She cowered like a dog before threatening punishment, and her eyes, lifted to his face, were dog-like in their steadfast, wistful appeal.
"By train to Bhara and then I drove—for two days, Jim. But no one knew me. I didn't ask any questions—I didn't tell any one. Not a soul. I just found my way here. I had your letters and they described things so wonderfully, I felt I was coming home. Jim, how beautiful it all is! Much more beautiful than I ever dreamed!"
Partly she was trying to propitiate him, but partly the exclamation was sincere. Her brown eyes were wide and bright as they passed over the room's treasures, resting at last on the culminating vulgarity of the Venus. Barclay followed her gaze, then, without a word, he released her, and going over to the lamp, turned down the wick. It sputtered feebly, throwing up decreasing flashes of light on to the white, stupid loveliness of the goddess, and then died out. Through the darkness, Barclay's voice sounded thick with anger.
"Anybody might have seen us from the road," he said. "You must be mad, Marie, or bent on doing for my chances. Don't you know what I told you—or did you just choose to forget? Good God, don't whimper! You're like a child. You smash something and then you cry as though you were the injured party——"
"I was so awfully lonely——" she broke in, piteously.
He was silent. She could not read his expression, but the quiet following on his first violence suggested a furious effort to regain self-control. She waited, not moving or speaking, and presently he took up her plea, scrutinizing it with the level coldness of suppressed anger.
"Lonely, you say? Hadn't you friends enough? You used to make me sick with your boasts about them. There were the Mazzinis and the Aostas—in our Calcutta days they lived with us, fed on us, borrowed from us. What's become of them? You had money enough to buy the lot. Lonely!" He exploded on the word, falling on it with a raging bitterness, then choked himself back to his pose of judicial deliberation. "It did not at all occur to you that I might be lonely, I suppose. It did not occur to you that whilst you were lolling comfortably in your rut, I was cutting new roads for us both through a granite opposition with not a soul to help me. You imagined me in a whirl of conviviality, no doubt—fêted, courted, the catch of Gaya——" He laughed out. "You fool!" he flung at her, in a paroxysm of exasperation.
She gasped, as though he had struck her across the face, but she was no longer crying. Her voice sounded flat and tired like a child's.
"I was lonely," she reiterated patiently. "I had the Mazzinis and the Aostas. I saw them every day, and they were very kind. But they were not you, Jim. I wanted you all the time, night and day, worse and worse. I thought I should have died, wanting you. And I did imagine things. I couldn't help it. I thought how brilliant and handsome you were, and I knew you'd win through and climb—ever so high—and I should be left behind. I couldn't bear it, Jim, dear. I had to come."
Barclay did not answer, but now his silence was no longer the tense, savage thing it had been. She could see his tall, slight figure dimly outlined against the paler darkness of the garden. Presently he turned and drew up, the Chesterfield to the shadow's edge.