Читать книгу Awake and Rehearse - Louis Bromfield - Страница 10

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Amélie, excited and tearful, was standing in the middle of the salon filled with porcelaine de Saxe. She was dressed to go out and had her bags by her side.

“Surely,” I said, “you don’t mean to leave the moment Miss Wannop dies.”

There was no arguing with her. Amélie meant to go, without delay. “It was like her to die on the day I was to be married,” she said bitterly. “I’ll be late, as it is.”

I mentioned loyalty. “Loyalty!” screamed Amélie. “Why should I be loyal? She tormented me for seven years.”

I asked how, but she could only scream, “In a million ways. She was a monster! It was like living with one of the dead.”

She could not say what it was poor Miss Wannop had done, but she burst forth into a life history of the old woman. “You want to know what she was like? Well, she never had a friend ... never since I knew her ... but harpies like Madame la Duchesse and Monsieur le Marquis. She used to buy things, furniture and pictures and porcelain, from people like you, respectable people of position, just to get acquainted with them. But it never lasted. They saw her once or twice and that was the end. You were just like the others. The people she might have known were never good enough for her. Why, she had to close her house because nobody would come to it and she couldn’t get any servants to stay.” Amélie began to weep. “Oh, sir, you don’t know what I’ve put up with.”

I didn’t know and it seemed impossible to discover.

Amélie seized her bags and rushed from the room to marry Henri and carry on life. I was left alone. There was a faint noise in the adjoining bedroom and I discovered that with Miss Wannop was an undertaker with a blue-black beard. He was making her ready for her final rest.

I began poking about the room, looking for some clue to a will or the address of her lawyers, for anything, I must say, which would take from my shoulders the responsibility for this old lady whom I disliked so coldly. Presently I found the address of her lawyers. And I found also a pile of heavy books, expensively bound in red morocco and gold. I opened one of them. It was not an ordinary book, but one filled with pages of blank paper on which press cuttings had been pasted. There they were, page after page of them, many of them yellow with age, some of them clippings from the columns of Mondanités in French journals, some of them, the recent ones, from the columns of the Daily Mail printed in the days since the Harmsworths discovered that Americans, too, meant circulation. “Among those who entertained at the unusually brilliant Sunday evening at the Ritz was Miss Savina Wannop, etc., etc.” Going back through them one discovered all the names which had once given my mother many a laugh—the names of the world which she said did not exist. It was like a directory to some shabby niche in Hell filled with the ghosts of bankrupt grand dukes, bogus princes, broken-down opera singers, fake counts, swindling duchesses. This, then, had been the world of Miss Wannop. These books were the story of her life. She had lived for these books and now she was dead, alone, having captured only the ghosts of ruin and decay.

The voice of the undertaker interrupted my thoughts. He stood in the doorway rubbing his hands. “If you wish to look at Mademoiselle, she is ready.”

I went because it seemed only decent that someone should care enough to look at her just once before the coffin was closed, someone who was not a servant, an undertaker or a hotel manager.

She was dressed in the black and purple dress in which I had first seen her, but the jewels were missing. Feeling my responsibility, I asked the undertaker what had become of them.

“I have them,” he said. “A woman came and tried to take them, but I know the law and I refused to let her have them. She said she was Miss Wannop’s sister.”

“Sister!” I said. “But she had no sister.” A suspicion rose swiftly. “What did the woman look like?”

He described her—a large woman, he said, with diamond earrings and many diamonds on her fingers. Her hair, he thought—well, perhaps nature had never produced so vivid a red. And she was, he thought, perhaps an untidy eater. She was very fat and much painted.

I asked him to leave me alone for a moment, and then I knelt to pray by the old woman whose “friend” had tried to rob her as she lay dead. When I had finished I stood for a long time looking down at the old face. In death it was more than ever like marble, more delicate and aristocratic and more than ever vacant of all emotion, of all passion, of all character. It was empty and in its peculiar emptiness there was a kind of horror and repulsion. I could understand a little what Amélie had not been able to put into words.

And then suddenly I became aware that I was being watched by someone or something and that the curtain at the window was moving ever so slightly. Looking down, I saw a soiled white paw emerge, and a moment later I was looking into a pair of empty china-blue eyes faintly rimmed with pink. For a moment I experienced a wild sensation of horror and madness, for I was looking into the living eyes of Miss Savina Wannop. Then I knew suddenly and was relieved. It was the Cat that lived at the Ritz. He had found her out at the very end, when she could no longer scream or faint or escape. But the eyes were the eyes of Miss Savina Wannop. Suddenly I understood. I knew that my prayer for her soul had been useless, because Miss Wannop had never had any soul. She was exactly like the cat of which she had such a horror.

Driving the animal before me, I closed the door on the last of those who had lived among us so long that they were really French. The cat scurried down the stair and from the well arose the sound of American voices and the tinkle of ice in American cocktail glasses. Something more than Miss Savina Wannop lay dead in the room next to the porcelaine de Saxe.