handkerchief stained with drops of blood, whereon for an instant the wings of her youthful spirit had quivered; on the open piano, upholding a melody forever unfinished; on the Indian flowers which she had gathered with her own hands in the conservatory, and which now were dying in vases of old Saxony ware; and there at the foot of the bed, on the tiny slippers of oriental velvet, on which glittered a laughing device of her name, stitched with pearls: Qui verra Vera l’aimera. And only yesterday morning the bare feet of the loved one were still playing there, kissed at every step by the swan’s-down! And there, there in the shadow, was the clock whose spring he had snapped, so that never again should it tell other hours.
    Thus had she vanished…! But whither…? And living now? To what end…? It was impossible, it was absurd!
    And the Count plunged into the darkness of unknown thoughts.
    He thought of all the past existence. Six months had gone by since this marriage. Was it not abroad, at an embassy ball, that he had set eyes upon her for the first time? Yes. That moment rose up again before his eyes, in all its distinctness. She appeared to him there, radiant. That night their glances had met, and inwardly they had recognized their affinity, their obligation to a lasting love.
    Deceitful talk, observant smiles, insinuations, all the difficulties thrust up by the world to delay the inevitable happiness of those who belong to each other—everything had vanished before the calm certitude which, at that very moment, they had exchanged. Weary of the insipid pomposities of her circle, Vera had come to meet him with the first hindrance that showed itself, and so straightened out in queenly fashion those dreary preliminaries which squander the precious days of life.
    But ah! at their first words the empty comments of outsiders seemed no more than a flight of night-birds passing back into their darkness. What smiles they exchanged! What ineffable embraces were theirs!
    And yet their nature was strange, strange in the extreme! They were two beings gifted with marvelous senses, but exclusively terrestrial. Sensations were prolonged within them with disturbing intensity, and in experiencing them they lost consciousness of themselves. On the other hand, certain ideas, those of the soul for instance, of the infinite, of God Himself, were as if veiled from their understanding. The faith of great numbers of living persons in supernatural things was for them only a matter for vague astonishment; a sealed book wherewith they had no concern, being qualified neither to justify nor to condemn. And so, recognizing fully that the world was something foreign to themselves, they had isolated themselves immediately upon their union in this ancient sombre mansion, where the noises of the