They talked on and on very pleasantly, very cosily, and as the draught given him by the doctor began to take effect Barclay's eyes grew heavy and his voice gradually softer; finally his head fell back against the pillow and he slept.
Grisel sat for some time looking at him in his unconsciousness, and it seemed to the girl that she was really seeing for the first time this man who was to be her husband. She studied his face closely; its well marked eyebrows and strong serene mouth; a good face it was, she saw, the best of faces. And then she gave a little shiver and rose, for somehow the intimacy of the little scene was painful to her.
After a minute she went quietly out of the room and down into the garden. A little wind had risen as the sun began to go down, and the leaves in the big elm tree were stirring with small, brisk sounds, as if they, too, felt better for the coolness. The sky was unusually bright in its hard blueness, and the two lilac bushes, one purple and the other white, that had been gently grilling all day, sent out strong waves of sweetness as they swayed in the freshening air. Grisel Walbridge sat down on the steps and gazed out across the garden. One or two of the earlier rose bushes were starred with half-open buds, and a patch of some intensely yellow flower in one of the pathetic herbaceous borders caught her eye—so yellow it was that it looked like a pool of concentrated light—an altar of sunshine, the girl thought absently. Then her mind went back to the sleeping man in the drawing-room. "How handsome he looked," she said to herself resolutely. "How kind his face is, and how strong. I certainly am a very lucky girl." Yet somehow she seemed to know better than ever before what it was she was really doing in marrying this kind powerful man. Strong and placid and handsome as he undoubtedly was, the relaxation of sleep had revealed one thing very clearly to her. His face was as smooth, and more unlined than that of many much younger men whom she knew—the flesh looked firm and sound, and the muscles were shapely and did not sag, but she moved restlessly and leaning her head against the handrail on which a climbing rose had swung its first clumps of thick pink blossom. "He's old," she said, "old." In her security of perfect solitude she had, without knowing it, spoken aloud, and Oliver Wick, who had come down the passage noiselessly, on rubber-soled tennis shoes, heard her, without her having heard him, and for several minutes he stood in the doorway quite motionless, his white flannelled figure sharply outlined against the inner darkness, his tennis racquet in his hand, listening, as it seemed to him, to the repeated echo of her words. They seemed to go on for a long time, the words, "He is old—he is old."
Presently he tiptoed back into the house and a moment later came bounding out into the sunshine very noisily, so noisily that she turned with an irritated frown, and on her seeing who it was her frown deepened. "Oh, it is you," she said ungraciously, "I thought you were coming to dinner, you and Jenny."
"We are; Jenny is spending the night with Mrs. Gaskell-Walker, and I am at the Catherwoods."
"I see. Will you come upstairs? Sir John is asleep in the drawing-room. He has sprained his ankle and is asleep."
Wick expressed proper regret at the accident, but declined to go in.
"I have a message for you," he went on, sitting down, pulling up the knees of his trousers, "from Dorothy. She's awfully sorry to have missed you on Tuesday."
"Yes, I was sorry too, but I thought you quite understood that I was going to tea with Hermione."
He shook his head. "No, I muddled it somehow, fool that I am. And about Monday, I am afraid it is no good after all, for she is going to Birmingham to see her grandmother, who is ill. She had a wire while I was there last night."