Then he opened the door and passed into the smoking-room to join his junior partner, with a quite expressionless face.
CHAPTER V
PASSAGES FROM JOANNA SMYRTHWAITE'S LOCKED BOOK
"You won't go sitting up writing to-night, Miss Joanna? You should get right into bed, for you are properly worn out."
"It would be useless for me to attempt to sleep yet, Isherwood, but I shall not sit up late."
This, between two women standing on the gallery of the spacious, heavily carpeted stair-head. Save for the feeble light of their glass-shaded candles the place was in darkness. The atmosphere, oppressive from the heat given off by radiators in the hall below and upon the landing itself, was permeated by the clinging odor of some disinfectant. They spoke in subdued voices, covered and whispering as those of reverent-minded persons unwillingly compelled to hold conversation in church. The northeasterly wind—which, at this same hour, cried homeless along the steep house-roofs of the Quai Malaquais to the disturbance of Gabrielle St. Leger's meditations upon the deceptions of modern marriage—raked the thick-set fir and pine trees bordering the carriage-drive outside, and shattered against the elaborately leaded panes of the high staircase windows, making the thick velvet curtains which covered them sway and quiver in the draught.
"You had better let me wait and brush your hair as usual, Miss Joanna. It might soothe your nerves," the elder of the two women said. She was a comely, vigilant-eyed person, a touch of mustache on her long upper lip and a ruddiness upon her high cheek-bones as of sun-ripened fruit. Though well on in the sixties, her carriage was upright, and her hair, looped window-curtain fashion over her ears and plaited in a round at the back of her head, still showed as black as her close-fitted black silk dress. First nurse in the Smyrthwaite family, now for many years lady's maid and housekeeper, capable, prejudiced, caustic of speech, untiring in faithful devotion to those—the very few—whom she loved, Mrs. Isherwood, virgin and spinster, represented a domestic type becoming all too rapidly extinct.
The younger woman made no immediate answer. Her bearing and attitude bespoke a great lassitude as she stood resting her right hand on the ball of the newel-post. The light of the candle she carried was thrown upward, showing a face making but small claim to beauty. A thick, pasty complexion, straight, heavy, yellowish auburn hair turned back over a pad from the high, square forehead. No sufficient softening of the pale, anxious, blue-gray eyes by eyelash or eyebrow. An acquiline nose with upcut winged nostrils, and a mouth, which, but for the compression of the lips, might have argued a certain coarseness of nature. A face, in fine, almost painful in its effect of studied self-repression, patient as it was unsatisfied, an arrested, consciously resisted violence of feeling perceptible in every line of it.
"I could hardly bear having my hair brushed to-night, I am afraid, Isherwood," she said, presently. "I am really only fit to be alone. You say Margaret is quite composed now? You think she will sleep?"
"Oh! dear me, yes, Miss Joanna, Miss Margaret will sleep. She drank a full tumbler of hot milk and fairly settled off before I left her. I wish I was half as easy about your night's rest as I am about hers."