She found him close beside her when she regained consciousness. She lay upon the lounge in her own dressing-room upstairs. He was bathing her forehead with cologne, and holding to her nostrils a handkerchief drenched with it. He had begun to be alarmed at her continued swoon. The first thing that her eyes reopened upon was his smile of glad relief.
The light of that smile stayed with Claire through years. It bathed her life in perpetual sunshine.
Everything altered in a few more weeks. They left the great house and went to live in the smaller one, which Claire personally owned, and which Hollister would not let her give back to him, though she pleaded with him more than once on this subject.
"No," he would always say. "It is yours, and that means it is mine as well. I meant, when the crash first came, that you should keep it, and I was glad that the law made it yours. If I let you give it back to me, this would look as if I had lost faith in you. And I have lost no faith; I have gained a new faith—that is all."
'To think that I should ever have known this man and not have loved him!' she would say to herself again and again.
Every successive day brought with it a dear surprise. She felt toward her husband as though his nature were a region through which she had journeyed heedlessly but was now revisiting with sharpened vision, vitalized intelligence. Traits and qualities that she could not but remember him to have possessed, now assumed a beauty, a harmony, a proportion, an allurement that she had never before dreamed of recognizing. A fresh light, so to speak, flooded the beloved landscape of his character. Vale, grove, wayside, were all preciously different from of old. Over them sang awakened birds, and still higher leaned a shining sky, fond, fathomless, prophetic.
Very few of their former fashionable acquaintances showed the slightest sign of deserting them. Hollister had been one of the many victims of the dire panic, but it soon became generally understood that he was going to make honorable settlement with his creditors—that he was on the list of the seriously wounded, so to speak, and not on that of the killed. In many instances there was even an increase of civility. Cards were left at the door of the small house, just as they had been left at the door of the more spacious one. Society made it a matter of amour propre not to drop them. It had taken them up; it could not afford to discountenance them for the single fault of a reduced income. The thorough-paced plutocrat is always very slow to admit his claims founded on anything so vulgar as a purely mercenary basis; and the aristocrat, on the other hand, will very often pay you a kind of proud loyalty when he has once openly ranked you as his equal. Moreover, both Claire and her husband had an ample personal popularity to fall back upon. They had been graceful and charming young figures, felicitously harmonizing with their festal background. Their absence left a sensible void.
But it was an absence, and as such it continued. Claire's love for the superficial glitter and pomp of what she had always inwardly felt to be sham and falsity was no longer even a dumb sensation. It had become the merest memory, and by no means a pleasant one. She had changed for the last time in her life. The change was securely permanent, now. If she looked into the future and asked herself what unfulfilled desire lay there, it was always to thrill with the hope that Herbert might one day be rid of all financial worriment, and that their home, already lit and warmed by a precious mutual love, might receive the blessing of a happy tranquillity as well.
For a long time this hope looked very far from being realized. She was untiringly devoted to his interests, and would hold long talks with him regarding the complicated and distracting nature of his affairs. Her apt mind, her ready and shrewd counsel, no longer surprised him; but he recognized with an untold joy the different motives that now spurred and animated her. In the end light began to break from darkness. Hollister still kept steady the extraordinary nerve which had before enabled him to set aflame and continue such astonishing pyrotechnics of speculation. It slowly and surely became evident to him that he would soon have steered clear of all disastrous reefs, and bring forth from the final dying rage of the big tempest a ship not so wholly shattered that careful repairs and cautious sailing hereafter might not keep it very seaworthy for many years.
Claire had meanwhile exulted in her economies, and conducted them with that same easy tact and skill which had marked her past supervision of a large and splendid establishment. She still preserved a certain residuum of friends. There was no ascetic renunciation of all worldly pleasures, either on her own or Hollister's part. It amused her to observe just whom she retained as her intimates and allies. The survival of the fittest, in this respect, was something to note and value. It showed her that the gay throng in which she had shone was not all made of worthlessly flippant members. But those, both men and women, whom she now liked to have about her had each stood some pleasant test, had each presented to her some solid or sterling trait of mind or character, which gave them a passport into the gentler, healthier, and wiser conditions of her new life.