‘You are too kind,’ I burst out eagerly, for some inexplicable reason repelled by the suggestion of Trueberry and myself together under her roof. ‘My friend is in the best of hands, and I should not dream of trespassing so far. Besides, I enjoy my walks to and from the cottage.’
What an idiot I was, to be sure, and what a miserably inadequate refusal! Yet could I give my real reason? That a sharp-witted man of the world, an intelligent French writer of some fame, should be driven to inane stuttering at the greatest moment of his existence, was surely a grotesque fatality. I saw with a shock the contraction of the delicate brows, and the surprised interrogation of the proud glance she levelled at me. Then pride and surprise ebbed back to their still depths, and the brows smoothed by sheer effort of will, I divined, and she smiled coldly, a little austere smile, remote and frosted like a ray on ice. A woman of my own land would have read below the commonplace words the deeper melody of the heart’s unuttered eloquence. But Brases, so untutored, so wrapped in her musing and undiscerning solitude, had not this tact of sympathy, this subtle divination, this keen scent of sex. Her simplicity was mournful and gentle, but not penetrative nor scrutinising. Mute fervour I saw would leave her untroubled, and with Trueberry near, I feared to hope her regard would ever gleam and drop in glad surrender at my coming, or her pulses quicken to the bidding of my touch. I felt crushed, out of reach of comfort, and resolved no more to tread that haunting pathway from the little rocky plateau to this sombre valley, but to go out with my immeasurable pain into the soothing limitlessness of earth and sea and air upon the moors. Yet there was the misery of it—I could not command my will. I felt the folly of it; I apprehended the misery of a rivalry between Trueberry and me,—self at odds with the finest friendship that ever knitted men together. But I as well knew that my hunger to-morrow for Brases would be greater even than to-day, and a starving man will gnaw at straw when you refuse him bread.
I found Trueberry half raised upon his pillow, a pink flush like the reflection of a flame upon his pallid cheek, and the blue of his eyes burning darkly.
‘Have you seen her?’ he asked, meeting my hand affectionately.
‘Yes.’
The dull, brief tone must have struck him as implied negation of his visible enthusiasm, for he scanned my face quickly, and asked in a surprised voice—
‘Don’t you find her beautiful, Gontran?’
‘Most beautiful,’ I replied, with grim emphasis.
I sat down, and took up a volume of The Ring and the Book, which lay on a little table close to an arm-chair at the foot of the bed.
‘No, no, Gontran. Not that, pray. She has been reading it to me,’ he shouted, as if a wound were pressed.