“Madame is asleep, Monsieur.”
“Ah! then do not wake her for the world! I will call again later. It is of no consequence. I will take a little walk. Thank you, Pauline; shut the door gently.”
Giles recognised the peculiarly soft, purring tones of Nielsen’s voice. The door closed softly, and through the flower-covered trellis work, he watched the Swede’s square figure as he tiptoed his way down the steps. He noticed black clouds creeping fast towards the coast from over the sea, and the olives below the road beginning to sway a little. He saw very clearly, and with a childish feeling of irritation, Nielsen’s broad, wrinkled face, with its great tawny moustache and gold-rimmed eyeglass, lifted towards the sky at an angle which bared his short neck.
His brain was in an exhausted state of nervous excitement, rendering it as receptive of outward impression as a photographer’s plate; everything he saw and heard was graven upon it indelibly.
When Nielsen had disappeared, Giles turned back to his wife’s couch. The bars of sunlight were gone. She was still sleeping heavily; would she never wake, and let him get this over?
He fingered the medicine glass mechanically, there were a few drops of moisture at the bottom. He smelled it—the sickly-sweet, unmistakable smell of morphia—and put it down with a faint quiver of disgust. The drug she took every day to make her sleep. He looked at the bottle nearly full of a white liquid, with a kind of fascination. A tenth of it would kill him! An easy death, that! He felt with indignation that the bottle had no business to be there; his wife always put it under her cushions before going to sleep, for fear of a mistake—he had seen her many times. Fingering the cool, slippery round of the glass, he looked mechanically about him for the medicine that she took the instant she woke, heavy and dazed from the morphia. It should be there ready, it was always there! There was no bottle upon the table except the wrong one, that which should have been under her cushions.
A thought flashed through his mind, a vivid vision snatched from the future. What if—! He stood up, hardly breathing, his hands behind his back, looking down upon his wife. Her first waking act! Half conscious—the wrong bottle!—the wrong....
He drew a deep breath, turned suddenly upon his heel, and passed swiftly through the window.
The humming of insects and the long droning sigh of the coming wind was in the breath of the warm air as he stepped out. A creeper went swish-swish over his head, and a loosened spray of jessamine beat him in the face. Its sweet, subtle scent penetrated his senses, and gave him a queer feeling as if his heart were contracting within him, and the cool beat of the leaves against his face felt like the touch of fingers, forcing him back. He pulled the window to, very gently. A chance had been sent!
A chance had been sent! He had a dim vision of black clouds driving over the sky, olives swaying in a long line in front of him, and there was the road, long, white, and dusty, and he knew that what he had to do was to get down it, as far and as fast as he could. To get down it, before he began to think. He began to run—he had no hat on, and he knew it, but he knew that it was not his business to inquire into the reason why he had no hat, it was to get over the ground quickly.