“Where have you been?� asked Sheldrick unwillingly, as a man who suspects that the question may open some unwelcome topic.
Mrs. Sheldrick looked at her husband full; and, though it had seemed to him that he had read the book of her beauty from preface to finis, there was something new to him in her regard as she answered:
“I have gone over in memory every week of the last three years that we have spent together, Edgar; and the road has been a rough and stony one, without one green patch of grass to rest on by the wayside, or one refreshing spring at which to drink. But I was patient while I plodded after you, because I saw an end to what I was enduring. Now it seems that I am mistaken. It is only my endurance that is at an end.�
“Why do you talk in allegory, Ella?� Sheldrick broke out impatiently. He threw down his leather motoring cap with the talc eye shields upon the sofa, and pitched his heavy overcoat upon a chair in a corner of the ugly room, and let his long, lithe body down into a hideous Early Victorian plush armchair beside the empty fireplace, where nothing crackled but some fantastically bordered strips of red and green gelatine paper, shuddering under the influence of a powerful chimney draught. “I’m not an imaginative man,� he went on. “Even if my mind were not occupied with a dozen affairs of supreme urgency I should still boggle at interpreting your cryptic utterances. If you want them understood, make them to some minor poet at a garden party or an At Home. You’ve stacks of invitations from the nicest people to all sorts of functions ever since I pulled off those two events at Moncaster and the Grand Prix at Nismes. And now that it’s May, and the season in full swing, you might be having no end of a capital time at home in London instead of——� She interrupted him with a passionate gesture.
“I have no home!�
“No?� said Sheldrick coolly, leaning back his head against the knobby back of the Early Victorian armchair.
“No!� said Mrs. Sheldrick, and her passion seemed to dash itself against and break upon the man’s composure as a wave beats and breaks upon a rock. “It was a home, once, when you were working partner in the firm of Mallard, Mallard and Sheldrick, Manufacturers of Automobiles; and the life you led was a normal, ordinary, everyday life, and the risks you ran were everyday, ordinary risks, such as a woman who loved you—note that I say who loved you—might bear without going mad or dying of terror. But it is a prison now. I cannot breathe in it. Even when you are there with me—and when every postman’s knock, or telegraph boy’s ring, or telephone message has for the moment ceased to be fraught with hideous, often-dreamed-of, never-forgotten possibilities ... when each newsboy’s voice, yelling in the streets, has temporarily ceased to be the voice of Fate for me—it is no longer home! It is a caravanserai, from which Hope and Content and Peace of Mind may go out before the next day’s dawning, leaving the door open that Death and Despair may the more freely enter in!�
“Ella!� exclaimed Sheldrick, looking at her open-eyed. She had always been such a quiet, calm, self-possessed woman, that now, as she rose up out of her chair suddenly, as though she had been prodded with a bayonet, she was strange and new, and rather awe-inspiring. As she stood before him, her passion-breathing face an ivory cameo between the drooping folds of her rich blue-black hair, her gray eyes glittering fiercely between the narrowed lids under the straight black brows, her lips two bitterly straightened lines of scarlet showing the gleaming teeth, her firm chin implacable in its set upon the dainty cravat of muslin and black silk ribbon, her slight bosom panting fiercely under her bodice folds, her slender limbs rigid beneath the sheath-fitting gown of silken chestnut-colored cloth, the man, her husband, looked at her more attentively than he had looked for years.
“Ella, what is the matter? What has upset you like this? If there is anything I can do to put things right, why not tell me, and—and——�
Sheldrick’s voice faltered, and his eyes looked away from his wife’s as he saw the reviving hope leap desperately into her face. It died instantly, leaving her gray eyes more somber, and the lines of her scarlet, parted lips more bitter than before.