René Dax raised himself higher and looked long and searchingly at his friend from head to foot. The red lamp began to glow behind his somber eyes again.
"You do not possess one-tenth of my talent," he declared; "but you possess ten times my physique. Therefore you will obtain. You will prosper. You will lie soft. From the most fastidious to the vilest all women are the same. The Moslems are right. Women have neither soul nor intellect, only bodies, bodies, bodies. All they want in a man is physique."
His tone changed to a wheedling one. He crawled over the soft, black silk cushions and put his arm coaxingly about Adrian's neck.
"See, mon vieux, see, be amiable! Do not loiter. Come at once. Let us search together diligently every corner, every nook. To recover it would fill me with rapture; and there is still time before the school-bell rings for class. Come. Help me to find my lost laughter," he said.
And at that moment, with a startling emotion of hope and of relief, Adrian observed, for the first time, that the infamous drawings upon the walls had been painted out, leaving the whole, from floor to ceiling, white.
V
THE LIVING AND THE DEAD
CHAPTER I
SOME PASSAGES FROM JOANNA SMYRTHWAITE's
LOCKED BOOK
The drought was slow in breaking. Day after day ragged-headed thunder pillars boiled up along the southeastern horizon; and, drifting northward, inland, in portentous procession as the afternoon advanced, massed themselves as a mighty mountain range against the sulky blue of the upper sky. About their flanks, later, sheet lightning streaked and quivered, making the hot night unrestful, as with the winking of malevolent and monstrous eyes.
Owing to the lie of the land and the encircling trees, this aerial drama was not visible from the Tower House. But the atmospheric pressure, and nervous tension produced by it, very sensibly invaded the great woodland. The French window of Joanna Smyrthwaite's bedroom stood wide open on to the balcony. She had drawn an easy-chair close up to it, and, dressed in her white woolen négligé, sat there in the half-dark. She left the négligé unfastened at the neck, it being an unsuitably warm garment to wear on so hot a night. She was aware it caused her discomfort; despite which she wore it. The pristine freshness of it was passed. It was slightly soiled, and the knife-pleatings, losing their sharpness of edge, sagged irregularly in places, like the bellows of an old concertina. More than once Mrs. Isherwood had declared, "Miss Joanna ought to buy herself a new wrapper, or at any rate let this poor old object go to the cleaners'." But Joanna refused, almost angrily, to part with it even for a week. She gave no reason for her refusal, but locked the insulted garment away in a drawer of her wardrobe, whence she extracted it with jealous tenderness after Isherwood had left her at night. Then she wore it, if but for half an hour; and, wearing it, she brooded, fondling her right hand, which, upon two occasions, Adrian Savage had kissed.