[XXXI]
Until she died, Clancy would hold vividly, in memory, the recollection of this scene. Just beyond the threshold Carey stopped. His wife, wild-eyed, leaned against the door which she had closed, her hand still on the knob.
For a full minute, there was silence. Clancy forgot her own danger. She was looking upon the most dramatic thing in life, the casting-off by a woman of a man whom she had loved, because she has found him unworthy.
Not that Sophie Carey, just now—or later on, for that matter—stooped to any melodramatic utterance. But her eyes were as expressive as spoken sentences. Into them first crept fear—a fear that was different from the alarm that she had shown when Clancy had mentioned her husband. But the fear vanished, was banished by the fulness of her contempt. Her eyes, that had been wide, now narrowed, hardened, seemed to emit sparks of ice.
Contemptuous anger heightened her beauty. Rather, it restored it. For, when Clancy had staggered into the house, the beauty of Sophie Carey, always a matter of coloring and spirits rather than of feature, had been a memory. She had been haggard, wan, sunken of cheek, so pale that her rouge had made her ghastly by contrast.
But now a normal color crept into her face. Not really normal, but, induced by the emotions that swayed her, it was the color that should always have been hers. It took years from her age. Her figure had seemed heavy, matronly, a moment ago. But now, as her muscles stiffened, it took on again that litheness which, despite her plumpness, made her seem more youthful than she was.
But it was the face of her husband that fascinated Clancy. Below his left eye, a bruise stood out, crimson. Clancy knew that it was from the blow that she had struck with the butt of the whip. She felt a certain vindictive pleasure at the sight of it. Carey's mouth twitched. His blond mustache looked more like straw than anything else. Ordinarily, it was carefully combed, but now the hairs that should have been trained to the right stuck over toward the left, rendering him almost grotesque. Below it, his mouth was twisted in a sort of sneer that made its weakness more apparent than ever.
His hat was missing; snow was on his shoulders, as though, in his pursuit, he had stumbled headlong into the drifts. And his tie was undone, his collar opened, as though he had found difficulty in breathing. The hand that held the revolver shook.
Before the gaze of the two women, his air of menace vanished. The intoxication that, combined with fear, had made him almost insane, left him.