The beauty of that wide prospect of sea and mountain never staled; every change of hour and weather gave variety; morning after cloudless morning came always with a fresh surprise and novel charm.
Her corner was by the balustrade on the edge of the steep ravine, whence a wall of rock fell steep and far beneath. She sat with the morning sunlight behind her and the lemon terraces sinking away on one side to the platane-shadowed torrent by the road, where the people looked small as ants, and carts and waggons were toys, leading to the clean, bright-walled town embowered in dark foliage, with illimitable spaces of dark purple sea beyond it, all glowing in the clear brilliance of southern sun. Sounds of cheerful labour rose pleasantly from a saw-mill niched in the bottom of a narrow gorge, from carpenters' hammers, mingling with washerwomen's voices, the roll and clatter of wheels, the tramp of soldiers and confused noises of the town, and floated up, softened and mellowed, above the faint and far sea-murmurs. And before her, in the full morning light, so soft though so strong, the white-walled monastery towered high on its dark, wooded ridge, with gabled roof, quivering cypress flames and feathery eucalyptus tops traced clear on the dark blue sky. What a glow in the blue-black pine foliage, what mystery in the purply bloom of those olive-woods, climbing the steep summit far above the vines! How lovingly the golden light lay upon all, steeping it in splendour, caressing it with warm radiance, and bringing out every detail of shape and colour and shadowy distance. Contrasted with all this joyous colour and radiance, how solemnly beautiful was the convent-crested steep, and how grand and awe-inspiring the deep sweet blue of the broad, unbounded sea sweeping far away into unseen space!
Her troubled spirit and unquiet heart were soothed and calmed by this familiar but never-staling beauty; the sweet, sharp air, so light and pleasant to breathe, kindled fresh life with every inspiration; she seemed to drink it with her coffee and eat it with her crisp roll and butter.
And yet—and yet, with what different eyes she once saw it. Where was the mental elevation, the pure and healing emotion, of her first sight of this large, fresh, foreign beauty of purple-shadowed mountain and glowing sea? Talk about the gaming-tables, about petty vices and sordid troubles, had filled her with incredulous disgust then. But now? She had lost more than money on those green tables, and bartered something more precious than jewels in the glittering Monte Carlo shops; and here, in the pure and rose-scented air, some subtle soul-perfume had floated away and vanished, she knew not how.
A little breeze, shaking the palm-foliage close by, had the sadness of pattering rain, but it brought a wave of spiced carnation and heliotrope and sweet geranium mixed with rose. Ermengarde sighed with the breeze. Her unquiet breast told her that something was wrong within; she could not, perhaps would not, say what; she had fallen a little way from some height, but how she could not tell. Only she was quite sure she ought to have opened the publisher's parcel earlier; she was equally sure that she should have been given some knowledge of the importance of its contents beforehand. In any case, she had been the last to know of an event that altered the whole tenor of her own and her husband's lives. Arthur must have known at least that he had produced something of a higher quality, and greater aim and scope, than he had ever done before; yet he had lived under the same roof with her and never said a word; he had been like a man in a dream, absorbed, preoccupied, moving in a world apart, of which she had never been given the faintest glimpse. Perhaps her darkest suspicions were justified. And now, in the full blaze of a sudden fame, he had made no sign and given her no shadow of participation in his changed fortune. No one could make a first great success like that with indifference. He must have been deeply moved, if only by the prospect of a fresh vista of mental activity opening before him, or, less worthily, by the comparative wealth it assured. Yes; those huge sales of which she heard must mean a solid accretion of hard cash for the writer of the book, were publishers never so rapacious.
And his short, scrappy letters gave no hint of what must be an epoch, a turning-point, in his life. They were without address, because of that mysteriously prolonged business tour; they were evidently written some time before they reached her, while her answers, addressed to the home he appeared never to have seen since they parted, had presumably made long tours before he received them.
Where was Arthur?
An inquiry addressed to Herbert on the subject had met with an unsatisfactory reply. Her father and mother only mentioned her husband in answer to her questions; they had not seen him; he had not yet returned; he was a notoriously bad letter-writer, conducting his correspondence mainly by telegraph or telegrammatic post-cards, she heard. Things undoubtedly were more serious, the breach between them more deadly, than she had suspected. A very bad feature of the case was his refusal to finance the tour of which she had stood in such real need on the plea of poverty. Poverty! When he must have known that he was on the brink of a gold-mine.
Men know men. No doubt Herbert and her father knew more than they cared to say of the strained relations between husband and wife, and of the causes that had produced this bitter state of affairs. Well, at least Charlie was left. Poor little Charlie, whose short, stiff, pot-hook letters, written with such laborious effort, expressed nothing but that the child was executing a wearisome task, and whose solitary sentence, "Farther cent a good big Kake; The fellers ett it," was his sole allusion to him. Poor little Charlie!
Through tears evoked by the vision of a little, lonely, curly-headed boy bending with inky fingers and knitted brows over toilsome letters, all the bright and sunny beauty and the great peace of the vast sea-plains darkening and glowing on that solid blue horizon rim seemed full of rebuke and chiding. Snowy sails, flitting bird-like on the deep-blue splendour, and black hulls, trailing their smoke pennons above it, reproached her, and the quivering cypress-spires on the monastery height condemned her. For what? Then the shining lemon-foliage took up the tale, and rustled disapproval among the gleaming yellow fruit, and the voices and low laughter of people sitting in the sun vaguely excluded her, making her a thing apart from general sympathy. But why?