My brain was in a whirl.I am safe to say that at this precise moment there was nobody completely sane in the house.Setting apart Therese and Ortega, both in the grip of unspeakable passions, all the moral economy of Dona Rita had gone to pieces.Everything was gone except her strong sense of life with all its implied menaces.The woman was a mere chaos of sensations and vitality.
I, too, suffered most from inability to get hold of some fundamental thought.The one on which I could best build some hopes was the thought that, of course, Ortega did not know anything.I whispered this into the ear of Dona Rita, into her precious, her beautifully shaped ear.
But she shook her head, very much like an inconsolable child and very much with a child's complete pessimism she murmured, "Therese has told him."The words, "Oh, nonsense," never passed my lips, because I could not cheat myself into denying that there had been a noise; and that the noise was in the fencing-room.I knew that room.There was nothing there that by the wildest stretch of imagination could be conceived as falling with that particular sound.There was a table with a tall strip of looking-glass above it at one end; but since Blunt took away his campaigning kit there was no small object of any sort on the console or anywhere else that could have been jarred off in some mysterious manner.Along one of the walls there was the whole complicated apparatus of solid brass pipes, and quite close to it an enormous bath sunk into the floor.The greatest part of the room along its whole length was covered with matting and had nothing else but a long, narrow leather-upholstered bench fixed to the wall.And that was all.And the door leading to the studio was locked.And Therese had the key.And it flashed on my mind, independently of Dona Rita's pessimism, by the force of personal conviction, that, of course, Therese would tell him.Ibeheld the whole succession of events perfectly connected and tending to that particular conclusion.Therese would tell him! Icould see the contrasted heads of those two formidable lunatics close together in a dark mist of whispers compounded of greed, piety, and jealousy, plotting in a sense of perfect security as if under the very wing of Providence.So at least Therese would think.She could not be but under the impression that (providentially) I had been called out for the rest of the night.
And now there was one sane person in the house, for I had regained complete command of my thoughts.Working in a logical succession of images they showed me at last as clearly as a picture on a wall, Therese pressing with fervour the key into the fevered palm of the rich, prestigious, virtuous cousin, so that he should go and urge his self-sacrificing offer to Rita, and gain merit before Him whose Eye sees all the actions of men.And this image of those two with the key in the studio seemed to me a most monstrous conception of fanaticism, of a perfectly horrible aberration.For who could mistake the state that made Jose Ortega the figure he was, inspiring both pity and fear? I could not deny that I understood, not the full extent but the exact nature of his suffering.Young as I was I had solved for myself that grotesque and sombre personality.His contact with me, the personal contact with (as he thought) one of the actual lovers of that woman who brought to him as a boy the curse of the gods, had tipped over the trembling scales.No doubt I was very near death in the "grand salon" of the Maison Doree, only that his torture had gone too far.It seemed to me that I ought to have heard his very soul scream while we were seated at supper.But in a moment he had ceased to care for me.Iwas nothing.To the crazy exaggeration of his jealousy I was but one amongst a hundred thousand.What was my death? Nothing.All mankind had possessed that woman.I knew what his wooing of her would be: Mine - or Dead.
All this ought to have had the clearness of noon-day, even to the veriest idiot that ever lived; and Therese was, properly speaking, exactly that.An idiot.A one-ideaed creature.Only the idea was complex; therefore it was impossible really to say what she wasn't capable of.This was what made her obscure processes so awful.
She had at times the most amazing perceptions.Who could tell where her simplicity ended and her cunning began? She had also the faculty of never forgetting any fact bearing upon her one idea; and I remembered now that the conversation with me about the will had produced on her an indelible impression of the Law's surprising justice.Recalling her naive admiration of the "just" law that required no "paper" from a sister, I saw her casting loose the raging fate with a sanctimonious air.And Therese would naturally give the key of the fencing-room to her dear, virtuous, grateful, disinterested cousin, to that damned soul with delicate whiskers, because she would think it just possible that Rita might have locked the door leading front her room into the hall; whereas there was no earthly reason, not the slightest likelihood, that she would bother about the other.Righteousness demanded that the erring sister should be taken unawares.
All the above is the analysis of one short moment.Images are to words like light to sound - incomparably swifter.And all this was really one flash of light through my mind.A comforting thought succeeded it: that both doors were locked and that really there was no danger.
However, there had been that noise - the why and the how of it? Of course in the dark he might have fallen into the bath, but that wouldn't have been a faint noise.It wouldn't have been a rattle.
