...of gloom

She sat down the candle, and Xavier found himself alone. He heard the boy whispering and laughing behind the door. The sound of footsteps died away. It must have been a long time since the room had last been occupied. One of the curtains had holes in it: but the candle-flame shone on the brass fittings and inlaid woodwork of a pot-bellied chest-of-drawers. Xavier could imagine what his mother would have said: “The drawing-room’s full of horrors, but there are some marvellous pieces in the guest-rooms.” He apporached the sheetless bed. A smell of dead mice came from the mattress. The half-open cupboard beside the bed had, too, a noticeable aroma. He went to the window but could not draw aside the curtains because the cord was broken. He did, however, at last manage to get the casement open. The night-wind blowing through the slats of the closed shutters flattened the candle-flame. Xavier knelt down, his forehead pressed against the mahogany framework of the bed.
At that moment he became conscious of a sense of suffering which came from something far deeper than the fact that he was lost and lonely in a hostile house. He knew that feeling: he had it before in certain clearly-defined circumstances, and the memory had stayed with him. What had it been made up of then? He could not say, but to-night it had a face, two faces, the young girl’s and the small boy’s; her’s in particular. What sort of an impression had she got of him? The thought of wht might be going on in her mind set him trembling. There was no sign of her return: the linen-cupboard must be locked…. Perhaps she had gone to put Roland to bed? Oh, well, sooner or later Mirbel would get worried: sooner or later somebody would turn up. Meanwhile, there was no gettng away from the smell of damp-mould, from the old mattress, from the bedside rug, the feel of which was under his knees, the threadbare surface before his eyes. He could no more escape from this room, from this house, than a convict from his cell. He called for help, he uttered a cry, but call and cry were silent. His lips did not move. Then, suddenly, it was as though the current of his horrible suffering had been switched off, as though the power had been cut. All movement ceased in him. A moth staggered about on the marble top of the chest-of-drawers. The curtains bellied momentarily in the night-wind, then came to rest. The moth seemed to have settled. The faint sound he heard came from the torn wall-paper moving in the wind.

[The Lamb, Mauriac, F.]