"If Madame wants me to tell her.... For the rest, Monsieur is way out in the park, busy sharpening the pick-axe.... And besides, there is nothing to it ... the stone blocks are like stone blocks, seemingly of the pavement. That's all!... Madame may be sure.... Only it might be that that was only in Master Jean's imagination.... Madame knows that children are like grown-up folks and that they see things! But as to these slabs, they are just slabs, neither more nor less."
"Shut up!" she ordered, "and get out of here, all of you!"
And without waiting for the execution of her order she carried me out of the room. Her cries, interrupted by the slamming of the door, resounded on the stairway and in the hall.
She never thought, however, poor dear creature that she was, of giving to the bathroom incident a natural explanation. One could have demonstrated to her that what had frightened me so badly might have been a moving reflection of a towel upon the humid surface of the floor, or perhaps the shadow of a leaf projected from outside across the window, which of course she would not have admitted as likely to have taken place. Her spirit, fed on dreams, tormented by lurid exaggerations and instinctively drawn to the mysterious and the fantastic, accepted with dangerous credulity the vaguest explanation and yielded to the most troubling suggestions. She imagined that her caresses, her kisses, her lulling me to sleep communicated to me the germs of her disease, that the nervous fits which almost caused my death, the hallucinations which shone in my eyes with the sombre radiance of madness, were to her a divine warning, and as soon as she conceived that, the last hope died in her heart.
Marie found her mistress half naked, stretched out on the bed.
"My God! My God!" she moaned, "that's the end of it.... My poor little Jean!... You, too, they will take away from me!... Oh, God, have pity on him!... Could that be possible!... So little, so weak!..."
And while Marie was putting back her clothes which slipped to the ground, trying to quiet her:
"My good Marie," she stammered, "listen to me. Promise me, yes promise me to do as I tell you.... You have seen it just now, you have seen it, haven't you?... Well, take Jean, and bring him up because I--you see ... he must not.... I'll kill him.... Here, you'll stay in this room with him, right near me.... You shall take good care of him and tell me all about him.... I'll feel his presence there, I'll hear him.... But you understand, he must not see me.... It is I who make him that way!..."