CHAPTER IV.
At eleven o’clock of that New Year’s night the snow still fell, but the wind had increased to a gale, and shook the eastward windows of Agnes Ashe’s bedchamber.
Nurse and baby were sound asleep in the adjoining nursery. Even in the well-built house and curtained room, the night-light wavered in the unquiet air, sending fitful hosts of specter shadows scurrying over the ceiling and falling down the walls. Sometimes one dropped upon the bed and made mouths or crooked lean fingers at the convalescent. Now and then they whispered something in fleeing or skulking past. When this happened they spoke of her husband and how he had carried off both her babies downstairs. For Baby Nest’s crib was gone. She had been doubly robbed.
The door of communication between the rooms was ajar. Mrs. Ashe had need to move cautiously in arising and wrapping herself in a dressing gown. She had been three weeks upstairs. Mrs. Ames had declared her too feeble to walk across the room unaided, but to-night she felt strong and restless. Her brain was teeming with fledged thoughts, crying and fluttering to escape. If she had pen and ink she could begin another book, now that the nurse was asleep and Barton out. But that was not her reason for getting up and slipping on the wrapper. Oh, no! She drew the door to behind her cautiously, listened with held breath for sounds from the inner room, and hearing nothing, smiled cunningly, crept to the stair-head and down the polished steps. Their chill struck through the slippers into which she had thrust her stockingless feet; she shivered in the wind that drove fine snow under the front door and whistled jeeringly at her as she went by.
The library was void of human presence but warm and murky red with firelight. The vivid glow of the Argand burner, as she touched the regulator, shone upon glittering eyes, scarlet cheeks, and red lips that showed her teeth in the fixed smile of successful cunning. She found what she sought at once. Barton had left “The Story of Walter King” upon the table beside his reading chair. He would be out late. There was nothing to call him home and he was fond of his club. She was quite safe for an hour or two—secure from spy and intrusion—she and her brain-baby.
Clasping it to her heart, she wept and smiled, rocked herself to and fro as she would cuddle Baby Nest, did the nurse allow it. There was nobody to meddle with her here. She settled herself in the easy-chair and, finding where Barton had left off, read on and on, until the type began to gyrate queerly in fantastic measure across the page. Her eyes were getting tired. The tyrant above-stairs had prohibited reading so long that the effort tried her strength.
Still holding the book to her bosom, she looked around. The library was not so orderly as when she visited it tri-daily. There were no flowers on the table, yet she fancied that she smelled Bon Silène roses, as she had on that far-back March night when she unlocked the door leading into her beautiful, comforting Other World, where no rough blasts shook buds from blowing, no iron hand pressed down Fancy and held in Imagination with curb and bridle. The ash-cup of the bronze smoking table was filled with ashes, burnt stumps of cigars littered the hearth. Seeing them she bethought herself of the truncated brown canoe tossing in the foam-fringe of the tide on the Old Point beach. By shutting her eyes she could reproduce the scene with the minuteness of a photograph; could see the floating and swooping gulls, silver-breasted against the blue sky, and hear the swash of the waters between the rocks.
She was dreaming! It would never do to fall asleep here and be discovered by Barton or Mrs. Ames! Rubbing her eyes, she forced herself to note that one slipper lay on the rug, the other under a chair, just as Barton had kicked it off.