It was a singular affair; with the discretion of experience he filed it for reference, and sat quietly nursing his chin and looking at the floor.
Outside, the wind moaned and raged, and a driving rain began to beat against the windows. Inside was the stillness of death itself.
Giles had fallen into a chair with his elbows resting on the table, and his face buried in his hands. The hunted feeling of the moment had gone in a great indifference—a numb sensation that was creeping over him. What did it matter? Let the fellow think what he would, he could know nothing. There was nothing to know, of course—it was a matter between him and his own conscience.
He was surprised that he no longer felt pain, remorse, or indecision, only a dull craving for rest, and that peculiar numbness in his brain and limbs.
There was a sound of wheels outside—then footsteps—he heard them indistinctly through the hissing of the rain and the moaning of the wind. The door opened, and some one came into the room.
In the dim light he had an impression of a man with a bearded face and dark clothes, of water dripping from the sleeves of his coat and from his hat. A doctor! Not his wife’s doctor! He was conscious, too, of the maid’s presence, of low-voiced questions and answers in French, of fingers pointed at himself, of a long hush, of the lifting of something white on the couch and of its being laid gently back again.
He had an impression of being spoken to, and of answering, of the subdued rattle of Venetian blinds drawn up, of the soft beating of the rain against the window panes.
The group of figures round the couch seemed to shift and shift again. There was another long hush, then a whisper in French.
“Poor fellow, he seems quite overcome!” And another voice, low also, and of uncertain intonation, said, “Que voulez-vous? it is his wife.”
In a silence, that seemed everlasting, he sat staring at a black figure leaning over the couch and going through evolutions with a bottle, measuring, smelling, tasting it, bending forward till his body was right-angled, raising himself again. Then the silence came to an end in words pronounced, distinctly and with finality, in the French tongue.