She resolutely set to work, but she found that whenever she looked up, there was something tantalizing about the view, cut off by the deep embrasures at just a point where the scenery seemed to verge with a lovelier blue. Irresistibly she was led to the broad step. Irresistibly she mounted it. The window ledge, unlike the other, was wide enough as well as broad enough to sit on comfortably. Turned up against each wall were thickly padded mats. She tipped them down and had a cushioned seat.
She closed her eyes and, with the shallow breathing that she was always a little conscious of in the tower, drank in the ozone that brought reward exceeding that of nepenthe. She did not sleep. Yet she seemed to return to reality as from a dream and with the feeling that she had been roused therefrom by a sound. She sat erect, listening. There were steps on the stairs again slow and halting. Her first impulse was to get quickly to the table so as to seem at work if anybody came in; but all sound had ceased. She could not tell how long she sat there, looking straight at the entrance to the tower, with the feeling that she was looking right through someone standing there, while that somebody looked her over. And then she heard the steps again. Going down.
It’s the solitude, she thought. I ought to pack up and leave, return the money I have not earned and live at ease again with conscience.
But, instead of beginning straightway to transmute thought into decision, she turned her eyes toward the outside world—and almost swooned. It was like looking upon life on a different planet. Hills, vales, earth, sky and water were there. But they seemed to float in a thin transparent vapor, or to be mirrored in a lake that could be nothing but mirage. All her being tingled with ecstasy. Paradise could be no lovelier. Though there was no way by which she could reach the ethereal country, she felt as if she were the one human being to whom a glimpse of it had been vouchsafed.
But, disturbingly, a sentence from Thomas Woods’s book intruded as distinctly as if somebody had spoken it aloud. But he who sees paradise with earth-bound eyes sheds hope of future paradise, because it has been given him to know that there is no reality beyond what the mind mirrors.
So, Thomas Woods had sat in this window enclosure. What sort of man had he been? What had he looked like? She wished she knew more about him. She recalled the portrait opposite the gallery and how it drew the eye down when there, and upward when in the living room. It had impressed her, because it was the only painting in the room. Vaguely she had thought of it as something of such value that the eccentric—for everything proclaimed him that—had considered it worthy of the enhancement of solitariness. Could he have assigned a portrait of himself to such distinction?
She went downstairs to the gallery and looked across to the full-length portrait. The face was not remarkable; but the total effect of the painting was one of indestructible vitality.
She questioned the caretaker when he brought her lunch.
“That’s a portrait of Mr. Woods, I suppose,” she said.
He turned about, his face transfixed with astonishment that then gave way to sullenness. “Are you trying a joke on me?” he asked.
“A joke? Why should I?”
He gave her a long, curious look. “Do you mean to say you don’t know?”
“Know what?”
He did not answer that. “No, it’s not the master,” he said and went out.
She worked in the library the rest of the day. One of my few days of honest work, she thought; for she extended her labors so far into the evening that the late beginning was made up for. She lingered on, even after she had reached a point of tiredness that made meticulous work impossible. She sought a book to read, but was conscious of eyestrain and dared not ignore it. Yet she still did not want to go to bed. Her first reaction to the bedroom had been recoil from the impression of a cell—as if one were supposed to atone in a room of austerity for the sensuous pleasure afforded by other rooms. The feeling had retreated in the succession of nights; but now it advanced again, and she thought of the thick stone walls as of a tomb. The smallness of the room, the pale light which the deeply recessed window admitted during day, the starkly bright electric light that seemed to strive to push back walls that pressed in upon the narrow bed and strictly necessary furniture, gave her a feeling that when she closed the door she was shutting herself forever away from life.
Nevertheless she went along the gallery to her room. She switched on the light and undressed; but in spite of mental fatigue, her mind was restless. She put on a dressing gown and turned back to the gallery. A pale radiance flowed over it, drifting upward from the big room below, which was so clearly, though softly, illuminated that every chair, table and everything at floor level stood out as distinctly as in daytime. And still the light poured in through the French windows that opened upon the terrace. With the light on, she had not noticed that the moon was rising; and now, with moonlight flooding the room below, she felt as if floating on a silvery sea from which she had just risen. Higher and brighter the light rose. Looking across the gallery, she saw the portrait, transfigured until the ordinarily good-looking face seemed of unearthly beauty.
Almost in the same breath came gladness that she was wearing the rose-colored gown—more becoming than any of her dresses—and a thud of pain that he could not see her and would not notice her if he could. She could not bear the ache of the ifs that pushed between them—if he could arise from the dead, if she could discard ten years and match youth with youth, if he could come down from the frame, if she could be transformed into an Isolde, in place of a person that no one looked at twice, provided the disfigured side of her face was turned away.
She was tired. The moonlight had grown too bright and too cold. She went back to her bedroom, turned off the light, threw the rose-colored gown across a chair and got into bed. Here the moonlight was reduced. It gave a sense of warmth where it stretched across the rose-colored gown. A lethargy settled over her, and she felt herself sinking into a great emptiness.
She awoke shaking, drenched with a strange, sweet terror. There was light still in the room, but of a faintly opalescent tinge that merged with shadows, so that everything was indistinct. Some sickly thought about a waning moon entered her mind, but a line of Turgenev washed it away, “In the garden the nightingale was singing his last song before the dawn.” Listen.... Yes, a bird was singing, but not a nightingale. Dawn had emerged, wan and weak, from the womb of night.
Would she ever dare to sleep again? For in her sleep she had been ravished, in all the various meanings of that word. All her ifs had been bowled over like tenpins by a bowl from the hand of a crack player. The dead had risen. The young man had descended from the frame. Like a strip-teaser, she had tossed off the years one by one until she lay clothed only in the soft flesh of a few years past twenty. He had looked at her and had found her desirable.
She could feel a flush spread over the whole surface of her body. For a moment or two she lay relaxed with memory; but another fit of shivering seized her. She roused to a sense that the room was icy.
I’m sick. Let’s face it. I’m a sick woman. It’s the solitude. I’ve never been alone like this before. But truth interrupted to say that there had always been a sense of somebody close at hand. Closer in every way than the caretaker and his wife—too close, maybe. And though once she would have smiled at the implication of that, she now shivered again and sighed.
Resolutely she got up. She would make some toast and coffee and get to work again. She would work without stint until she could conscientiously say that she had earned money already received and then she would resign.