And that was twelve years ago! She had bettered slightly, grown stronger, walked a little, then declined again. Now for five years past her life had been a colorless exchange of bed and reclining-chair, and, in this period, she had never left the house.
Margaret shivered in the sun as she thought. At intervals she had heard of his life. “Such a lovely life!” people said. She had thought of his self-sacrifice and devotion as something very beautiful. It had been an ever-present ideal to her of spiritual love. In her own self-dissatisfaction she had flown to this haven instinctively, as to a dear example. A strange desire to stab herself with the visual presence of her own lack had possessed her. But in some way the steel had failed her. She was conscious now of a vague self-reproach that her greater sorrow was for Melwin and not for the invalid. Surely Lydia was the one to be sorry for, and yet there was an awfulness about the life he led that she was coming to feel acutely.
The crying incompletion, the negative hollowness of it, had smote her. His full life had stopped, like a sluggish stream. His vitality, his energies, could not go ahead. He was bound through all these years to the body of this death. Love had broadened his gaze, lifted his horizon, and then Fate had suddenly reared this crystal, impassable wall, through which he must ever gaze and ever be denied. He was condemned still to love her and to watch agonizedly the slender gradations, the imperceptible stages by which she became less and less of her old self to him.
Margaret gazed out across the velvet edge of the hills, and felt a sense of dissatisfaction in the color harmony. A doubt had darkened the windows of her soul and turned the golden sunlight to a duller chrome. She was so absorbed that she caught a sharp breath as the French window behind her clicked raspingly and swung inward on its hinges. It was Melwin.
He came slowly forward through the window, holding his head slightly on one side as though he listened for something behind him. She found herself wondering how he had acquired the habit. His face was motionless and set, with a peculiar absence of placidity—like a graven image with topaz eyes. To Margaret it suggested a figure on an Egyptian bas-relief, and yet he looked much the same, she thought, as he had ten years before. Perhaps his beard was grayer and he was more stoop-shouldered, and—yes, his temples looked somehow hollower and older. He had a way of pausing just before the closing word of a question, giving it a quaint and unnatural emphasis, and of gazing above and past one when he spoke or answered. When he had first greeted her on her arrival, Margaret had turned instinctively in the belief that he had spoken to some one unperceived behind her.
“Will you go in to—Lydia?” he said, difficultly. “I think she wants you.”
As Margaret came down the stairway a moment later, tying the ribbons of her broad hat under her chin, his look of inquiry met her at the door, and the tinge of eagerness in his lack-lustre eyes faded back into stolidity again as she told him it was only an errand for Lydia.
She jumped from the piazza and raced around the drive toward the stables. Creed, the coachman, whose wool was growing gray in a lifetime of allegiance to the Whiting stock, was standing by the window, holding a harvest apple for the black, reaching lip and white, impatient teeth of his favorite charge inside the stall. He dropped his currycomb as he saw her.
“Mornin’, Miss Marg’et. Want me fur sump’n?”