The Third Macabre Megapack Read Online Free Page B

continue to serve them without taking heed of Death? What a strange fancy! Would it endure for one night…? Tomorrow perhaps, alas…! Who could tell…? Maybe… But after all, a sacred project! What right had he to reflect like this…?
    He left the chamber, carried out his orders to the letter, and that same evening the unwonted mode of life began.
    A terrible mirage—this is what had to be brought into being!
    The pain of the first days faded quickly away. Raymond, at first with stupefaction, afterwards from a sort of deference and fondness, had adapted himself so skillfully to a natural demeanour, that before three weeks had passed he felt at moments that he was himself the dupe of his good-will. The suppressed thought was fading! Sometimes, experiencing a kind of dizziness, he felt compelled to assure himself that the Countess was no more, positively was dead. He became adept in the melancholy pretence, and every moment he grew more forgetful of reality. Before long he needed to reflect more than once to convince himself and pull himself together. He realized clearly that in the end he would surrender utterly to the terrifying magnetism wherewith the Count, little by little, was infusing the atmosphere around them. A fear came over him, a quiet, uncertain fear.
    D’Athol, in fact, was living in an absolute denial of the fact of his loved one’s death. So closely was the form of the young woman fused with his own that he could not but find her always with him. Now, on a garden seat on sunny days, he was reading aloud the poems that she loved. Now, in the evening, by the fireside, with two cups of tea on the little round table, he was chattering with the Illusion, who, for his eyes, sat smiling there in the other arm-chair.
    Days, nights, weeks sped by. Neither one nor the other knew what they were bringing to pass. And strange happenings were now taking place, so that it became hard to distinguish how far the real and the imaginary coincided. A presence floated in the air. A form was struggling to become visible, to weave some pattern of its being upon the space no longer within its measure.
    D’Athol lived a twofold life, like a visionary. The glimpse of a pale and gentle face, caught in a flash, within the twinkling of an eye; a faint chord struck on the piano, suddenly; a kiss that closed his lips at the instant of his speaking; the affinities of feminine thoughts which awoke within him in response to the words he uttered; a doubling of his own self which made him feel as if he were in some fluid mist; the perfume, the intoxicating, sweet perfume of his beloved by his side; and at night, betwixt waking and sleeping, words which he heard low-spoken—everything pointed to one thing: a negation of Death exalted finally into an unknown force!
    Once d’Athol felt and saw her so clearly beside him that he took her in his arms. But with the movement she vanished.
    “Poor child!” he murmured, smiling, and fell asleep again, like a lover repulsed by his smiling, drowsy mistress.
    On her birthday, he placed in pleasantry some everlastings amid the bouquet of flowers which he laid on Vera’s pillow.
    “Because she imagines that she’s dead!” said he.
    In the end, by reason of the deep and all-compelling will of d’Athol, who thus from the strength of his love wrought the very life and presence of his wife into the lonely mansion, this mode of life acquired a gloomy and persuasive magic. Raymond himself no longer felt any alarm, having become gradually used to these impressions.
    The glimpse of a black velvet robe at the bend of a pathway; the call of a laughing voice in the drawing-room; a bell rung when he awoke in the morning, just at it used to be—all this had become familiar to him: the dead woman, one might have thought, was playing with the invisible, as a child might. So well beloved did she feel herself! It was altogether natural.
    A year had gone by.
    On the evening of the Anniversary the Count was