Джозеф Конрад - Suspense

“Is that your constant practice?” asked the astonished doctor, with curiosity rather than indignation. “Suppose I told on you,” he added, with a glance at the door. “Suppose somebody else gave you away … ”

“You would not be thanked,” was the unexpected answer.

“I wouldn’t be believed—is that it? Well, I confess that I can hardly believe my own eyes.”

“Oh, you would be believed,” was the ready but dispassionate admission. Bernard’s trust in his interlocutor’s acuteness was not deceived.

“Do you mean that you have been found out already?” said the doctor in a changed tone. “Whew! You don’t say! Well, stranger things have happened. Whose old retainer are you?”

“I have always belonged to Madame la Comtesse,” said the old retainer without looking at the doctor, who, after some meditation, accepted the statement at its face–value.

“I am staying at Cantelucci’s inn,” he said in an ordinary conversational tone. “And I would be glad to see you there any time you like to call. Especially if you had anything to tell me of Mr. Latham.” Bernard not responding in any way to that invitation, the doctor added: “You know what I mean?”

“Oh yes, I know what you mean.” That answer came coldly from the lips of the respectable servant, who said nothing more while conscientiously escorting the doctor to the ante–room at the foot of the grand staircase. A little bowed old woman in black clothes clung to the balustrade half–way down the marble steps, in the act of descending, while another, taller and upright, hovered anxiously on the landing above. Bernard’s scandalised “Go away! Go back!” sounded irresistibly authoritative. The doctor had no doubt that it would send the two crones back to their lair, but he did not stop to see.

Bernard went up the staircase slowly to the first landing, where he watched the retreat of the two weird apparitions down a long and dim corridor. They were very much intimidated by this man in black and with a priestly aspect. One of them, however, made a stand, and screamed in an angry cracked voice: “Where’s the child? The child! We are looking for her.”

“Why don’t you take her back to your village and keep her there?” he cried out sternly. “I have seen her. She won’t get lost.”

A distant door slammed. They had vanished as if blown away by his voice; and Bernard with a muttered after–thought: “More’s the pity,” continued up one flight of stairs after another till he reached the wilderness of the garrets that once upon a time had been inhabited by a multitude of servants and retainers. The room he entered was low and sombre, with rough walls and a vast bare floor. His wife Aglae sat on the edge of the bed, with her hands in her lap, and downcast eyes, which she did not raise at his entrance. He looked at her with a serious and friendly expression before he sat down by her side. And even then she did not move. He took her tragic immobility in silence as a matter of course. His face, which had never been very mobile, had acquired with years a sort of blank dignity. It had been the work of years, of those married years which had crushed the last vestiges of pertness out of the more emotional Aglae. When she whispered to him: “Bernard, this thing kill me a little every day,” he felt moved to put his arm round his wife’s waist, and made a mental remark, which always occurred to him poignantly on such occasions, that she had grown very thin. In the trials of a life which had not kept its promise of contented bliss, he had been most impressed by the loss of that plumpness which years ago was so much appreciated by him. It seemed to give to that plaint which he had heard before more than once an awful sort of reality, a dreadful precision. …A little…. Every day.

He took his arm away brusquely and got up.

“I thought I would find you here,” he remarked in an indifferent marital tone. “That man has gone now,” he added.

With a deep sigh the maid of Madame de Montevesso struggled out of the depths of despondency, only to fall a prey to anxiety.

“Oh, Bernard, what did that man want with Miss Adèle?”

Bernard knew enough to have formed a conjecture that that English fellow must have either left some papers or a message for the marquis with Madame de Montevesso.

In what seemed to him a very short time, Cosmo found himself under the colonnade separating the town piled upon the hills from the flat ground of the waterside. A profound quietness reigned on the darkly polished surface of the harbour and the long incurved range of the quays. This quietness that surrounded him on all sides, through which, beyond the spars of clustered coasters, he could look at the night–horizon of the open sea, relieved that fantastic feeling of confinement within his own body with its intolerable tremors and shrinkings and imperious suggestions. Mere weaknesses all. His desire, however, to climb to the top of the tower, as if only there complete relief could be found for his captive spirit, was as strong as ever.

The only light on shore he could see issued in a dim streak from the door of the guard–house, which he had passed on his return from the tower on his first evening in Genoa. As he did not wish to pass near the Austrian sentry at the head of the landing–steps, Cosmo, instead of following the quay, kept under the portico at the back of the guard–house. When he came to its end he had a view of the squat bulk of the tower across a considerable space of flat waste ground extending to the low rocks of the seashore. He made for it with the directness of a man possessed by a fixed idea. When he reached the iron–studded low door within the deep dark archway at the foot of the tower he found it immovable. Locked! How stupid! As if those heavy ship guns up there could be stolen! Disappointed he leaned his shoulders against the side of the deep arch, lingering as people will before the finality of a closed door, or of a situation without issue.

His superstitious mood had left him. An old picture was an old picture; and probably the face of that noble saint copied from an old triptych and of Madame de Montevesso were not at all alike. At most a suggestion which may have been the doing of the copyist, and so without meaning. A copyist is not an inspired person; not a seer of visions. He felt critical, almost ironic, towards the Cosmo of the morning, the Cosmo of the day, the Cosmo rushing away like a scared child from a fanciful resemblance, that probably did not even exist. What was he doing there? He might have asked the way to the public gardens. Lurking within that dark archway muffled up in his blue cloak, he was a suspect figure, like an ambushed assassin waiting for his victim, or a conspirator hiding from the minions of a tyrant. “I am perfectly ridiculous,” he thought. “I had better go back as soon as I can.” This was his sudden conclusion, but he did not move. It struck him that he was not anxious to face his empty room. Was he ready to get into another panic? he asked himself scornfully…. At that moment he heard distinctly the sound of whispering as if through the wall, or from above or from the ground. He held his breath. The whispering went on, loquacious. When it stopped, another voice, as low but deeper and more distinct, muttered the words: “The hour is past.”

Ha! Whispers in the air, sounds wandering without bodies, as mysterious as though they had come across a hundred miles, for he had heard no footsteps, no rustle, no sound of any sort. Nothing but the two voices. They were so weirdly disembodied and unbelievable that he had to clothe them in attributes: the excitable—the morose. They were quite near. But he did not know on which side of the arch within which he was hiding. For he was frankly hiding now—no doubt about it. He had remembered that he had left his pistols by his bedside. And he was certain he would hear the voices again. The wait seemed long before the fluent, loquacious voice came back through space and was punctually followed by the deep voice, which this time emitted only an unintelligible grunt.