“Ah! but not now, I have so much pain just now. Give her my love, and tell her—later.” Her black eyes from out of their hollows glanced half pitifully, half maliciously, at her husband, and then drooped resignedly with a quiver of bodily pain under brows that fell obliquely away from the furrow in the centre of her low Slav forehead.
“I’m very sorry that you’re so ill to-day. Can I do anything for you?” said Legard. It was all he found to say, and his face in the maze of his emotions expressed no one of them.
“Amuse yourself, mon cher, I have no want of anything, except to be alone, this is one of my bad days, you know.”
Again she looked at him, and, but for the pain of the whitened lips, one would have said she laughed. Giles turned away, but stopped at the window irresolutely; he had found no help. Irma Legard dropped her book with a slightly impatient gesture. A gleam of sun stealing round the screen fell on her face—she sat up, drew the screen forward, and sank back on her cushions with a sigh. The sound of a piano came from the next room.
“I beg your pardon,” said Giles, “I am going,” and stepped into the sunshine.
Through the green shutters of the adjoining room came a little petulant tune; Giles stopped, and his face quivered; the little tune gripped some string in his heart, it was as if the player had put her finger upon it, and pulled it towards her. He stood there leaning against the wall, with his hands in his pockets, and half-closed eyes. He had found the depth of those uncertain waters; they were just of that depth, whatever it might be, that mattered nothing. The reality of circumstance, of social relations and duties, no longer existed, they had become shadows to him; that which was real, the only thing which had substance, was the girl playing that tune in the shuttered room. Nothing else mattered. He had a momentary feeling of relief, the feeling which comes to the man whose life has been a compromise with circumstance, who has always been afraid of stretching out his hand too far, when, for the first time, he is conscious that his power of temporising has been taken from him—that in his life, it is to be all, or nothing. Shikari, the great brindled greyhound lying against the wall, paused in his occupation of lazily snapping at flies, and stretched himself to lick his master’s hand.
“Amuse yourself, mon cher!” His wife’s words came into Legard’s mind, and he laughed. He did not find things amusing.
The green shutters were opened gently, and a man stepped on to the terrace.
“How do you do, my dear Legard?” he said in slow, suave, purring tones, putting on a soft, grey hat; “how very fortunate to see you. I am just off, you know.”
Scrupulously dressed after the manner of the English, Gustavus Nielsen was unmistakably a foreigner. He was by birth a Swede, by education and adoption a Cosmopolitan. About forty years old, of medium height and substantial build, he carried a flaxen head stiffly upon his broad shoulders. His pale, sandy face, of a square moulding, was marked with innumerable little lines; one of two unfathomable eyes of a warm, reddish brown, was protected by a gold-rimmed eye-glass; and his tawny moustache curled walrus-like downwards to the level of his jaws. He carried under his arm a white, green-lined umbrella.