Richard Maule waited a while to see if his cousin would come to him, and then he went up to his bedroom.
He soon dismissed his man-servant, and the book he had meant to read in the night—a book on the newly-revealed treasures of Cretan art—lay ready to his feeble hand on the table by the wide, low bed which was the only new piece of furniture placed there since the room had been the nursery of his happy childhood. But he felt unwontedly restless, and soon he began moving about the low-ceilinged, square room with dragging, heavy footsteps.
When they had brought him back ill to death, as he had hoped, from Italy eight years before, it was here that he had insisted on being put; and there were good reasons for his choice, for the room communicated by easy shallow stairs with that part of the house where were the Greek Room, and the library which had been arranged for him by his grandfather as a delightful surprise on his seventeenth birthday.
Mr. Maule's bedchamber was in odd contrast to the rest of Rede Place. The furnishings were frankly ugly, substantial veneered furniture had been chosen by the sensible, middle-aged woman to whom Theophilus Joy, after anxious consultation with the leading doctor of the day, had confided his precious orphan grandson. His old nurse's clean, self-respecting presence haunted, not unpleasantly, the room at times when Richard Maule only asked to forget the present in the past.
His wife, Athena, had never been in this room. Even when he was lying helpless, scarcely able to make himself understood by his nurses, the stricken man had been able to convey his strong wish concerning this matter of his wife's banishment from his sick room to Dick Wantele, and Athena had quietly acquiesced....
As time had gone on, Richard Maule had become in a very real sense master of this one room; here at least none had the right to disturb him or to spy on his infirmities unless he gave them leave.
He went across to the window which commanded a side view of the door by which the inmates of Rede Place generally let themselves in and out. Dick, so he felt sure, was out of doors—no doubt walking off, as the young and hale are able to do, his anger and his pain.
A great yearning for his kinsman came over Richard Maule. Drawing the folds of his luxurious dressing-gown round his shrunken limbs, he painfully pushed a chair to a window and sat down there. And as he looked out into the October night, waiting for the sound which would tell him that Dick had come in, he allowed himself to do what he very seldom did—he thought of the past and surveyed, dispassionately, the present.
To the majority of people there is something repugnant in the sight of an old man married to a lovely young woman, and this feeling is naturally intensified when the husband happens to be in any way infirm. Richard Maule was aware that these were the feelings with which he and his wife had long been regarded, both by their immediate neighbours and by the larger circle of the outer world where Mrs. Maule enjoyed the popularity so easily accorded to any woman who contributes beauty and a measure of agreeable animation to the common stock.