But the rounded edges of the hill remained bare, and Downing looked at the advancing figure with longing eyes, with throbbing heart. It seemed an eternity since they two had been really alone together, free from probable interruption and from Mrs. Mote's suspicious, unfriendly eyes.
Turning quickly away, he walked with impatient steps up and down the old-fashioned farmhouse sitting-room, stifling the wish to go out and meet her, there, on the solitary road. But her coming had been unheralded. This was the first time she had come to him; hitherto it was always he who had gone to her, and he felt that even in the matter of moments she must choose that of their meeting.
Mrs. Robinson did not seem in any haste. Even when actually on her way up the prim flagged path, edged with wallflower, which led to the door of the farmhouse, she turned and looked long at the wonderful view spread out below the narrow ledge where wound the rough road above which she was standing.
Suddenly she put her hand to her breast; she had walked too quickly up the steep winding way from the hamlet where she had been compelled to leave her pony-cart; and as she stood, looking intently, with enraptured eyes, at the marvellous sight before her—for a great storm was gathering over the vast plain lying unrolled below—the man who watched her from the farmhouse windows likened her in his mind to Diana, weary for a moment of the chase.
Her tall figure was outlined against the lowering white and grey sky, the short dun-coloured skirt was blown about her knees by the high, stinging wind, while the closely buttoned jacket, reaching but just below the waist, revealed the exquisite arching lines of her shoulders and throat. Mercury, rather than Diana, was evoked by the winged, casque-like headgear which remained so firmly wedded, in spite of windy buffetings, to the broadly coiled hair.
Like all beautiful women who are also intelligent, Penelope's outward appearance—the very character of her beauty—changed and modified according to her mood. There were times when body was almost wholly subordinate to mind; days, again, when her physical loveliness had about it a mature, alluring quality, like to that of a ripe peach.
So perhaps had Downing envisaged her during those first days when he had been drawn out of his austere, watchful self by a charm Circe-like and compelling, when Mrs. Robinson had been engaged in the great feminine game at which she was so skilful a player—that of subduing a heart believed to be impregnable.
But her opponent himself had only caught fire, in any deep unchanging sense, when his Circe had suddenly revealed another and a very different side to her nature.
Just as an apparently trivial incident will often deflect the whole course of a human career, so, in the more complex and subtle life of the heart, a physical accident may quicken feeling into life, or destroy the nascent emotion. Downing had not been long at Pol les Thermes when he fell ill from a return of the fever which often attacks Europeans in Persia, and Mrs. Robinson, after two long, dull days, during which she had been bereft of the stimulating presence of her new friend—or prey—took on herself the office, not so much of nurse as of secretary, to the lonely man.
It was then, when her mere presence had seemed to lift him out of a pit of deep physical depression, that Downing had found her to be a far more enduringly attractive woman than the brilliant, seductive figure who had appeared before him as a ripe delicious fruit, with which he had known well enough he must never slake his thirst. Her he could have left, and gone on his way, sighing that such Hesperidean apples were not for him. It was the softer, and, it must be said, the more intelligent and companionable, woman who received, during those days when she was simply kind, confidences concerning his present ambitions, and his schemes for benefiting the country with which he had now so many links, as well as that which had given him birth, and which was about to welcome him back, him the prodigal, with high honour.