You must not think from this that there was no emotion. There was tremendous emotion, only it was not the emotion of love after long separation. If it was that there were too many elements in it to allow pent-up passion the immediate right of way. Pent-up passion was stemmed by the realization of what my coming back must mean to the woman before me. For her I had been three years in my grave. As Alice Mountney had put it, she had been in mourning for me—and out again. It was the out again that created this thickened atmosphere between her and me. What had been all over, finished and done with she had to begin again.
And I had not come back to her as I had gone away. I had come back—entirely to the outward eye and somewhat in my heart—not as the smart young fellow of Lydia Blair's recollection, but as a working-man. The metamorphosis rendered me in some ways more akin to Boosey the butler than to my former self. I had acquired an art that made it possible for me to go into the servants' sitting-room and be at home in the company I should find there. The people in the front of the house had to some extent become to me as the Olympian gods at Creed & Creed's, exalted beings with whom I had little to do outside the necessities of work and pay. This change in me was more than superficial; and whatever it was Vio saw it. For her the meeting was harder than for me; and for me it was like a backward revolution of the years.
But after she had clung to me and cried a little, the tensity was broken. As I analyze now, I see the impulse that urged us into each other's arms as one of memory. For her, I was the man who had been, as she was the woman who had been, for me. She, however, had the help of pity, while I was humble and overawed.
It was one of those moments when so many things begin again that it is hard to seize on any. The simplest being the easiest, she said, after having detached herself from me and got back some measure of her self-control:
"What about your things? Have you brought them?"
"The little I have is at the hotel."
Both question and answer came out absently while we looked at each other with a new kind of inspection. The first had been of the self within; now it was of the outer self. I should have shrunk from the way in which her eyes traveled over me had not my whole mind gone into the examination I was making.
Yes; she had changed, though I cannot say that it was in the way of looking older. Rather she had grown to resemble Zuloaga's portrait of her, which we had always considered too theatrical. Zuloaga had emphasized all her most startling traits—her slenderness, sinuousity, and fantastic grace—her immense black eyes, of which he alone of all the men who had painted her had caught the fire that had been compared to that of the black opal—the long, narrow face that was like Wolf's, except for being mysterious and baffling—the mouth, haunted by memories that might have survived from another incarnation, since there had been nothing in her present life to correspond to them. You could speak of her as being beautiful only in the sense of being strange, with an appeal less to the eye than to the imagination. More akin to fire than to flesh, she was closer to spirit than to fire. It might have been a perverse, tortured spirit, but it was far from the merely animal. Discriminating people called it her salvation to have married a humdrum chap like me, since, with a man of more temperament, she would have clashed too outrageously. High-handed and intense, she needed some one seemingly to yield to her caprices, correcting them under the guise of giving in.
Like others of tempestuous nature, when she was gentle her gentleness was heavenly. She was gentle in that way now.
"Sit down, Billy, and let me look at you. Why didn't you bring your things?"