The Trespasser

The clock downstairs struck two.

'I must get to sleep,' he said.

He dragged his portmanteau from beneath the bed and began to pack it.

When at last it was finished, he shut it with a snap. The click sounded

final. He stood up, stretched himself, and sighed.

'I am fearfully tired,' he said.

But that was persuasive. When he was undressed he sat in his pyjamas for

some time, rapidly beating his fingers on his knee.

'Thirty-eight years old,' he said to himself, 'and disconsolate as a

child!' He began to muse of the morrow.

When he seemed to be going to sleep, he woke up to find thoughts

labouring over his brain, like bees on a hive. Recollections, swift

thoughts, flew in and alighted upon him, as wild geese swing down and

take possession of a pond. Phrases from the opera tyrannized over him;

he played the rhythm with all his blood. As he turned over in this

torture, he sighed, and recognized a movement of the De Beriot concerto

which Helena had played for her last lesson. He found himself watching

her as he had watched then, felt again the wild impatience when she was

wrong, started again as, amid the dipping and sliding of her bow, he

realized where his thoughts were going. She was wrong, he was hasty; and

he felt her blue eyes looking intently at him.

Both started as his daughter Vera entered suddenly. She was a handsome

girl of nineteen. Crossing the room, brushing Helena as if she were a

piece of furniture in the way, Vera had asked her father a question, in

a hard, insulting tone, then had gone out again, just as if Helena had

not been in the room.

Helena stood fingering the score of _Pelléas_. When Vera had gone, she

asked, in the peculiar tone that made Siegmund shiver: 'Why do you consider the music of _Pelléas_ cold?' Siegmund had struggled to answer. So they passed everything off, without

mention, after Helena's fashion, ignoring all that might be humiliating;

and to her much was humiliating.

For years she had come as pupil to Siegmund, first as a friend of the

household. Then she and Louisa went occasionally to whatever hall or

theatre had Siegmund in the orchestra, so that shortly the three formed

the habit of coming home together. Then Helena had invited Siegmund to

her home; then the three friends went walks together; then the two went

walks together, whilst Louisa sheltered them.

Helena had come to read his loneliness and the humiliation of his lot.

He had felt her blue eyes, heavily, steadily gazing into his soul, and

he had lost himself to her.