CHAPTER XXIII.
"They are one and one, with a shadowy third;
One near one is too far."
—Browning.
Quita was troubled.
A full week had elapsed since that day so strangely compounded of rapture and dread; of matter-of-fact service, and shy, tender intimacies that had seemed to set a seal on the completeness of their reunion. Yet, in the days that followed, she had been increasingly aware of a nameless something, an indefinable constraint between them, which instinct told her would not have been there if conscience had surrendered all along the line.
It was not his mere avoidance, after the first, of caresses congenial to the opening phase of marriage that disconcerted her. Such emotional reticence squared with her idea of the man. She would not have had him otherwise. They were sure of one another; and in both natures passion was proud and fastidious. It could thrive without much lip-service. The undefined aloofness that troubled Quita was spiritual, rather than physical. She was conscious of walls within walls, separating her from his essential self; and behind these again of an unobtrusive reserve force, whose power of endurance she could not estimate; because her dealings with Michael's shallower nature had afforded her no experience of a moral stability free from the warp of the personal equation. It was as if some intangible part of him, over which she could establish no hold, stood persistently afar off,—tormented, but immovable.
She could not know that the form of opium administered during his illness had revived and strengthened temptation when he himself was physically unfit to cope with it; that by her impulsive return to him, at a critical moment, she was forcing him open-eyed toward a catastrophe more lasting, more terrible for them both, than the initial harm done by her rejection of him five years ago. Reserve and self-disgust made speech on the subject seem a thing impossible; while his mere man's chivalry shrank from allowing her to guess that by an act of seeming reparation, she had run grave risk of putting real reparation out of her power. Once only did the love that consumed him break through the restraint he put upon himself in sheer self-defence.
It was the first day he had been allowed up at a normal hour; and coming into the dining-room, he had found her alone at her easel, near one of the long glass doors. At the sound of his step she turned her canvas round swiftly, and came to him with a glad lift of her head. He took her hands in his big grasp, and kissed her forehead.
"Good morning, lass," he said. "You never told me you had brought that with you. Couldn't be divorced from it, eh? What's the great work now? May I see?"
"But yes, naturally. I've been keeping it as a surprise for you. I don't believe I should ever have got through this last fortnight without it. Voilà!"
She set it facing him, and standing so with her eyes on the picture, waited eagerly for his word of praise. But as the seconds passed, and it did not come, she turned, to find him looking at her, not at the picture; his teeth tormenting his lower lip; a suspicious film dimming the clear blue of his eyes. Emboldened by this last incredible phenomenon, she came and stood close to him, yet without touching him.