... two soul sides, one to face the world with,
One to show a woman when he loves her.
Ah, nothing could rob her of that! She had been the woman he had loved, and the soul side he had shown to her, most generous, most sacred, most beautiful, was what no other being in the Universe could have from him, not even his God!
They had parted in the dawn, the Indian dawn, all shot with flame. Not once had he faltered in his resolute cheerfulness. He had kissed her and blessed her as she lay in bed. But at the door he had halted to look upon her a last time; and she was weeping. Then he had flung himself back beside her ... and now she closed her eyes and shuddered on the memory of his last kisses.
With the chill barren earth beneath her, the lowering winter sky above, the sun-warmth of his love again enfolded her. It was as if his presence brooded upon her. Oh, could she but die and be with him! "Harry, I am yours," she called to him in the passion of her soul, "yours only—love, take me!"
So strong seemed the atmosphere of his spirit about her, that she looked round wildly, almost feeling as if her soul-cry must have called back the dead. There stretched the iron earth, there hung the relentless skies—the world was empty.
The copse where she had chosen to rest was on the higher downs, and before her the land fell away gently yet so surely that the high chimney-stack of the Old Ancient House would scarcely have caught the eye against the opposite slope, save for its rising smoke columns, which the wind seized and tore to flakes.
As she gazed, unseeing, upon the desolate spectacle, a gleam of something unwonted, something like a huge crimson bird, moved vaguely tropical in all the duns and greys. She wondered awhile, and then realised: realised with a sudden sick spasm.
It was the red turban of Muhammed Saif-u-din. How sinister it looked, how unnatural a bloodstain under this pale English sky! Yonder son of the treacherous race that she could not banish from her life, even in this peaceful abode of her widowhood—Sir Arthur's secretary.... Sir Arthur! Her husband! The man to whom she had given the claim of what was left of her life! ... Thought followed on thought up to this culminating point. And then it was to Lady Gerardine as if some veil was rent before her mental vision, and she saw—saw at last—with that agony to the sight of sudden glare in the darkness, what she had done.
These last weeks she had lived in a dream, and every aspiration of her soul, every tendency of her life, had drifted always further away from the existence she and fate had chosen for herself. Now there was a gulf between Rosamond English and Rosamond Gerardine; and by the hot recoil of her blood she knew that it was unsurmountable. How could she ever go back; again be wife of the man she loved not, she who was widow of the man she loved!
She looked for the letter in her hand to cast it from her, and found that it had already escaped her careless hold. Upon the yellow grass at her feet the wind was chasing it; turning it mockingly over and over, a contemptible foolish thing, meanly out of place among the withered leaves, the naturally dying things of the fields.