XII
AFTERWARDS—LOVE
An overwhelming shyness possessed Nina that night. She dined alone with her husband, and found his silences even more oppressive than usual. Yet, when she rose from the table, an urgent desire to keep him within call impelled her to pause.
"Shall you be late to-night?" she asked him, stopping nervously before him, as he stood by the open door.
"I am not going out to-night," he responded gravely."
"Oh!" Nina hesitated still. She was trembling slightly. "Then—I shall see you again?" she said.
He bent his head.
"I shall be with you in ten minutes," he replied.
And she passed out quickly.
The night was still and hot. She went into her own little sitting-room and straight to the open window. Her heart was beating very fast as she stood and looked across the quiet square. The roar of London hummed busily from afar. She heard it as one hears the rushing of unseen water among the hills.
There was no one moving in the square. The trees in the garden looked dim and dreamlike against a red-gold sky.
Suddenly in the next house, from a room with an open window, there rose the sound of a woman's voice, tender as the night. It reached the girl who stood waiting in the silence. The melody was familiar to her, and she leant forward breathlessly to catch the words:
Shadows and mist and night,
Darkness around the way;
Here a cloud and there a star;
Afterwards, Day!
There came a pause and the soft notes of a piano. Nina stood with clasped hands, waiting for the second verse. Her cheeks were wet.
It came, slow and exquisitely pure, as if an angel had drawn near to the turbulent earth with a message of healing:
Sorrow and grief and tears,
Eyes vainly raised above;
Here a thorn and there a rose;
Afterwards, Love!
Nina turned from the open window. She was groping, for her eyes were full of tears. From the doorway a man moved quietly to meet her.
"Hereford!" she said in a broken whisper, and went straight into his arms.
He held her fast, so fast that she felt his heart beating against her bowed head. But it was many seconds before he spoke.
"Do you remember the wishing-gate, Nina?" he said, speaking softly. "And how you asked for a Deliverer?"
She stretched up her arms to clasp his neck without lifting her head. She was crying and could not answer him.
He put his hand upon her hair and she felt it tremble.
"Has the Deliverer come to you, dear?" he asked her very tenderly.
He felt for her face in the darkness, and turned it slowly upwards. She did not resist him though she knew well what was coming. Rather she yielded to his touch with a sudden, passionate willingness. And so their lips met in the first kiss that had ever passed between them.
Thus there came a Deliverer more potent than death into the heart of the girl who had married for money, and made its surrender sweet.
The Prey of the Dragon
I
[II,] [ III,] [ IV,] [ V,] [ VI,] [ VII,] [ VIII,] [ IX,] [ X,] [ XI,] [ XII,] [ XIII,] [ XIV,] [ XV,] [ XVI,] [ XVII,] [ XVIII,] [ XIX]
"Ah! She's off!"
A deafening blast came from the great steamship's siren, and a long sigh went up from the crowd upon the quay. Someone raised a cheer that was quickly drowned in the noise of escaping steam. Very slowly, almost imperceptibly, the vessel began to move.
A black gap appeared, and widened between her and the wharf till it became a stretch of grey water veiled in the dank fog of a murky sea. The fog was everywhere, floating in wreaths upon the oily swell, blotting out all distant objects, making vague those that were near. Very soon the crowd on the shore was swallowed up and the great vessel was heading for the mouth, of the harbour and the wide loneliness beyond.
Sybil Denham hid her face in her hands for a moment and shivered. There was something terrible to her in the thought of those thousands of miles to be traversed alone. It cowed her. It appalled her.
Yet when she looked up again her eyes were brave. She stood committed now to this great step, and she was resolved to take it with a high courage. Whatever lay before her, she must face it now without shrinking. Yet it was horribly lonely. She turned from the deck-rail with nervous haste.
The next instant she caught her foot against a coil of rope and fell headlong, with a violence that almost stunned her. A moment she lay, then, gasping, began to raise herself.
But as she struggled to her knees strong hands lifted her, and a man's voice said gruffly:
"Are you hurt?"
She found herself in the grasp of a powerful giant with the physique of a prize-fighter and a dark face with lowering brows that seemed to wear an habitual scowl.
She was too staggered to speak; the fall had unnerved her. She put her hand vaguely behind her, feeling for the rail, looking up at him with piteous, quivering lips.
"You should look where you are going," he said, with scant sympathy. "Perhaps you will another time."
She found the rail, leaned upon it, then turned her back upon him suddenly and burst into tears which she was too shaken to restrain. She thought he would go away, hoped that he would; but he remained, standing in stolid silence till she managed in a measure to regain her self-control.
"Where did you hurt yourself?" he asked then.
She struggled with herself, and answered him. "I—I am not hurt."
"Then what are you crying for?"
The words sounded more like a rude retort than a question.
She found them unanswerable, and suddenly, while she still stood battling with her tears, something in the utterance touched her sense of humour. She gulped down a sob, and gave a little strangled laugh.
"I don't quite know," she said, drying her eyes. "Thank you for picking me up."
"I should have tumbled over you if I hadn't," he responded.
Again her sense of humour quivered, finally dispelling all desire to cry. She turned a little.
"I'm glad you didn't!" she said with fervour.
"So am I."
The curt rejoinder cut clean through her depression. She broke into a gay, spontaneous laugh.
But the next instant she checked herself and apologized.
"Forgive me! I'm very rude."
"What's the joke?" he asked.
She answered him in a voice that still quivered a little with suppressed merriment.
"There isn't a joke. I—I often laugh at nothing. It's a silly habit of mine."
His moody silence seemed to endorse this remark. She became silent also, and after a moment made a shy movement to depart.
He turned then and looked at her, looked full and straight into her small, sallow face, with its shadowy eyes and pointed features, as if he would register her likeness upon his memory.
She gave him a faint, friendly smile.
"I'm going below now," she said. "Good-bye!"
He raised his hat abruptly. His head was massive as a bull's.
"Mind how you go!" he said briefly.
And Sybil went, feeling like a child that has been rebuked.