The Third Macabre Megapack Read Online Free PDF Page A

sitting by the fire in Vera’s room. He had just finished reading her the last verses of a Florentine tale, Callimachus, and he closed the book.
    “Douschka,” he said, pouring himself out some tea,” do you remember the Vallée-des-Roses, and the banks of the Lahn, and the castle of Quatre-Tours? Do you? Didn’t that story bring them back to you?”
    He rose, and in the bluish glass he saw himself paler than his wont. He took up a bracelet of pearls in a goblet and gazed at them attentively. Vera had taken the pearls from her arm (had she not?) just a little time ago, before disrobing, and the pearls were still warm, and their water softened, as by the warmth of her flesh. And here was the opal of that Siberian necklace; so well did it love Vera’s fair bosom that, when sometimes she forgot it for awhile, it would grow pale in its golden network, as if sick and languishing. (For that, in days gone by, the Countess used to love her devoted trinket!) And now this evening, the opal was gleaming as if it had just been left off, as if it were still infused with the rare magnetism of the dead beauty. As he set down the necklace and the precious stone, the count touched accidentally the cambric handkerchief: the drops of blood upon it were damp and red, like carnations on snow! And there, on the piano—who had turned the last page of that melody out of the past? Why, the sacred lamp had relit itself, there in the reliquary! Yes, its gilded flame threw a mystic light upon the face of the Madonna and on her closed eyes! And those eastern flowers, new-gathered, opening and blooming in those old Saxony vases—whose hand had just placed them there? The whole room seemed to be happy, seemed to be gifted with life, in some fashion more significant, more intense than usual. But nothing could surprise the Count! So normal did all appear to him, that he did not so much as notice the hour striking on that clock which through the whole long year had stood still.
    That evening one would have said that, from out of the depths of the darkness, the Countess Vera was striving (and striving how adorably!) to come back to this room, whose every corner was impregnate with her own self! She had left behind so much of herself there! Everything that had gone to make up her existence was drawing her back thither. Her charm hung suspended in its air. The prolonged force sprung from her husband’s impassioned will must have loosened the vague bonds of the Invisible about her…
    She was necessitated there. All that she loved was there.
    She must have longed, surely, to come and smile to herself in that mysterious mirror wherein so often she had admired the lilies of her countenance. Yes, down there amid the violets, there beneath the cold and darkened lamps in the vault, in her loneliness, she had started, the lovely one, the dead one; she had shuddered, the divine one, shuddered as she gazed on the silver key flung upon the slabs. She longed to come to him, she in her turn! And her will vanished in the idea of the incense and the isolation. Death is a final and binding term only for those who cherish hopes from the heavens; but for her was not the final term the embrace of Death and the Heavens and Life? And there, in the gloom, the solitary kiss of her husband was drawing forth her own lips. And the vanished sound of the melodies, the intoxicating words of days gone by, the stuffs which had covered her body and still held its perfume, those magical jewels which still in their obscure sympathy longed for her, and above all the overwhelming and absolute impression of her presence, a feeling shared in the end even by the things themselves—everything had been calling, had been drawing her thither for so long now, and by such insensible degrees, that, cured at last of somnolent Death, there was lacking nothing, save only Her alone.
    Ah, Ideas are living beings! The Count had hollowed out in the air the shape of his love, and necessity demanded that