CHAPTER XIV
MARADICK IN A NEW RÔLE—HE AFTERWARDS SEES TONY’S
FACE IN A MIRROR
He didn’t precisely know what his feelings were; he was too hot, and the whole thing was too much of a surprise for him to think at all; the thing that he did most nearly resemble, if he had wanted similes, was some sharply contested citadel receiving a new attack on its crumbling walls before the last one was truly over.
But that again was not a simile that served with any accuracy, because he was so glad, so tumultuously and intensely glad, to see her. He wanted to keep that moment, that instant when she was coming down the path towards him, quite distinct from all the other moments of his life in its beauty and colours, and so he focussed in his mind the deep green of the trees and their purple shadows on the path, the noise that two birds made, and the deep rustle as of some moving water that her dress sent to him as she came.
He sat there, one hand on each knee, looking straight before him, motionless.
Mrs. Lester had that morning done her utmost to persuade her husband to “play a game.” She was brimming over with sentiment, partly because of the weather, partly because Treliss always made her feel like that, partly because it was “in the air” in some vague way through Tony.
She did not understand it, but she knew that she had one of her “fits,” a craving for excitement, for doing anything that could give one something of a fling.
But her talk with her husband had also partly arisen from her realisation of her feeling for Maradick. She was not a very serious woman, she took life very lightly, but she knew that her affection for her husband was by far the best and most important thing in her.
She knew this through all the passing and temporary moods that she might have, and she had learnt to dread those moods simply because she never knew how far she might go. But then Fred would be so provoking! As he was just now, for instance, paying no attention to her at all, wrapped in his stupid writing, talking about nerves and suggesting doctors.