NIGHT
A quicker breeze was stirring as John Valiant went back along the Red Road. It brushed the fraying clouds from the sky, leaving it a pale gray-blue, sprinkled with wan stars. He had waited in the garden at Rosewood till Shirley, aided by Emmaline and with Ranston’s anxious face hovering in the background, having performed those gentle offices which a woman’s fainting spell requires, had come to reassure him and to say good night.
The road seemed no longer dark; it swam before him now in a soft winged mistiness with here and there an occasional cedar thrusting grotesquely above huddled cobble-wall and black-lined rail-fence. As he went, her form swam before him. The texture of each shadowy bush seemed that gauzy drapery, sprayed with lilies-of-the-valley, and the leaves syllabled her name in cautious whispers. That brief touch of her, when he had caught her in his arms, lingered, as the memory of the harp music on his inner ear, pricking his senses like fine musk, a thing of soft new pulses flashing over him like spurts of vapor.
As he threw off his coat in the bedroom he had chosen for his own, he felt the hard corner of the Lucile in the pocket, and drawing it out, laid it on the table by the bedside. He seemed to feel again the tingle of his cheek where a curling strand of her coppery hair had sprung against it when her head had bent beside his own to read the marked lines. By now perhaps that riotous crown was all unbound and falling redly about her shoulders, those shoulders no longer peeping from a weave of lilies, but draped in virginal white. Perhaps she knelt now by her silk-covered bed, warming the coverlid with her breast, her down-bent face above her locked palms. What did she pray for, he wondered. As a child, his own prayers had been comprehensive ones. Even the savages who lived at Wishing-House and their innumerable offspring had been regularly included in those petitions.
When he had undressed he sat an hour in the candle-blaze, a dressing-gown thrown over his shoulders, striving vainly to recreate that evening call, to remember her every word and look and movement. For a breath her face would flush suddenly before him, like a live thing; then it would mysteriously fade and elude him, though he clenched his hands on the arms of his chair in the fierce mental effort to recall it. Only the intense blue of her eyes, the tawny sweep of her hair—these and the touch of her, the consciousness of her warm and vivid fragrance, remained to wrap all his senses in a mist woven of gold and fire.
Shirley, meanwhile, had sat some time beside her mother’s bed, leaning from a white chintz-covered chair, her anxiety only partially allayed by reassurances, now and then stooping to lay her young cheek against the delicate arm in its lacy sleeve or to pass her hand lovingly up and down its outline, noting with a recurrent passion of tenderness the transparency of the skin with its violet veining and the shadows beneath the closed eyes. Emmaline, moving on soft worsted-shod feet about the dim room, at length had whispered:
“You go tuh baid, honey. I stay with Mis’ Judith till she go tuh sleep.”
“Yes, go, Shirley,” said her mother. “Haven’t I any privileges at all? Can’t I even faint when I feel like it, without calling out the fire-brigade? You’ll pamper me to death and heaven knows I don’t need it.”
“You won’t let me telephone for Doctor Southall?”