“Well, my journey was useful to me. I found out things. Would you like to go and tell Lady Skene about the picture, or do I come first in your loyalty?”
“You do.”
Her answer took me like a sting, sweet and piercing. I don’t know what madness, what revolt was in my blood; but I bent down suddenly and kissed her lips. And then, having done it, the instant revulsion came, and I thrust her rudely from me. She sank back, sitting on her heels, and hid her face in her hands.
“There, go!” I cried, jumping to my feet. “I took that, not for myself, but—damn it! don’t you know that Lord Skene disapproves of your coming here? I told him you came by your own will, not mine; and if your will isn’t his, he can just look after his own. But you take the risk of any consequences if you come. I warn you, I’m master here, and I kiss or ill treat whom I choose. Do you understand? You’re a ‘unique young party’ according to him, and you’ve been kissed by the grandson of that old pottle-pot yonder. How do you like the thought? You’ve bound yourself slave to something worse than you expected, haven’t you! But I’ll manumit you. Take your furs and go, before you find out how dangerous I can be! Do you hear? Go, while there’s time!”
I was half beside myself with rage and scorn for my act. I had never in all my life kissed woman before, and this first fierce contact smote me like a blasphemy against my clean youth. Nor had I had in my mind at the moment a thought of all that rage of justification for my deed which had afterwards suggested itself. It had been just the leap of a mad impulse, born of the girl’s soft and emotional submission. And, having torn that unresisting flower, I was ashamed.
I went and leaned against the mantelshelf and turned my eyes from her. She did not rise at once; but presently I heard her go and take her things from the chair. Then, somehow, I hoped that she would dwell just the little minute necessary for putting them on. I suppose the bully’s instinct is always to keep by him the thing he has just injured, perhaps in the sneaking hope that it will justify in some way his brutality to himself. He hates the frightened thing for trying to escape from him, silently and tremblingly after the deed.
But Miss Christmas did not linger that minute. She swept up her jacket and furs, as I knew by the sound, and ran with them out into the cold. A wild impulse to stride and stop her surged up in me. I even followed her footsteps into the passage; but there I checked myself, and flung to the open door with a resounding slam that must have caught her heart for a moment. Then I went back to my room, biting a savage curse between my teeth.
I was furious with myself; furious with the girl; furious with the means I had seized to misrepresent my feelings towards her. Why had she put herself in my way, just to awaken the beast in me? She had no proper pride of womanhood; and, if for that only, was beneath my notice. And yet I had kissed her—why? because I despised her; and all the time the fragrance of that contact hung on my lips like a sweet poison.
I could eat no lunch, I was so angry and disturbed. And all the afternoon I sat idly with a book, affecting to read, but seeing nothing on the page. Dusk came on, and with it sharp squalls of wind and sleet that brought the dead leaves whirling about my windows. My fire had gone out, and I sat and shivered, not finding the energy to relight it. It grew uncanny sitting there in the white gloom, not a living soul within a half mile of me, the deep and sodden woodland all around. The storm, with its loaded flakes, rushed upon the glass in swoops and charges; and, when it fell back, I always seemed to hear a small and urgent whisper rallying it. Sometimes, I felt tinglingly, it would burst in, and then—what would come with it! And at that very instant, glancing up, I saw a face pressed against the glass.
It had risen, swiftly and silently, like death in the night—a horrible sinister face, I thought it, in the first shock of discovery. The eyes were searchingly alive; the upper lip was lifted, showing the teeth; the mist of its breath shrank and dilated on the pane as the wind took it. I held my own, staring in a sort of awful trance. The eyes in the motionless head whipped to and fro, as if hurrying to penetrate and devour the substance of the room’s every shadow. Fortunately the one in which I sat was too dense for their resolving. I congratulated myself on my dead hearth, though, for whatever reason, I was shivering all through. But over and over again the eyes passed me by, and I knew that I was not yet discovered.