A sort of ripple of sound behind made her turn.
Cosme had followed her, was standing in the open door, and had heard her speech. The weapon had struck home, and she saw how it had poisoned all his blood.
He vanished without a word. Sheila turned back to Miss Blake a paler face. She let fall all her flowers.
"Now he'll never come back," she said.
She climbed up the ladder to her loft.
There she sat for an hour, listening to the silence. Her mind busied itself with trivial memories. She thought of Amelia Plecks…. It would have comforted her to hear that knock and the rattle of her dinner tray. The little sitting-room at Hudson's Hotel, with its bit of tapestry and its yellow tea-set and its vases filled with flowers, seemed to her memory as elaborate and artificial as the boudoir of a French princess. Farther than Millings had seemed from her old life did this dark little gabled attic seem from Millings. What was to be the end of this strange wandering, this withdrawing of herself farther and farther into the lonely places! She longed for the noise of Babe's hearty, irrepressible voice with its smack of chewing, of her step coming up the stairs to that little bedroom under Hudson's gaudy roof. Could it be possible that she was homesick for Millings? For the bar with its lights and its visitors and its big-aproned guardian? Her lids were actually smarting with tears at the recollection of Carthy's big Irish face…. He had been such a good, faithful watch-dog. Were men always like that—either watch-dogs or wolves? The simile brought her back to Hidden Creek. It grew darker and darker, a heavy darkness; the night had a new soft weight. There began to be a sort of whisper in the stillness—not the motion of pines, for there was no wind. Perhaps it was more a sensation than a sound, of innumerable soft numb fingers working against the silence … Sheila got up, shivering, lighted her candle, and went over to the small, four-paned window under the eaves. She pressed her face against it and started back. Things were flying toward her. She opened the sash and a whirling scarf of stars flung itself into the room. It was snowing. The night was blind with snow.
CHAPTER IX
WORK AND A SONG
On the studio skylight the misty autumn rain fell that night, as the snow fell against Sheila's window-panes, with a light tapping. Below it Dickie worked. He had very little leisure now for stars or dreams. For the first time in his neglected and mismanaged life he knew the pleasure of congenial work; and this, although Lorrimer worked him like a slave. He dragged him over the city and set his picture-painting faculty to labor in dark corners. Dickie, every sense keen and clean, was not allowed to flinch. No, his freshness was his value. And the power that was in him, driven with whip and spur, throve and grew and fairly took the bit in its teeth and ran away with its trainer.
"Look here, my lad," Lorrimer had said that morning, "you keep on laying hands on the English language the way you've been doing lately and I'll have to get a job for you on the staff. Then my plagiarism that has been paying us both so well comes to an end. I won't have the face to edit stuff like this much longer." Lorrimer did not realize in his amazement that Dickie's mind had always busied itself with this exciting and nerve-racking matter of choosing words. From his childhood, in the face of ridicule and outrage, he had fumbled with the tools of Lorrimer's trade. No wonder that now knowledge and practice, and the sort of intensive training he was under, magically fitted all the jumbled odds and ends into place. Dickie had stopped looking over his shoulder. The pursuing pack, the stealthy-footed beasts of the city, had dropped utterly from his flying imagination. There was only one that remained faithful—that craving for beauty—half-god, half-beast. Against him Dickie still pressed his door shut. Lorrimer's gift of work had not quieted the leader of the pack. But it had brought Dickie something that was nearly happiness. The very look of him had changed; he looked driven rather than harried, keen rather than harassed, eager instead of vague, hungry rather than wistful. Only, sometimes, Dickie's brain would suddenly turn blank and blind from sheer exhaustion. This happened to him now. The printed lines he was studying lost all their meaning. He put his forehead on his hands. Then he heard that eerie, light tapping above him on the skylight. But he was too tired to look up.