There were times when that look of utter abstraction almost frightened Mildred Greswold. It was an expression she had seen occasionally during her daughter’s lifetime, and which had always made her anxious. It was the look about which Lola used to say when they all met at the breakfast-table,
“Papa has had his bad dream again.”
That bad dream was no invention of Lola’s, but a stern reality in George Greswold’s life. He would start up from his pillow in an agony, muttering broken sentences in that voice of the sleeper which seems always different from his natural voice—as if he belonged to another world. Cold beads of sweat would start out upon his forehead, and the wife would put her arms round him and soothe him as a mother soothes her frightened child, until the muttering ceased and he sank upon his pillow exhausted, to lapse into quiet sleep, or else awoke and recovered calmness in awakening.
The dream—whatever it was—always left its mark upon him next day. It was a kind of nightmare, he told his wife, when she gently questioned him, not urging her questions lest there should be pain in the mere recollection of that horrid vision. He could give no graphic description of that dream. It was all confusion—a blurred and troubled picture; but that confusion was in itself agony.
Rarely were his mutterings intelligible; rarely did his wife catch half-a-dozen consecutive words from those broken sentences; but once she heard him say,
“The cage—the cage again—iron bars—like a wild beast!”
And now that absent and cloudy look which she had seen in her husband’s face after the bad dream was there often. She spoke to him sometimes, and he did not hear. She repeated the same question twice or thrice, in her soft low voice, standing close beside him, and he did not answer. There were times when it was difficult to arouse him from that deep abstraction; and at such times the utter blankness and solitude of her own life weighed upon her like a dead weight, an almost unbearable burden.
“What is to become of us both in all the long years before us?” she thought despairingly. “Are we to be always far apart—living in the same house, spending all our days together, and yet divided?”
She had married before she was eighteen, and at one-and-thirty was still in the bloom of womanhood, younger than most women of that age; for her life had been subject to none of those vicissitudes and fevers which age women of the world. She had never kept a secret from her husband, never trembled at opening a milliner’s account, or blushed at the delivery of a surreptitious letter. The struggles for preëminence, the social race in which some women waste their energies and strain their nerves, were unknown to her. She had lived at Enderby Manor as the flowers lived, rejoicing in the air and the sunshine, drinking out of a cup of life in which there mingled no drop of poison. Thus it was that not one line upon the transparent skin marked the passage of a decade. The violet eyes had the limpid purity, and the emotional lips had the tender carnation, of girlhood. Mildred Greswold was as beautiful at thirty-one as Mildred Fausset had been at seventeen. And yet it seemed to her that life was over, and that her husband had ceased to care for her.
Many and many an hour in that lovely solitude beside the lake she sat with hands loosely clasped in her lap or above her head, with her books lying forgotten at her feet—all the newest books that librarians could send to tempt the jaded appetite of the reader—and her eyes gazing vacantly over the blue of the lake or towards the snow-peaks on the horizon. Often in these silent musings she recalled the past, and looked at the days that were gone as at a picture.