On my return from Richmond and after another duty had been performed I drove to his chambers. It was the first time, but I had often wanted to see them. On the staircase, which, as the house contained twenty sets of rooms, was unrestrictedly public, I met his servant, who went back with me and ushered me in. At the sound of my entrance he appeared in the doorway of a further room, and the instant we were alone I produced my news: “She’s dead!”
He was tremendously struck, and I observed that he had no need to ask whom, in this abruptness, I meant.
“She died last evening--just after leaving me.”
He stared with the strangest expression, his eyes searching mine as if they were looking for a trap. “Last evening--after leaving you?” He repeated my words in stupefaction. Then he brought out so that it was in stupefaction I heard: “Impossible! I saw her.”
This brought back to me after an instant, as if to help me to take it in, the memory of the strange warning of his youth. “In the hour of death--I understand: as you so beautifully saw your mother.”
“Ah! _not_ as I saw my mother--not that way, not that way!” He was deeply moved by my news--far more moved, I perceived, than he would have been the day before: it gave me a vivid sense that, as I had then said to myself, there was indeed a relation between them and that he had actually been face to face with her. Such an idea, by its reassertion of his extraordinary privilege, would have suddenly presented him as painfully abnormal had he not so vehemently insisted on the difference. “I saw her living--I saw her to speak to her--I saw her as I see you now!”
It is remarkable that for a moment, though only for a moment, I found relief in the more personal, as it were, but also the more natural of the two phenomena. The next, as I embraced this image of her having come to him on leaving me and of just what it accounted for in the disposal of her time, I demanded with a shade of harshness of which I was aware--“What on earth did she come for?” He had now had a minute to think--to recover himself and judge of effects, so that if it was still with excited eyes he spoke he showed a conscious redness and made an inconsequent attempt to smile away the gravity of his words.