Several months later he kept his promise. Ceneri, he told me, had been
arrested in St. Petersburg for participation in some anarchist plot, and
was on his way to Siberia. Of his own personal history he discoursed at
length. His name, it appeared, was really March, and he was Pauline's
brother. In common with his sister, he had been robbed by Ceneri of his
fortune.
He asked to see his sister, but when they met, Pauline showed no
recollection of him. He called often, and she watched him, I noticed,
with an eager, troubled look. One night, after dinner, as he described
how, in a battle, he had killed a white-coated Austrian, he seized a
knife from the table, and illustrated the downward blow with which he
had saved his own life. I heard a deep sigh behind me, and turning, I
saw Pauline in a dead faint. I carried her to her room. When she came to
herself again, or rather when she rose in her bed and turned her face to
mine, I saw in her eyes, what, by the mercy of God, I shall never again
see there.
With eyes fixed and immovable, and dilated to their utmost extent, she
rose and passed out of the room. I followed her. Swiftly she passed out
of the house into the street, and without the slightest hesitation,
turning at right angles, moved swiftly up a long, straight road. After
turning once more she stopped at a three-storeyed house. Going up to the
door, she laid her hand upon it. I tried to lead her gently away, but
she resisted. What was I to do? The house was an empty one. I paused.
Once before my latch-key had opened a strange door. Would it open this
one? I tried it. It fitted exactly.
Without waiting for me, Pauline ran in ahead. I shut the door. All was
darkness. I could hear Pauline moving about on the first floor. I
followed her, and, striking a match, found myself in a room with
folding-doors. It was furnished, but the dust lay deep everywhere.
Pauline stood in the middle of the room, holding her head in her hands,
striving, it seemed, to remember something. I entered the back room with
the candle I had found. There was a piano there. Something induced me to
sit down at it and to play the first few notes of the song I had heard
that terrible night.
A nervous trembling seemed to seize Pauline. She crossed the floor
towards me, and I made room for her at the piano. With a master hand she
played brilliantly the prelude of the song of which I had struck a few
vagrant notes. I waited breathlessly, expecting her to sing. Suddenly
she started wildly to her feet and, uttering a wild cry of horror, sank
into my arms. I laid her on a sofa close by. As I held her there, a
strange thing happened.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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