"He did love me—never was there a better son. But he changed all at once. It was as if something had broken his life. But I think you can melt his heart. He will understand my grief better when it is brought home to him by another. I am to see him to-morrow afternoon, and I shall be allowed to take you with me. Will you come?"
The entreaty was so insistent, so agonising, that Vera could only bend her head in mute acquiescence.
Mrs. Rutherford threw her arms round the frail figure and strained it to her breast.
"My dearest girl, I knew you would have pity upon me. I will call for you to-morrow at half-past two. The house is on the hill, beyond the Medici Villa—a lovely spot—but to me, though it is only a place of probation, it seems like a grave. Vera!" with a sudden passion, "if I thought that this step were for his happiness, I believe I could submit; but when I parted with him last week his face was the face of despair. How changed, oh, my God, how changed!"
CHAPTER XIX
Mrs. Rutherford and Vera drove to the hill behind the Medici Villa in the golden light of a Roman November, when the gardens on the height were glowing with foliage that seemed made of fire, and only cypress and ilex showed dark against that splendour of red and amber; but to those two women all that beauty of autumn colour, and purple distances, of fairy-like gardens, and flashing fountains, was part of a world that was dead. The metaphysician's idea of the universe as an emanation of the individual mind is so far borne out by experience, that in a great grief the universe ceases to exist.
The room to which one of the brotherhood led them faced the western sky and was full of golden light when the two women entered.
It was a room that had once been splendid; but of all its splendour nothing was left but vast space, and the blurred and faded outlines of a fresco upon the ceiling.
The two women stood within the doorway looking to the other end of the room, where a solitary figure was sitting, huddled in a large armchair, in front of a fireplace that looked like an open tomb, where a little heap of smouldering logs upon a spacious hearth seemed a hollow mockery of a fire meant for warmth. That crouching form with contracted shoulders, and wasted hands stretched above the feeble fire-glow—could that be Claude Rutherford?