But there the young man stopped and fairly laughed outright. For to class Gabrielle St. Leger, the devoutly worshiped and desired, and poor Joanna Smyrthwaite together, even in passing, was a little too outrageously far-fetched. Here, indeed, the study of psychology ran frankly and, in a sense, almost profanely mad.
He looked away, through the shifting cloud of screaming gulls, over the steel-blue levels of the Channel toward far-distant France, and a strong nostalgia took him for the delightful, quick-witted land of his birth. It seemed a thousand years since he left Paris. What were they all doing over there, the dear people whose friendship spelled for him more than half the joy of living? Save for one brief note, in the response to the announcement of his arrival, Madame St. Leger had given no sign. And he, in face of his last interview with her, wanted to know—wanted so very badly to know. He wanted to look at her. He wanted to hear her voice.—Whereupon he turned positively vindictive. Oh! most consoling doctrine of purgatory!—Might Montagu Smyrthwaite very thoroughly suffer the depleting pains of it as punishment for this fiendishly tiresome legacy of an executorship! Why couldn't he have left Adrian free to pursue his delicious love campaign, and appointed somebody else—the unpleasant, heavy-weight Challoner, say, or the worldly, feather-weight Haig? Either of them would have reveled in the brief authority it conferred, while to him it constituted an intolerable waste of time. He was sick to death, interesting racial and psychological researches notwithstanding, sick to death of the whole corvée.
And then he skipped aside with quite undignified haste, for an incoming wave threatened his long-toed French boots with total immersion.
CHAPTER VIII
A MODERN ANTIGONE
His retina still holding that northern elfin landscape and seascape, his ears the voices of the forest and of the wildly yelping gulls, his mind still working on the thought of that new moral and social order now coming into being, his heart and his manhood crying out for the woman he loved, Adrian—the keen freshness of the winter morning pouring in through the open door along with him—entered the hall of the Tower House. And down the broad staircase, over the thick, sound-muffling carpet, the wan light streaming in through the blurred, leaded glass of the great staircase windows falling upon her meager, flat-bosomed, crape-clad figure, yellowish-auburn hair and strained, anxious countenance, came the other woman, the Ibsen woman, concerning whose nature and attributes he had just indulged in so much analytic speculation.
Joanna held up the front of her crape dress. Her feet showed as she stepped down the shallow treads. And Adrian, standing below, looking up at her, hat in hand, saw—though he didn't in the least want to see—that she wore black velvet slippers with square toes and no heels to them, and that both her feet and hands, though comparatively small, were lacking in individuality and in that sharpness of outline which is the mark of fineness of breeding. They might have been just anybody's hands and feet; and so—he felt amusedly ashamed of himself for admitting it—they were exactly the hands and feet one would expect Joanna Smyrthwaite to possess.
Taking himself to task for this involuntary cruelty of observation, his manner the more persuasive and gallant because he felt himself to blame, the young man advanced through the dull reds and browns of the spacious hall to the foot of the staircase.
"Ah! you are here! Good-morning, chère cousine," he said. "I rose early and have already been out walking in your great woods and down on the shore. It is all a poem of the first days of creation, before man intruded his perplexing presence upon the earth. I felt quite rampantly decadent in this overcivilized twentieth-century costume, under obligation to offer the humblest apologies to the hairy mammoths and pterodactyls, which, at every turn of the road, I instinctively braced my courage to meet. But really it is rather wonderful how 'the desert and the sown' jostle one another here in England. The contrasts are so unexpected, so violent, so complete!"
Adrian talked on rather at random, smiling, his head thrown back, the expression of his handsome face gay yet subtlely apologetic; the general effect of him pleasantly healthy, self-secure, finished, and on excellently good terms both with fortune and with himself. And Joanna, looking down at him, faltered, stopped in her descent, let slip the folds of her crape skirt, while she laid one hand hurriedly upon the baluster-rail and pressed the other nervously against her left side over her heart.