"We have all been trying that remedy," put in Eustace. "What with the men coming in, and the boats being engaged, we shall want more whiskey to-morrow, Wilson."
"No, we shan't," retorted his host quickly; "I mean it's beastly stuff, you know. I never take anything but claret myself."
"Awfully difficult to get decent claret nowadays," remarked Eustace with the ease, to him so delightfully new, of the rich man who quarrels with the supply and not the price. So the topic passed.
"I'll have a cigar and go to bed; I didn't sleep a bit last night," said Mr. Wilson shortly after they returned to the bare drawing-room, guiltless of all decoration, where Lady Maud's Parisian teagown looked so oddly out of place.
"Take some hot whiskey and water," laughed his wife. "Won't you all go to the smoking-room? You must be tired, professor, after your long walk."
But the learned man's social beliefs forbade cigars when a charming woman was the alternative, so he elected to remain. Being in reality much fatigued, however, he shortly afterwards gave way to the seductions of semi-darkness and an arm-chair. Semi-darkness because Kirsty's lamp smoking horribly, they preferred the light of the blazing peat fire. Outside the wind crooned round the house,--a lullaby to ears acquainted with its other notes, but to those accustomed to the stillness of the south, a banshee wail of coming trouble. With the firelight playing on the jet agraffes which held the cunning draperies on her gleaming bust and arms, Lady Maud was a picture few men could look on absolutely unmoved; but if Eustace Gordon felt the charm of her beauty, he gave no sign of it as yet. They sate there in the semi-darkness side by side, sometimes silent, sometimes talking indifferently of indifferent subjects. Alone, as utterly alone in the world as if they two were the only man and woman in it; for the barrier which luxury raises between one human being and another had given way. Supposing, for instance, the butler, instead of bobbing up and down on the Minch in the Clansman, had been at his post, would they have been sitting in semi-darkness uninterrupted by inroads for coffee cups, peats, and candles? Again, would any really high-class butler have permitted Professor Endorwick to snooze undisturbed in his chair, for two hours on end? Not that he did any harm by his slumbers; he might have awakened at any moment and joined unhesitatingly in the desultory talk of those two. True enough; yet when, at last, Eustace did rouse the learned man by lighting Lady Maud's candle, they both felt that the tête-à-tête had not left them quite as it found them; that in some of those half-indifferent ordinary remarks a virtue had gone out of them.
She took the light from him, decidedly, with a refusal of his offer to pilot her along the dark passages; angry with herself for the very thought, she still felt that it would be wiser to say good-night here under the professor's eye; and as she went up the dim staircase, she paused to give a glance at the sea with a wonder as to when Louisa would find calm or courage enough to attempt the voyage. In a vague way, she recognized that things would go more comfortably if she were there. But beyond a sense of motion in the deep grey plane stretching away to a paler grey horizon, she could see nothing. The tide was flowing one way or another; that much was certain.
She opened the door of her dressing-room softly, so as not to disturb her husband should he have fallen asleep. A great fire burnt bravely in her little sitting-room beyond, and something in the unusual silence of it all enhanced its comfort in her eyes. If Josephine had been awaiting her as usual, she could not have put off the task of undressing in favour of sheer idleness by the fire. Her husband was right; something in that rhythmical surge of the sea made one not exactly restless, but on the alert; disinclined for action, yet prepared for it. A foolish idea, since what could be going to happen to the small household already, for the most part, asleep? The professor would have taken the first opportunity of recommencing that snooze legitimately in his bed, and even Eustace,--why would her thoughts run on Eustace? Irritated at her own self-consciousness, she took up a book impatiently. It interested her, and, by and by, she turned for the second volume, to find that it must have been left in the travelling bag which Kirsty's ignorance had put in the bedroom. Shading the light carefully, she passed through the dressing-room, and so into the room beyond, giving a tentative glance at the bed as she entered, lest she should disturb the sleeper. It was empty. Her hand fell from the light; she looked round the room in surprise, and the next moment was on her knees beside a figure on the floor,--a figure which even in her first alarm brought back a horrible memory.
"Edward! what is the matter? Are you ill?"
Once, as a slip of a girl out blackberrying, she had come upon a tipsy tramp in a ditch; a beast of a man who had met her innocent benevolence by stumbling to his feet, pursuing her as far as his feet would carry him. This was her solitary personal experience of drunkenness, and something in her husband's look and attitude revived the dread which had remained with her ever since. Yet he might be ill--very, very ill--