As he approached the bed, the man forgot the dim hostility by which he was surrounded, in a practical doubt. How if the poison had proved insufficient and she should open her eyes, those ice-blue eyes and ask what had brought him thither? For a moment he stood humbly at the foot of her bed. He dared not look.
The candle-light fell on a quiet face, on closed eyes, on shut lips. She had said—"Good night."
Sabina lay on her back, a squat figure, occupying in that great bed but a little space. The bright silk quilt had been folded neatly back over the mahogany foot and her covering was as white as the hangings. It swept in a generous curve over her breast, this breast which no longer rose and fell.
The man ventured, at last, to look and his heart leapt with relief, with more than relief, with a primitive and savage joy. In the long struggle between them he had won.
The rose had faded from Sabina's cheek, but her lips were curving as if over a pleasant thought. She had taken with her into the dark the hope that she and her husband might soon be reconciled, that years of concord lay before them and this sweet expectation had given her a look of unfathomable peace. The serenity of her dead face was that of the blue night, the night that is beyond the clouds of earth. She was no longer the successful farmer, the stoutest heart in Tregols, but something infinitely remote. In dying she had proved that if life is transitory and insignificant, death hides behind closed lips, an intriguing mystery. Byron, vaunting the folly of a mad moment, of a dark dream interpretated in terms of earth, became slowly conscious of it. Drop by drop, the passion of his exultation fell. This was not the workaday woman he had known, the woman whose obstinacy and unreasonableness had so angered him, but a creature spiritually changed. He could not feel that she would bear any resentment against the instrument of what was, undoubtedly, a release. Life had chained and prevented her, now she was free and he no longer counted with her in any way. She was afar off. Human interests had dwindled to the humming of a hive and he, whom she had cherished, was become one among many. The conviction of this was not only humbling, it brought a sense of loss. The place where he had been wont to sit at ease had been shut against him and the door locked and bolted. He was outside and unimportant and forgotten.
The last dregs of his excitement ran out leaving him with a sense of emptiness. Sabina was dead and death had raised a barrier between them which should have given him a sense of security. But from such a one as the woman, folded in ineffable peace, who lay before him, was no need of escape. This Sabina was a development of the other, the generous large-souled creature for whom the mean and the sordid had no existence. Byron had come to face Sabina and prove himself the stronger, but he stood before her like a child that had lost its way. For some minutes he waited in desolate silence, his heart sinking, his sense of inexorable loss growing more poignant. Sabina was dead, she had set out upon a journey from which she was never to return and he was left. The great chest heaved suddenly and a sob burst from him. Stumbling, and with the hardly wept tears of manhood rolling over his cheeks, he turned away. The door slammed behind him as he made for the shallow stairs that led to his room. Once in his refuge he flung himself on the bed, muffling his tempestuous weeping in the pillow—as he had done, when, as a boy, he had fled the fatherly corrections of the elder Leadville.
On the morrow he would awaken to the old life of narrow interests and lusts and scheming; but that night he mourned with exceeding grief, mourned that golden bowl which had been his and which he had cast down and broken. The bed shook under his sobs and the little hours before the dawn scurried up, dragging after them a new and reluctant day. Byron was a weary man, overwrought both in body and mind; and by degrees the noisy gulps, the long shudders, the groans grew less frequent. He sank into broken sleep, started from it with a catch of the breath and a sudden desolate cry, but fell back again. His slumbers deepened until he lay quiescent, his heavy frame thrown across the bed, his arms outstretched. At intervals a quiver passed over his body, but he had drifted out upon quiet seas and was—poor miserable wight—at rest.
CHAPTER XVI
In the bright moonlight Mrs. Tom stood at her garden gate to watch Mrs. Constantine Rosevear—or Mrs. Conny, as she was called—walk up the road. A big strong woman was Bessie Rosevear but full of nervous fears; and she had professed herself unable to go back to the mill unless some one 'put 'er 'ome.' The revelry of the evening, though sober and moderate, had carried the party into the small hours. Tom had gone off to bed and it fell, therefore, to one of the five maidens to accompany her aunt.
"Aw poor sawl, I'm pretty and sorry for 'er bein' so nervous," thought Mrs. Tom, making kindly allowance. "One of 'er boys should 'av come down to put 'er 'ome. They are always rangin' about in the evenings after the maidens, but any'ow Richbell was glad of a mouthful of fresh air."