He lit a cigarette, strolled about the room, and came to rest standing before the fire and looking down on the glowing coals. He was sure now that Christina Alberta was blue-eyed, fragile, shy—with a deep sweet vein of humorous fantasy hidden away in her. Very probably she concealed a gift for writing. It would be for him perhaps to discover that and cultivate it and bring it out. Together they would protect Sargon, already more than half recovered from the intoxication of his dream. They would have to soften the humiliations of his complete awakening. How fortunate and as it were providential it was that he had been impelled to rescue the little man!—for otherwise he would never have met Christina Alberta, never won her timid wealth of love....
“Eh!
“But this is all damned nonsense!” said Bobby violently, and threw his cigarette into the fire. “This is just fancy! I haven’t even seen the girl!”
He lit his candle, put out Mrs. Plumer’s oil lamp with all the devices and precautions proper to this dangerous survival from the Dark Ages, and went up to bed. He stopped and listened outside Sargon’s door. The patient was asleep and breathing rather noisily—ever and again choking with a little cough.
“I wish the weather had kept warmer,” said Bobby.
When he opened his own bedroom door, the flame of his candle writhed and flared horizontally, the curtains streamed into the room and a sheet of paper flapped on the dressing-table. He put down the candle and went to shut the window. The wind was rising and there was a little patter of raindrops on the pane.
CHAPTER THE THIRD
The Last Phase
§ 1
IT was part of the general unsatisfactoriness of Bobby’s make-up that he was acutely responsive to meteorological conditions. That late Indian summer was over now, and the heavens and the earth and the air between began to push, hustle, wet, chill, darken, distress and bully him. Jumbled grey clouds came hurrying across Dymchurch from Dungeness and the Atlantic, torn, angular, outstretched clouds with malicious expressions like witches and warlocks, emitting fierce squirts of rain. Under their skirts came the waves in long rolling regiments, threatening from afar, breaking into premature handfuls of foam, gathering force at last, towering up for a last culminating thud against the sea-wall and spouting heavenward in white fountains of suddy water.
“Face it, man,” said Bobby. “Face it. It’s only Nature. Brace up to it. Think of this poor girl.”