White Narcissus Read Online Free PDF

to show the figure of a woman, that woman who was sinister in his mind by very reason of her appalling and helpless misery. Her tall form bent over a vase of white narcissus. Other vases of the glowing white flower lent a distilled radiance to the dusk of the room. It seemed, though the window was down, that a sickly, heavy odour came spreading impalpable through the air. Richard seemed to be stupefied by it, and kept his watch in fascination; but the woman inside appeared unconscious of everything but the flowering bulbs. Her fingers caressed a blossom, and she passed to the other side of the room to look at a bulb just breaking into bud, with a slow, trembling shake of the head. She gazed a long time at this one, and long at one wilting with the accomplishment of its short life. She turned at last and passed into another room, opening and closing the door in silence peculiarly a summation of her white face.
    He felt and heard a sigh at his cheek. “She can’t haveheard us….” The window was darkened by the Virginia Creeper.
    “You speak as though nothing could be more terrible than her hearing us,” he replied aloud. “As a matter of fact, it would probably be one of the best things which could happen if they overheard us – both of them – discussing them in the harshest and least sympathetic manner.” His own surprised misgiving at the urgency of these words was only equalled by hers. She was struck silent in a way which made patent the effort with which she began speaking again.
    “She has always loved the narcissi.” Ada’s cadence on that word “loved” was enough to show that her fear was well grounded, and that pity could drain her soul. Instead of seeing an unreal, almost delusive quality in the situation, as one fresh from the sane world, she appeared to conceive of no other reality beyond this abnormal state of affairs. She accepted wholeheartedly the fact of her mother and her mother’s state, where one unobsessed would have implied, for all its gravity, a lightness of reservation.
    “I remember,” he assented heavily, with an accumulation of unspoken criticism in his tone. “But how does she endure them? A bulb or two is nice to have, if you like them, but such a number, with their enervating odour, must be intolerable to anyone else.”
    “But she likes them, worships them. She seems to think of nothing else from day to night. She looks at them, cares for them, she has some of them beside her when she sleeps, and first thing in the morning she comes downstairs to look at the others. I have known her to get up in the middle of the night to come downstairs to the sitting-room and look at them. Sometimes she will fall in a reverie over them, and I can scarcely call her away to a meal.”
    “Yes, she must be fairly fond of them,” he assented grimly. “But how do you stand it? It must get on your nerves, doesn’t it, day after day?” He was consciously trying to arouse her. “To say nothing of the smell. And she keeps the windows closed all the time?”
    “Yes, nearly all the time. … Sometimes I plead with her, but I think it does no good, it does harm. She becomes secretive, and starts when I come into the room and she is with them.”
    Richard was almost ready to feign such brutality as casual curiosity would dictate. “It’s pathological,” he muttered. “Should be looked into.”
    “They’ve always been so much to her, a refuge for her yearning, since I seem inanimate and averse. And – more now – And then –” He could see that she was struggling with the obviousness of some feeling which was obscurely trying to make her refer to her father.
    Richard Milne smiled bitterly at the conception of her as inanimate and averse, but he said:
    “And your father still means more to her than she admits or knows, though she would cut her heart out to be rid of him –” There was a weary flippancy almost of cynicism in his utterance, as of one arming himself with brusqueness