The door was still open. Outside it in the passage the waiters were clustered, listening. Inside the room Millie was listening. The order, roughly given, was just one which Callon for very shame could not obey. He would have liked to obey it, for confronting husbands was never to his liking; all his art lay in eluding them.
"Go out!" Tony repeated, and took a step forward. Callon could not cut so poor a figure as to slink from the room like a whipped schoolboy. Yet it would have gone better with him had he eaten his leek and gone.
"It would not be safe to leave you," he babbled. And suddenly Tony caught him by the throat, struck him upon the face, and then flung him violently away.
Callon reeled back through the open windows, slipped and fell at his full length upon the terrace. His head struck the stone flags with a horrible sound. He lay quite still in the strong light which poured from the room; his eyes were closed, his face quite bloodless. It was his business, as Mudge had said, to light amongst the teacups.
Tony made no further movement towards him. The waiters went out on to the terrace and lifted him up and carried him away. Then Tony turned towards his wife. She had risen up from her chair and overturned it when Tony had flung the interloper from the room. She now crouched shuddering against the wall, with her eyes fixed in terror upon her husband. As he turned towards her she uttered a sob and dropped upon her knees before him. That was the end of all her scorn. She kneeled in deadly fear, admiring him in the very frenzy of her fear. She had no memory for the contemptuous letters which she had written and Tony had carried under his pillow on the North Sea. Her little deceits and plots and trickeries to hoodwink her friends, her little pretence of passion for Lionel Callon--she knew at this moment that it never had been more than a pretence--these were the matters which now she remembered, and for which she dreaded punishment. She was wearing jewels that night--jewels which Tony had given her in the good past days when they lived together in the house in Deanery Street. They shook and glittered upon her hair, about her neck, upon her bosom and her arms. She kneeled in her delicate finery of lace and satin in this room of luxury and bright flowers. There was no need for Tony now to work to re-establish himself in her thoughts. She reached out her hands to him in supplication.
"I am not guilty," she moaned. "Tony! Tony!"
CHAPTER XXXII
[HUSBAND AND WIFE]
The man who was no good had his triumph then. Only triumph was not at all in his thoughts.
"Oh, please!" he said very quietly, "get up from your knees. I don't like to see you there. It hurts me."