He stepped back, gave the order, and she was driven away. He stood there in the road, his brows knit, his heart in tumult. What an ass he had been to decline that offer! He might have been seated by her now, conscious of her in every fibre, seeing her, even though not daring to look at her, breathing her, as it were, into his being. It could have done her no harm. He might have found time for some word, some faltering sentence that should have prepared her for his change of mind, for his entire defeat and penitence.
He started to walk home, in the dust of her chariot wheels. He would set eyes upon her no more that day, unless he stood, as he often did, at the window of his study, whence he could see the canopy of her chair as she lay out upon the terrace.
*****
He saw her no more, except from a distance, for another week. Then the doctor gave him cheering news. She was doing splendidly. He thought she might lead a normal life in a few days more, if she were carefully guarded, and not allowed to overdo herself.
"You might take her to the coast?—Devon or Cornwall, perhaps?" he suggested.
Gaunt said he would consider it. It was a difficult time for him to leave home, just as harvest was beginning. A month later perhaps.
As he limped back, up the avenue, when Dymock had ridden away, he thought that perhaps it might make the rupture easier, if it took place elsewhere, and not at Omberleigh, where apparently the world and his wife—specially his wife—was busy with his affairs. The world and his wife had been so shut out from his own purview hitherto that he was wholly unprepared for the shock of surprise, amusement, interest, which his sudden marriage excited. In such a sparsely populated neighbourhood he had believed that he might do what he pleased without exciting comment. He saw now, with sudden clarity, how impossible such an existence as he had planned for his unlucky wife would have been in reality.
A woman so used—any woman in the world except Virginia—would have cried her wrongs from the house-tops. His persecution of her could not have been hid for long. He felt that he was looking out upon a new world, of whose existence he had been as unaware as the proverbial ostrich. His vindictive malice even had its ridiculous side. He had made an egregious fool of himself.
Heavy as lead was his heart as he entered the house.
Cosmo and Damian, with their coloured ribbons about their fluffy necks, were at play in the hall, dancing about at hide and seek behind the big chairs, while Grim, his own golden collie, sat upon a settle, her feet tucked up like a fashionable lady afraid of a mouse, uttering panting, whining protests against the reckless interlopers. Gaunt called her, and she came down slowly and with quite evident nervousness from her elevation. Cosmo hunched his lovely grey fluffy back into an arch, and spat. His tail became a bottle brush. Grim slunk apologetically by, her tail between her legs.