She walked with him to the open door, outside which the servant was waiting to show him downstairs.
“You will come and see me again—very soon?” she repeated.
“Yes,” he answered simply, “if I may I shall come again! I will come as soon as you care to have me!”
CHAPTER V
Matravers passed out into the street with a curious admixture of sensations in a mind usually so free from any confusion of sentiments or ideas. The few words which he had been compelled to exchange with Thorndyke had grated very much against his sense of what was seemly; he was on the whole both repelled and fascinated by the incidents of this visit of his. Yet as he walked leisurely homewards through the bright, crowded streets, he recognized the existence of that strange personal charm in Berenice of which so many people had written and spoken. He himself had become subject to it in some slight degree, not enough, indeed, to engross his mind, yet enough to prevent any feeling of disappointment at the result of his visit.
She was not an ordinary woman—she was not an ordinarily clever woman. She did not belong to any type with which he was acquainted. She must for ever occupy a place of her own in his thoughts and in his estimation. It was a place very well defined, he told himself, and by no means within that inner circle of his brain and heart wherein lay the few things in life sweet and precious to him. The vague excitement of the early morning seemed to him now, as he moved calmly along the crowded, fashionable thoroughfare, a thing altogether unreal and unnatural. He had been in an emotional frame of mind, he told himself with a quiet smile, when the sight of those few lines in a handwriting then unknown had so curiously stirred him. Now that he had seen and spoken to her, her personality would recede to its proper proportions, the old philosophic calm which hung around him in his studious life like a mantle would have no further disturbance.
And then he suffered a rude shock! As he passed the corner of a street, the perfume of Neapolitan violets came floating out from a florist’s shop upon the warm sunlit air. Every fibre of his being quivered with a sudden emotion! The interior of that little room was before him, and a woman’s eyes looked into his. He clenched his hands and walked swiftly on, with pale face and rigid lips, like a man oppressed by some acute physical pain.
There must be nothing of this for him! It was part of a world which was not his world—of which he must never even be a temporary denizen. The thing passed away! With studious care he fixed his mind upon trifles. There was a crease in his silk hat, clearly visible as he glanced at his reflection in a plate-glass window. He turned into Scott’s, and waited whilst it was ironed. Then he walked homewards and spent the remainder of the day carefully revising a bundle of proofs which he found on his table fresh from the printer.