We were quite close to her little cottage, and as we walked towards it I tried to soften my refusal as best I could. She, however, did not seem to hear me.
She left me seated in the little parlour. There was no light in the room, but she carried in a lamp from an adjoining one; and I have never been so struck by a face as I was by hers when the glow of the lamp lighted it up. The charm of her beauty was not one whit abated—for beautiful she was; and yet there was only one thing to be read in her face, and that was resolution. It lay in her lips, the curve of the nostrils, a peculiar look in the eye, and a certain poise of the head. In very truth, she looked superb.
I sat waiting while the minutes passed, and not a sound broke the perfect silence in the house. Everything was so still that it seemed as if there could be no one within miles of me.
There was a book on the table before me, and I took it up unthinkingly. It opened where a cabinet-sized photograph had been left in it—as a marker I suppose. The photograph showed the head and shoulders of a man, and the face shown in full was one of the gayest and most resolute that I ever remember to have seen. There was something very attractive about it, and there was, as I thought, a faint suggestion of somebody I had known or seen. It was a good face, splendidly strong and honest, and, from a man’s point of view, a right handsome face too.
To look at a photograph uninvited may be an impertinence; to read the inscription on the back certainly is. And yet these are things which one is apt to do unthinkingly and even instinctively. I turned the photograph round and read:
“O death, where is thy sting? O grave, where is thy victory?” and under that a date. I put it back in the book, feeling that I had been prying into the secrets of a woman’s grief.
Presently I heard a chair pushed back in the next room and Mrs Mallandane’s step approaching. She handed me a closed note.
“You will give that to him, please,” she said politely, but very firmly. “He will come here if he receives it; but it is possible that he may still be delirious, and if so, I only ask you again if you will be good enough to bring him to me.”
With the knowledge which after-events have given me it is difficult to say whether I was concerned only for Cassidy’s health and Mrs Mallandane’s good name, or whether I was not pricked to anxiety by some other feeling. My heart did sink at her suggestion, I don’t know whether through selfishness or something better. I felt that I was beginning to yield before her evident purpose, but my answer was evasive. I said I did not see how I could promise anything.
She waved that impatiently aside. I recall the motion of her hand, as though she could literally brush such things away. She came a step nearer to me, the light shone full in her face, on the waves of her hair, on her slightly-parted lips, and glinted and flashed back from her eyes. For half a minute she stood so looking at me, and I was conscious of the grip of her hand on the back of a chair, and of the rise and fall of her breast as she breathed.