XXIV
THE COMIC MASK
She listened to the sound of wheels, first rattling loud on the gravel, slowly growing fainter. Then stillness was with her again, and inanition. She looked around and up, and had no start at seeing Clara's small face watching her over the gallery of the rotunda. It seemed to her that appearance was natural to her existence now, like her shadow. She looked away. When she raised her eyes again Clara was coming down the stairs, and even at that distance Flora saw she carried something in her hand—something flat and small and wrapped in a filmy bit of paper.
Out of the chaos of her feeling rose the solitary thought—the picture which she had bought that morning, the picture of Farrell Wand. She watched it drawing near her with wonder. She sat up trembling. She had a great longing and a horror to tear away the filmy paper and see Kerr at last brutally revealed. She could not have told afterward whether Clara spoke to her. She was conscious of her pausing; conscious of the faint rustle of her skirt passing; conscious, finally, that the small swathed square was in her hand.
She tore the tissue paper through. She held a photograph, a mounted kodak print. She made out the background to be sky and water and the rail of a ship with silhouettes of heads and shoulders, a jungle of black; and in the middle distance caught in full motion the single figure of a man, back turned and head in profile. He was moving from her out of the picture, and with the first look she knew it was not Kerr.
Her first thought was that there had been a trick played on her! But no—across the bottom of the picture, in Judge Buller's full round hand, was written, "Farrell Wand boarding the Loch Ettive." She held it high to the light. Clara had been faithful to her bargain. It was the picture that had deceived her. She studied it with passionate earnestness. She did not know the bearded profile; but in the burly shoulders, in the set and swing of the body in motion, more than all in the lowering, peering aspect of the whole figure, she began to see a familiar something. She held it away from her by both thin edges, and that aspect swelled and swelled in her startled eyes, until suddenly the figure in the picture seemed to be moving from her, not up a gang-plank, but through a glare of sun over grass between broad beds of flowers.
She was faint. She was going to fall. She caught at the chair to save herself, and still she was dropping down, down, into a gulf of spinning darkness. "Oh, Harry!" she whispered, and let her head roll back against the arm of the fauteuil.
With a dim sense of rising through immeasurable distances back to light she opened her eyes. She saw Mrs. Herrick's face, and as this was connected in her mind with protection she smiled.
"Do you feel better?" Mrs. Herrick asked her. Then she opened her eyes wide and saw the walls and the high-arched ceiling of the hall directly above her, knew herself lying on the floor, saw above her the figure of Clara standing with a bottle of salts, and then remembered; and, with a moan, buried her face in Mrs. Herrick's lap. "Oh, no, no, no; don't bring me back; I don't want to come back!"
Their voices sounding high above her were speaking. Mrs. Herrick said: "What is that?" Then Clara murmured. Then there was the light rustling of paper. Flora moved her hand.