CHAPTER XXXIV
"How did she know?" asked Spike.
"Know what—about Napoleon? Maybe she made it up!"
"No, about my looking out the window at the sacred inscription."
"Oh!" Marie had forgotten this was the original question. "Oh, she watched you!"
Spike's face lengthened with amazement.
"Through your window. She would climb up...."
"What!" exclaimed Spike.
"... up the drain pipe," Marie assured him. "She is a wonderful climber—holds on with her claws and walks up the wall on her limber feet. She would hang from your window sill like a bat!"
Spike sat up and clutched his hair with both hands.
"What?" he cried. "She didn't! Did she really? Oh, my God!"
He remembered lying in his bed listening fearfully to a series of cautious, scraping noises. Suppose he had gone to the window—as he almost had!—and seen that hideous old woman hanging from his window sill. She would have looked up into his face and grinned!... Then the four black hairs had been hers!
"Oh, my God," repeated Spike. "How often did she come?"
"Every night! She would wait until you had gone to sleep and then she would climb over the sill and sit on your bed and look at your face with the light of the magic ring on it!
"She thought of suggesting a decision to you while you slept. But here again she could not decide. She would whisper into your ear, 'Wish for gold!' and then thinking this a stupid decision to reach after centuries of meditation, she would whisper, 'Wish for happiness!' and then she would sit there gnawing her knuckles, and finally make still another suggestion, so that one canceled the other and none had any effect on you.
"She longed to wake you so that you two could talk together about things like reality—and time, and distance. But she was afraid if she shook you awake you might scream and then she would have been as frightened as you.... She would have sat in a corner, whimpering. I have seen her when she was frightened...."
"Holy Gosh!" breathed Spike. His head ached with a confusion of thoughts and images growing from Marie's story.
"After a while," Marie continued, "she would get up and slip out the window—down the drain pipe, three stories to the garden, climb the stone wall, run along it like a cat and drop down into an alley leading into the rue Notre Dame des Champs."
"She would not face the fact that when you met her in the street, you did not want to talk to her. She said you acted queerly but that your manner was brusque to every one. She said you were so deeply occupied with reaching a decision that you did not want to speak to anybody. 'Don't you think so?' she would ask me. And I would say, 'Yes, he is worried and nervous!'
"She finally did speak to you," Marie added.
"And scared me! All of a sudden somebody comes up and does something impossible! I wasn't afraid of what she could do to me, but what my imagination would do to me after she got through!"