“There is always danger in cases of heart-disease.”
“Heart-disease.... She said no word to me upon the subject. But it is like her,” said Dunoisse, “to conceal her sufferings rather than distress her friends.”
“She has needed friends, and the help that prosperous friendship could have well afforded to bestow, believe me, sir, in these late years of uncomplaining want and bitter privation.”
The voice that spoke was sweet; Dunoisse had already recognized in it that quality. Barely raised above an undertone—presumably for the sake of other sufferers within the neighboring rooms that opened on the landing, from behind the shut doors of which came the murmur of voices, or the clinking of cups and saucers, or the sound of fires being poked,—this voice had in its clear distinctness the ring of crystal; and the fine edge of scorn in it cut to the sensitive quick of the listener. He started as he looked at her, meeting the calm and clear and steady regard of eyes that were blue-gray as the waters of her own English Channel, and seemed as cold....
For they condemned him and judged him, the rich man’s son, who had left the old dependent to the charity of strangers. His shamed blood tingled under his red-brown skin, as he said, with a resentful flash of his black eyes:
“That this good woman, the faithful guardian of my motherless boyhood, has suffered want, is to my bitter regret, to my abiding poignant sorrow, but not to my shame. A thousand times—no!”
He was so vivid and emphatic, as he stood speaking with his back to the window, that, with his foreign brilliancy of coloring, the slightness of form that masked his great muscular strength, the supple eloquence of gesture that accompanied and emphasized his clear and cultivated utterance, he seemed to glow against the background of rimy February fog, and London roofs and chimney-pots, as a flashing ruby upon gray velvet; as a South American orchid seen in relief against a neutral-tinted screen. His “No!” had a convincing ring; the lightning-flash of his black eyes was genuine fire, not theatrical; the woman who heard and saw had been born with the rare power of judging and reading men. Her broad white forehead cleared between the silken folds of her hair, pale nut-brown, with the gleam of autumn gold upon the edges of its thick waved tresses; the lowered arches of her brown eyebrows lifted and drew apart, smoothing out the fold between them; the regard of her blue-gray eyes ceased to chill; the delicate stern lines of her sensitive mouth relaxed. She knew he spoke the truth.
He saw a tall, slight, brown-haired woman in a plain and, according to the voluminous fashion of the time, rather scanty gown of Quakerish gray, protected by a bibbed white apron with pockets of accommodating size. A little cape of stuff similar to that of the gown covered her shoulders. Their beauty of line, like the beauty of the long rounded throat that rose above her collar of unadorned white cambric, the shapeliness of the arms that were covered by her plain tight sleeves, the slender rounded hips and long graceful proportions of the lower limbs, were enhanced rather than hidden by the simplicity of her dress; as the admirable shape and poise of the small rounded head was undesignedly set off by the simple, close-fitting, white muslin cap, with its double frill and broad falling lappets.
Her calmness seemed immobility, her silence indifference to Dunoisse. Her hands were folded upon her apron, her bosom rose and fell to the time of her deep even breathing, her steady eyes regarded him as he poured himself out in passionate denial, fierce repudiation of the odious stigma of ingratitude, but she gave no sign of having heard. She looked at him, and considered, that was all. He said, galled and irritated by her unresponsiveness: