Finally one evening Veronica and Grandsailles entered the library on tiptoe, followed by the canoness, who also wanted to spy. The room was submerged in a soft, very faint grey smoke that never left it, like clear water clouded by anisette. But in the fireplace the smoke was even denser, so that one could barely see through it the outline of the smoke-man’s legs, from the knees down, inside the chimney where he was standing. He was stamping his left foot in sign of discontent and aggravation like a restive horse, while the hearth was covered with half-extinguished coals and pieces of burnt newspaper. Suddenly the smoke-man emerged from under the chimney and stood there before it, discouraged, his arms dangling, with a face like a Greek tragic mask. The Count, Veronica and the canoness withdrew to the end of the corridor to avoid being seen.

  ‘I’ll talk to him,’ said the Count, going in and shutting the door behind him.

  At dinner Grandsailles explained the situation to Veronica: ‘The smoke-man began to weep like a baby, and he begged me on his knees to give him just one last chance to carry out his final experiment.’

  ‘Well, let him, the poor man,’ said Veronica.

  ‘But the trouble is that he is asking something impossible,’ Grandsailles objected.

  ‘What does he want?’ Veronica asked, with a smile of tenderness.

  ‘He says now that he has to make a hole through the ceiling of your room – that it’s the only solution.’

  Veronica considered this eventuality for a long time. Then, taking the Count’s hand she said in a gentle tone that masked her bitterness.

  ‘Perhaps it’s a solution, for by now the smoke has also invaded our hearts and it is the torch of our love which is in danger of going out.’

  ‘I wanted in fact to suggest to you that we leave this spot and return to Palm Springs,’ said Grandsailles.

  ‘We shall leave the day after tomorrow,’ Veronica decided, ‘after the smoke-man has made his hole.’

  Then they called the smoke-man and the canoness, and Veronica gave her instructions: ‘Have the big bed taken out of my tower room, and the curtains and the white feather-rug.’ To Grandsailles she added, ‘I don’t want anything to be left except the four mirrored walls and the marble-tiled floor. Let the smoke-man make his hole in the ceiling as he wishes. After that the house will be locked up and we return to Palm Springs. Besides, the walls here are too new and it’s damp everywhere.’

  By the following evening the hole had been made in the angle of the ceiling and the chimney wall. If the experiment worked it would only be necessary to install a permanent chimney-pipe that could be plastered over and made relatively inconspicuous. But this new experiment failed like all the rest, and this time even more spectacularly than before. After the fire had crackled in the fireplace for a few minutes and at the very moment when it was belching smoke into the library as on all the previous occasions. Veronica’s room suddenly seemed about to catch fire. The hole in the ceiling spat out several consecutive sheafs of sparks whirled up by the draught, as well as whole bits of flaming wood-shavings. And all these flying cinders after whirling for some time in the air, reflected to infinity in the four mirrored walls, at last settled calmly on the tiles where they slowly died out one after another.

  ‘In any case,’ said Grandsailles, ‘we could ask for nothing better in the way of fireworks. Where is the smoke-man?’

  ‘He wants to leave,’ said the canoness. ‘He has already put his little bundle tied in a handkerchief to the end of his stick out on the chair.’

  ‘Have a first-class supper made ready for him in the kitchen,’ Veronica ordered, ‘and we will see him afterwards.’

  She and the Count went into the dining-room in which they were to have their last meal. When the canoness returned, Veronica asked her if all was well.

  ‘I set everything out for him on the table. He has everything, a real feast-stuffed turkey, a bottle of French wine, dessert-but he just sits in front of his plate and he doesn’t eat.’

  ‘Go and see,’ said Veronica anxiously.

  A few moments later they heard the canoness utter a cry of astonishment. They both ran out into the kitchen. The food was on the table just as it had been served. The smoke-man had vanished without having touched a thing. They ran out and called in vain. The canoness thought she could make out the bundle of his white handkerchief tied to the end of his stick, but it was only a road-sign. ‘He’s old, but I’ve seen him several times when he was in a hurry. He can run fast as a rabbit.’

  The following morning, before they left the oasis for good, Veronica opened the door to her tower-room for a moment. The ceiling, all around the hole, was blackened by smoke and the marble floor was entirely covered with a layer of ashes. She locked the door and kept the key.

  No sooner had they settled again in Palm Springs than Grandsailles, who could but ill conceal his irascibility, went back and cloistered himself in his room, pleading his recurrent headaches as an excuse.

  Veronica was standing before the lighted fire in the living-room and looking at herself in the minor above it. Pensive, with a deep line of melancholy between her eyebrows, holding an apple in one hand and in the other a knife, she seemed unable to make up her mind to cut into the fruit. She was so absorbed that she saw a figure approaching her through the mirror almost without noticing it. It was John Randolph. The moment she became aware of him he was already beside her. For several seconds Veronica was overwhelmed by a strange sensation. ‘Why, I’ve lived through this before!’ Veronica turned to him and Randolph lowered his head as if in shame, while Veronica instinctively lifted her hands to her neck. They remained thus face to face, motionless, like two anguishing figures.

  ‘I have a favour to ask you,’ Randolph said breathlessly. ‘Give me just one hour. I must explain to you. Tomorrow is my last day! I have waited for the two bitterest weeks of my life to ask you this!’

  ‘I want to, too,’ said Veronica.

  ‘Where and when?’ asked Randolph eagerly, so close to her that without shifting his balance he was able to apply a kiss to each of her two fists which she continued to hold clenched as if clasping something under her chin.

  ‘This afternoon at five o’clock at the oasis, in my empty room in the tower!’

  At about five o’clock Veronica and Randolph reached the oasis on horseback by different roads, meeting as if by chance. Veronica had arrived first. She ran up to Randolph. ‘Did you see?’ she said, ‘someone is following us. He’s coming this way.’

  ‘Yes, I noticed,’ said Randolph getting down from his horse and looking into the distance to follow the movements of a trotting horse and its rider. ‘I think it may be Betka. She is the only one who knows of our rendezvous – I had to tell her so she could warn us in case your husband took it into his head to come here for a ride.’

  ‘But it’s not a woman – it’s a man’s figure,’ Veronica answered, ‘my heart tells me it’s Jules! You shouldn’t have said anything to Betka!’

  ‘You don’t mistrust Betka, do you?’

  ‘Not yet,’ answered Veronica, shielding her eyes from the sun with her hands as she continued to watch the approaching rider.

  ‘Do you want me to go?’ asked Randolph.

  ‘No! He would see you leaving the oasis in any case. Bring our horses and shut them up in the stable; then come immediately to my room in the tower. There I’m on my own premises – he promised me never to violate its privacy. If he knocks at the door he will have broken his word.’

  Randolph presently joined her, but the time of his absence seemed to Veronica like a century. When he returned, she said to him, ‘There is no longer any doubt. It is Jules, and he is galloping this way. Betka has betrayed us.’

  ‘Yes, it’s he,’ said Randolph, going up to the window. ‘Let’s not stay in this room. Let him find us outside, near the pool.’

  ‘No!’ cried Veronica in a fury, ‘we’re staying here, in my room,’ and she went to the door, locked it and came back to the window.

  ‘In that case let me talk to you.’ Randolph begged her.

  ‘I don’t want to hear anything from you now,’ Veronica said irritably, ‘you’ve made me do something wrong! The first thing I have ever done to him that is wrong!’

  With her hands clutching her throat she paced back and forth like a hunted animal and at the same time proud as a queen. ‘Why did you come into my life – do you call that courage? You should have had the dignity to keep your emotions hidden. Jules and I are absolute beings. The misfortunes you have just brought down on our heads will also be absolute. Is that what a creature who soars on wings is like? You will see – how I am going to hate you!’

  ‘I can more easily set the whole sky on fire than put out the fire in my heart!’ answered Randolph.

  ‘Be still now! He is coming,’ Veronica ordered, holding her breath in anguishing suspense.

  Nodier had calmly got down from his horse and tied it to a ring in the wall. Briskly he climbed the few steps that led to the little side door in the court and from there entered the library that adjoined Veronica’s room. He went straight to the fireplace and Veronica, hearing the andirons being moved, immediately understood their situation. ‘If he lights the fire we are lost!’ she exclaimed in a low voice, glancing up at the hole in the ceiling.

  Though he did not follow her meaning, Randolph drew Veronica to him in a protective gesture. ‘Whatever happens,’ she said, looking hard into the depths of his eyes, ‘you must not call out!’

  Grandsailles had lit a fire and thrown into it a sheaf of documents which he wished to destroy. Almost immediately the hole in the ceiling of Veronica’s room belched forth a whirl of sparks. Then as on the night before, the furious draught in the chimney made bits of burning shavings fly all about the room, Randolph pressed Veronica’s head between his arms while a fine rain of fire fell on them. At the risk of burning her face Veronica looked up: a glowing cinder had just alighted on Randolph’s forehead. ‘You, who have set the heavens on fire,’ she murmured between her teeth, ‘must now endure being branded by a spark!’

  After its first burst the fire in the chimney went out, and the Count of Grandsailles left.

  ‘I’m convinced it was a pure coincidence,’ said Randolph, examining the remains of the bundles of carbonized papers. ‘He came here only to burn some secret documents.’

  ‘We shall soon know,’ said Veronica in a meaningful tone, and her face was sombre and severe as she mounted her white horse.

  That last evening of Randolph’s stay in Palm Springs the Count of Grandsailles, Veronica, Betka and Randolph were dining together round the highly-polished mahogany table in which the sparkle of the ostentatious and pitiless silverware was savagely reflected. It was exactly nine o’clock in the evening, and no one spoke.

  ‘One would think we had formed a conspiracy of silence!’ said Grandsailles at last with great naturalness. He had just finished his last mouthful of consommé, and the only response was the sinister clinking of the silver against the plates. Then the Count took a pear from the fruit dish in front of him and began to peel it as if in nervous anticipation of the dessert. But immediately recovering his calm he went on, ‘This silence can only be interpreted as the sorrow we all feel over the departure of our friend Randolph, who might be said to have dropped from heaven just for the purpose of sweetening our excessive solitude, for which I am wholly to blame. I was thinking of you, Randolph, all afternoon,’ the Count continued looking intently at the aviator, ‘I rode out to the tower in the oasis, for I wanted to burn some secret documents in that confounded fireplace that chased us away from there. What about you? What did you do this afternoon?’

  Randolph did not flinch and he answered, ‘Are you putting me on my honour to answer truthfully?’

  ‘Oh, not in the least,’ Grandsailles replied, ‘it was just a question like any other.’

  ‘Then,’ said Randolph, ‘just imagine, if you will, that I spent my afternoon as I always do, smoking cigarette after cigarette.’

  ‘That isn’t good for your hero’s heart,’ Grandsailles replied.

  Veronica seemed to become hypnotized by a Lilliputian reflection in the silverware on which she had kept her eyes glued since the beginning of this conversation, and Betka, terrified and pale, was looking at Veronica.

  ‘A curious country, America, don’t you think, Randolph?’ said the Count of Grandsailles, making a face after biting into a piece of pear impaled on his fork, and putting down his implement on the edge of the plate. ‘Its fruit has no flavour, its women have no shame, and its men are without honour!’

  Randolph jumped to his feet as if released by a spring. Betka tried to hold him back, but he had already rushed toward Grandsailles who, without moving, sat carefully wiping his lips with his napkin after having moistened it with orange, as if considering his dinner over. He added, ‘I call your attention, Randolph, to the fact that you have let some of the fire from your cigarette drop on your shoulders, which is strange, and also on your forehead, which is still stranger. You’ve got a burn there,’ and he pointed to a reddish swelling close to the hairline of Randolph’s head. Grandsailles let his vague gaze roam lazily to Veronica, who still did not stir, seeming absent and not paying the slightest attention to Randolph’s more and more threatening attitude.

  ‘The fruits of our country,’ said Randolph, measuring each syllable, ‘have the flavour of liberty and hospitality, which you have basely taken advantage of to feed yourself and your secrets; our women are those whom you try unsuccessfully to corrupt, to pervert and make sterile, and our men are those who have the honour of sacrificing their lives in that Europe of yours to redeem the honour which you weren’t men enough to defend and shamefully lost to the enemy.’

  Grandsailles was now struggling to his feet, but before he could get up he received a terrific blow of Randolph’s fist full in the face, which made him roll to the floor with his chair.

  Veronica rushed to Grandsailles where he lay and tried to revive him with Betka’s aid. The Count could scarcely lift one hand to his heart, while one finger of his other hand fumbled feebly at the collar of his shirt, as though he were choking. Betka undid the knot of his heavy silver-speckled tie, ripped open the buttons of his shirt, and bared his chest. Randolph’s bloodshot eyes then fell on an object that left him breathless with shocked surprise, and for several moments he thought he was suffering from a delusion. For there, hanging by a little chain round his rival’s neck, was the cross of pearls and diamonds that Veronica had given him in Paris and that he had entrusted to the Count of Grandsailles on their flight to Malta! This mysterious Nodier could be none other than the Count himself.

  ‘Veronica!’ Randolph cried, ‘the cross that man is wearing is the one you gave me!’

  Returning slowly to consciousness some hours after his heart attack, the Count of Grandsailles remained a good fifteen minutes with his eyes shut, pretending to be still asleep. But he knew that Veronica was there, sitting anxious and loving by his bedside, observing him attentively, for a moment ago he had looked up furtively between his eyelashes. He relived now the violent scene with Randolph, and he felt Veronica’s love redoubled in his favour by the brutal way in which his rival had treated him in spite of the delicate condition of his heart during the past weeks. After this squall, he enjoyed the sensation of coming back to life again in the warmth and comfort of these surroundings, his head nestling in a downy convalescent’s pillow. And as never before he understood the full value and meaning of a wife, of a spouse. It was a joy, now, to wake up gently, gradually, and through the shadowy blur of the thick lashes of his lids calmly and voluptuously opening, he began to perceive more and more distinctly the figure of Veronica who must only be waiting, with her heart in suspense, for him to wake up in order to rush forward and bend over him, to press her brow to his brow and her hands in his hands with that violent tenderness which since their marriage had not ceased to be the almost constant pattern of their relationship.

  But Veronica, instead of stirring and coming over to him when she saw him wake up, did nothing of the kind. On the contrary, it was as though her immobility were assuming an aspect of terror, and her fixed gaze struck him as hostile, ferocious as an animal’s. The Count, chilled by Veronica’s incomprehensible attitude exclaimed, ‘Why do you look at me like that?’

  ‘I’m not looking at you, Count de Grandsailles,’ Veronica answered, calling him for the first time by his real name, ‘what I am looking at is the cross you are wearing around your neck. It does not belong to you. You have usurped it, stolen it from a dead man – from Randolph, whom you thought dead.’

  The Count of Grandsailles, seized with a feeble convulsive trembling, which was a complete confession of his longstanding lie, brought his two hands to his neck as if to protect the cross from Veronica’s concentrated and ungovernable fury. But with a movement that nothing could restrain she seized the cross, wrapped it in her fist, and pulled it toward her slowly, slowly, with all her strength, until she finally broke the chain, and then went off with her sure step, entered her room and hung the cross above the head of her bed. Then she removed from her finger the engagement ring she had received from Grandsailles and put it away in her black velvet jewel-box. There now remained no other evidence of their encounter than this ring, which in its miniature night was like the annular eclipse of their conjunction.

  ‘I don’t want to live with anyone. I want Grandsailles to leave my house. I want Betka and the child to leave my house. I want the devil’s canoness to leave my house. I don’t want to see anything more of Randolph. I want to live alone again with him, with the white swan of my memory.’

  As soon as he had slightly recovered and the condition of his heart permitted, the Count of Grandsailles went into retirement and seclusion with his canoness for a certain length of time in the refuge of the oasis, but he had previously assured Veronica by letter that he would always respect her room in the tower. Into his retreat he also took Betka’s son to live with him – and this, too, constituted a dark mystery between Betka and the Count: the ‘bending of blood,’as he called it. Since his marriage he had, in collusion with Betka, laboriously, furtively, done everything to wean Betka’s son from Veronica’s influence. To what end?