Louis Couperus: Ecstasy

“It must be. It cannot be otherwise. Go, go. You must go. Do go …”

She gave her hand again, for the last time. A moment later he was gone.

She looked strangely about her, with bewildered eyes, with hands locked together. “Go, go,” she repeated, like one raving. Then she noticed the roses. With a light scream she sank down before the little table and buried her face in his gift, until the thorns wounded her face. The pain, two drops of blood which fell from her forehead, brought her back to her senses. Standing before the little Venetian mirror hanging over her writing-table, she wiped away the red spots with her handkerchief.

“Happiness!” she stammered to herself. “His happiness! The highest in his life! So he knew happiness, though short it was. But now … now he suffers, now he will suffer again as before. The remembrance of happiness cannot do everything. Ah! if it could only do that, then everything would be well, everything … I wish for nothing more, I have had my life, my own life, my own happiness … I have now my children; I belong to them now. To him I was not permitted to be anything more …”

She turned away from the mirror and sat down on the settee, as if tired with a great space traversed; and she closed her eyes, as if stunned with too great a light. She folded her hands together like one in prayer; her face beamed in its fatigue from smile to smile.

“Happiness!” she repeated, falteringly. “The highest in his life! Oh my God, happiness! I thank Thee. Oh God, I thank Thee …”