She fought the desire to peer at him again, but finally it gained complete possession of her, and she drew back the curtain once more.
He was lying just as quietly as before. His heavy hair, a little disordered on the pillow, gave him a noble, interesting appearance. He did not seem at all a fellow of whom to be afraid. It was incredible that he could have written those letters.
She tried to trace in his features a likeness to the youth of ten years ago, whom she had known when she was but a little girl, who had tied her braids to her chair, and put raw oysters and caterpillars down her back, or stretched invisible cords to trip her feet in dark places; who made her visits to a beloved uncle—whom he also had the right to call uncle, though he was no cousin of hers—a long list of catastrophes resulting in tears; who had never failed to mortify her on all occasions possible, and once—— But the memories were too horrible as they crowded one upon another! Let them be forgotten!
She watched the face before her keenly, critically, yet she could see no trace of any such character as she had imagined the boy George must have developed as a man; of which his letters had given her ample proof. This man’s face was finely-cut and sensitive. There was nothing coarse or selfish in its lines. The long, dark eyelashes lay above dark circles of weariness, and gave that look of boyishness that always touches the maternal chord in a woman’s heart. George used to have a puffy, self-indulgent look under his eyes even when he was a boy. She had imagined from his last photograph that he would be much stouter, much more bombastic; but, then, in his sleep, perhaps those things fell from a man.
She tried to turn away indifferently, but something in his face held her. She studied it. If he had been any other man, any stranger, she would have said from looking at him critically that kindness and generosity, self-respect and respect for women, were written all over the face before her. There was fine, firm modelling about the lips and the clean-shaven chin; and about the forehead the look almost of a scholar; yet she thought she knew the man before her to be none of these things. How deceptive were looks! She would probably be envied rather than pitied by all who saw her. Well, perhaps that was better. She could the easier keep her trouble to herself. But stay, what was there about this man that seemed different? The smooth face? Yes. She had the dim impression that last night he wore a mustache. She must have been mistaken, of course. She had only looked at him when absolutely necessary, and her brain was in such a whirl; but still there seemed to be something different about him.
Her eyes wandered to the hand that lay across his breast. It was the fine white hand of the professional man, the kind of hand that somehow attracts the eye with a sense of cleanness and strength. There was nothing flabby about it. George as a boy used to have big, stumpy fingers and nails chewed down to the quick. She could remember how she used to hate to look at them when she was a little girl, and yet somehow could not keep her eyes away. She saw with relief that the nails on this hand were well shaped and well cared for.
He looked very handsome and attractive as he lay there. The sun shot one of its early daring bolts of light across his hair as the train turned in its course and lurched northward around a curve. It glinted there for a moment, like a miniature search-light, travelling over the head, showing up every wave and curve. He had the kind of hair which makes a woman’s hand instinctively long to touch it. Celia wondered at the curious thoughts that crowded through her mind, knowing that all the while there was the consciousness that when this man should wake she would think of nothing but his hateful personality as she had known it through the years. And she was his wife! How strange! How terrible! How impossible to live with the thought through interminable weary years! Oh, that she might die at once before her strength failed and her mother found out her sorrow! She lay back again on her pillows very still and tried to think, but somehow a pleasant image of him, her husband, lingered in her memory. Could it be possible that she would ever see anything pleasant in him? Ever endure the days of his companionship? Ever come to the point where she could overlook his outrageous conduct toward her, forgive him, and be even tolerant of him? Sharp memories crowded upon her, and the smarting tears stung their way into her eyes, answering and echoing in her heart, “No, no, a thousand times, no!” She had paid his price and gained redemption for her own, but—forget what he had done? Never!
The long strain of weariness, and the monotony of the onrushing train, lulled her half into unconsciousness again, and the man on the couch slumbered on.
He came to himself suddenly, with all his senses on the alert, as the thumping noise and motion of the train ceased, and a sudden silence of open country succeeded, broken now and again by distant oncoming and receding voices. He caught the fragment of a sentence from some train official: “It’s a half-hour late, and maybe more. We’ll just have to lie by, that’s all. Here, you, Jim, take this flag and run up to the switch——” The voice trailed into the distance, ended by the metallic note of a hammer doing something mysterious to the underpinning of the car.
Gordon sat up suddenly, his hand yet across his breast, where his first waking thought had been to feel if the little pencil-case were safe.