The Last Post by Ford Madox Ford — Read

Marie Léonie, a strong taste of apples in her mouth, strong savours of apples on the air, wasps around her and as if a snowdrift of down descending about her feet, was frowning seriously over Burgundy bottles into which ran cider from a glass tube that she held to their necks. She frowned because the task was serious and engrossing, because the wasps annoyed her and because she was resisting an impulse inside herself. It told her that something ailed Mark and urged her to go and look at him.

It annoyed her because, as a rule -- a rule so strong that it had assumed the aspect of a regulation -- she felt presages of something ailing Mark only at night. Only at night. During the day usually she felt in her for intérieur that Mark was like what he was only because he wanted so to be. His glance was too virile and dominant to let you think otherwise -- the dark, liquid, direct glance! But at nightfall -- or at any rate shortly after supper when she had retired to her room terrible premonitions of disaster to Mark visited her. He was dying where he lay; he was beset by the spectral beings of the countryside; robbers, even, had crept upon him, though that was unreasonable. For all the countryside knew that Mark was paralysed and unable to store wealth in his mattress. Still, nefarious strangers might see him and imagine that he kept his gold repeater watch beneath his pillow. So she would rise a hundred times in a night and, going to the low, diamond-casement window, would lean out and listen. But there would be no sound: the wind in the leaves; the cry of waterbirds over head. The dim light would be in the hut, seen unmoving through the apple-boughs.