"As my wife," he said, "you would reign more proudly than you have ever reigned yet. The moment you were free I would be so glad to make you mine—you, the loveliest woman I ever knew, and the most finely, strictly pure!"
"Leave me," she repeated; but he had quitted the room before her words were spoken.
She glanced in the direction whence his voice had come to her, and then, seeing that he was gone, she dropped back upon the sofa, and sat there, staring straight ahead at nothing, with tight-locked hands and colorless, alarmed face.
XX.
She heard Hollister reënter the house that night at a very late hour, and pass to his own apartments. It was only after dawn that she obtained a little restless and broken sleep. By nine o'clock she rang for her coffee, and then, after forcing herself to swallow it, began to dress, with her maid's assistance. Marie was a perfect servant. As she performed with capable exactitude one after another careful duty, the ease and charm of being thus waited upon appealed to Claire with an ironical emphasis. The very softness and tasteful make of her garments took a new and dreary meaning. She had forgotten for weeks the dainty details of her late life, its elegance of tone, smoothness of movement, nicety of balance. These features had grown customary and inconspicuous, as cambric will in time grow familiar to the skin that has brushed against coarser textures. But now the light, so to speak, had altered; it was cloudy and stormful; it brought out in vivid relief what before had been clad with the pleasant haze of habit. The very carpet beneath Claire's tread took a reminding softness; the numberless attractions and comforts of her chamber thrust forward special claims to her heed; even the elaborate or simple utensils of her dressing-table had each its distinct note of souvenir. She must so soon lose so much of it all!
As if by some automatic and involuntary process, memory slipped images and pictures before her mental vision; she had noted them in the still, dark hours of the previous night, and they remained unbanished now by the glow of the wintry morning. She saw herself a child, cowed and satirized by her coarse and domineering mother; she witnessed the episode of her gentle father's firm and protective revolt; she lived again through the prosperous rise of the family fortunes; she watched herself brave and quell the insolence of Ada Gerrard, and slowly but surely gain rank and recognition among those adverse and disdainful schoolfellows; she endured anew the chagrin of subsequent decadence—the commonness and the disrelish of her public school career, the disappointment and monotony of her Jersey City experience, and then, lastly, the laborious and deathly tedium of Greenpoint.... Here the strange panorama would cease; the magic-lantern of reminiscence had no more lenses in its shadowy repository; the actual took the place of dream, and startled her by an aspect more unreal than though wrought merely of recollection.
Had these recent weeks all been true? Had she climbed so high in fact and not in fancy? Was the throne from which fate now gave harsh threat of pushing her a throne not built of air, but material, tangible, solid? The strangeness of her own history affected her in a purely objective way. She seemed to stand apart from it and regard it as though it were some lapse of singular country for which she had gained the sight-seer's best vantage-point. Its acclivities were so sheer, its valleys were so abrupt, it took such headlong plunges and made such unexpected ascents.
The discreet and sedulous Marie divined little of what engrossed her mistress's mind, and withdrew in her wonted humility of courtesy when Claire, no longer needing her service, at last dismissed her.
But before doing so, Claire took pains to learn that Hollister had not yet descended for his breakfast, which of late he had usually eaten alone in the great dining-room. She soon passed into her adjacent boudoir, where fresh treasures and mementos addressed her through a silent prophecy of coming loss.