But Saxham knew that she did not;—had even ceased to wish that the miracle might be wrought. Brainy men can be very dense. When she stamped her foot and cried, "I decline to accept Mrs. Saxham's invitation, either with you or without you. I wonder that you should dream of asking me to! If you can forget how hideously she and your brother have treated you, I cannot! I loathe treachery! I abominate ingratitude and deceit! And I hate her—and I shall not go!" Saxham opened his eyes, as well he might. He had never before seen his wife otherwise than gentle and submissive. He found his own bitter explanation of the sudden storm that had burst among the débris of dessert on the Harley Street dinner-table. Her fetters were galling her to agony, he knew! His square pale face grew more Rhadamanthine than ever, and the glass he had been filling with port overflowed unnoticed on the cloth. But he kept the mask of set composure before his agony of remorse. Then the frou-frou of light silken draperies passed over the soft carpet. The door opened and shut with a slam. Lynette had left the room. As Saxham sat alone, a heavy, brooding figure, mechanically sipping at his port, and staring at the empty place opposite, where the overset flower-glass, and the crookedly pushed-back chair, and the serviette that made a white streak on the dark crimson carpet, marked the haste and emotion of her departure, he said to himself that the West End upholsterer who had the contract for refurnishing Plas Bendigaid must be warned to complete his work without delay.
For Plas Bendigaid, the solid, stone-built grange that had been a Convent in the fifteenth century, and probably long before, the South Welsh home of his mother's girlhood, perched in the shadow of Herion Castle upon a wide shelf of the headland that commands the treacherous shoals and snowy shell-strewn sands and wild tumbling waters of Nantmadoc Bay ... Plas Bendigaid, with that hoarded, invested money, was to be Saxham's bequest to his young widow.
Everything that loving care and forethought could plan had already been done to make the old home pleasant and charming. Nothing was needed but the upholsterer's finishing touches. Saxham had planned that Lynette should be there when he wiped out the shame of failure by keeping that promise made in the Cemetery at Gueldersdorp, little more than a year before.
He had always meant to keep it, but not when the north-east gales of winter and spring should be sweeping over the mountain-passes and lashing the waves to madness; not when the ceaseless scurry of hunted clouds should have piled the south-west horizon with scowling blue-black ramparts, topped by awful towers, themselves belittled by stupendous heights built of intangible vapours, and reproducing with added grandeur and terror the soaring peaks and awful vales and appalling precipices of snow-helmed Frore and her daughters.
When the promise of Summer should have been fulfilled in sweetness, Saxham would keep his promise. When the swallows should hatch out their young broods between the huge stones that the hands of men who returned to dust cycles of centuries ago hauled up with the twisted hide-rope and the groaning crane, to rear with them upon the jut of the rugged headland two hundred feet above the waves that now break a mile away, the Lonely Tower, now merged in the huge dilapidated Edwardian keep that broods over Herion. When those blocks of cyclopæan masonry should be tufted with the golden wallflower and the perfumed wild geranium, and starred with the delicate blossom of the lavender scabious and the wild marguerite, then the little blue bottle that stood in the deep table-drawer near the big whisky-flask should come into use.
When the vast pale sweep of the sandy dunes should be covered for leagues by the perfumed cloth-of-gold spread by the broom and the furze; when the innumerable little yellow dwarf-roses should blossom on their prickly bushes, thrusting pertly through the powdery white sand, and every hollow and hillock should be gay with the star convolvulus and the flaunting scarlet poppies—then Death should come, borne on winged feet, and bearing the sword of keenness, to sever the iron bonds of Andromeda chained to the rock. And here was Summer, knocking at the door!
Lynette did not reappear. He did not seek her out and ask the reason of her strange display of emotion. Only a husband could do that who had the right to take her in his arms and kiss the last remaining traces of her tears away. Saxham went to his consulting-room, and while all the clocks of London made time, and the moon veered southward, and the stars rose and set, he toiled over his notes and case-books in the brilliant circle cast by the shaded electric lamp upon his writing-table, and the tide in the big whisky-flask in the table-drawer ebbed low.
Hours hence he laid down his pen. The flask had long been emptied; the alcohol-flare was dying out in the grey chambers of his brain. Weariness of life weighed on him like a leaden panoply. He had almost stretched his hand to take the little blue-glass vial that sat waiting, waiting in the deep table-drawer aside the drained flask before sleep overcame him. His head sank against the chair-back. His was a sudden, heavy lapsing into forgetfulness, unmarred by dreams.