CHAPTER XVI
MAN TO MAN
Hortense smiled softly to herself as she laid down the ivory-backed brushes. What did it mean, she wondered, when her mistress went out with tired eyes and pallid cheeks, and came home with the colour of a rose and eyes like stars, humming an old French love-song, and her feet moving all the time to some unheard music? It was years since she had seen her like this! Hortense knew the signs and was well pleased. At last, then, the household was to be properly established. A woman as beautiful as her mistress without a lover was to Hortense an incomprehensible thing.
“You can go now, Hortense,” her mistress ordered. “I will have my coffee half an hour earlier to-morrow morning.”
“Very good, madame,” the girl answered. “There is nothing else to-night, then?”
“Nothing, thank you,” Wilhelmina answered. “You had better go to bed now. I have been keeping you up rather late the last few evenings. We must both turn over a new leaf.”
Hortense departed, smiling to herself. It was always like this—when it came. One thought of others and one wanted to be alone. She, too, hummed a few bars of that love-song as she climbed the stairs to her room.
Wilhelmina rose from her chair and stood for a moment looking at herself in the long, oval looking-glass. Hortense had chosen for her a French dressing-jacket, with the palest of light blue ribbons drawn through the lace. Wilhelmina looked at herself and smiled. Was it the light, the colouring, or was she really still so good to look at? Her hair, falling over her shoulders, was long and silky, the lines seemed to have been smoothed out of her face—she was like herself when she had been a girl! She followed the slender lines of her figure, down past the lace of her petticoat to her feet, still encased in her evening slippers with diamond buckles, and she laughed softly to herself. What was she yet but a girl? Fate had cheated her of some of the years, but she was barely twenty-five. How wonderful to be young still and feel one’s blood flow to music like this! Her thoughts ran riot. Her mouth trembled and a deeper colour stained her cheeks. Then she heard a voice behind her, a living voice in her room. And as swiftly as those other mysterious thoughts had stolen into her heart, came the chill of a deadly, indescribable fear.
“Charming! Ravishing! It is almost worth the six years of waiting, dear wife!”
She began to tremble. She could not have called out or framed any intelligible sentence to save her life. It was like a nightmare. The horror was there, without the power of movement or speech.