"Yes. She has made great strides. Her Academy pictures fetched high prices last year."
"I am glad of that."
The words were spoken with such grave politeness that Richardson looked up as if suspecting sarcasm. But the other's face was inscrutable. "Do you happen to know where she is at present?" he asked, after a pause.
"No. I believe she and her brother travel about Europe. They never came back to England. That's what made my cousins feel sure there was something behind."
"Yes, naturally." Then, with an abrupt return to his usual manner, he added, "Now, old chap, I'm going to send you packing, and get to work. Deuced glad to have you back again. Hodson's a slacker of the slackest. We shan't keep him up here much longer, I fancy. Border notions of work don't agree with his delicate digestion! See you again at early parade:—sharp up to time."
And as Richardson's footsteps died into silence, Eldred Lenox went slowly back to the writing-table.
The past five years had not dealt tenderly with this man of surface hardness and repressed sensibilities. The black hair at his temples was too freely powdered with silver, the lines between his brows, and about his well-formed mouth and jaw, were too deeply indented for a man of five-and-thirty. The whole rugged face of him was only saved from harshness by a humorous kindliness in the keen blue eyes, that had measured distance and faced death with an equal deliberation; and by a forehead whose breadth made the whole face vivid with intellect and power. He looked ten years older than the inwardly exultant bridegroom who had stood upon that sunlit road outside Zermatt, waiting to take possession of the woman he had won.
The attempt to relieve bitterness of spirit with the stimulant of incessant work, and the questionable sedative of tobacco strongly tinctured with opium, was already producing its insidious, inevitable result—was, in truth, threatening to undermine an iron constitution while failing conspicuously to achieve the end in view.
After sitting for twenty minutes before a blank sheet of foolscap, Lenox gave up all further effort at mental concentration. A nostalgia of vast untenanted spaces was upon him,—of those great glacier regions where a man could stand alone with God and the universe, could shake himself free from the fret of personal desire. And he had agreed to forgo this—the one real rest and refreshment life afforded him,—to "suffer gladly" the insistent trivialities of hill-station life, merely, forsooth, because a woman had asked it of him. He anathematised himself for an inconsistent weak-minded fool. But he had no intention of breaking his promise to Mrs Desmond.
Since work was out of the question, he pushed his chair back impatiently, left the table, and flung out both arms with a gesture of desperate weariness. Yet sleep was far from him, and he knew it; unless he chose to induce it by the only means ready to his hand.