If Saxham had awakened then.... But he slept on. She did not dare to kiss that broad white buckler of his forehead again. She kissed the sleeve of his coat instead, and, scared by a sudden sigh and movement of one of the hands that hung over the chair-arms, gathered her draperies around her, and stole as noiselessly as a pale sunbeam, out of the room.
LXVII
It was barely five o'clock, and the balmiest summer day at Herion is wont to waken, like a spoilt child, in a bad temper of angry wind and lashing rain. Lynette, who had risen from her bed and thrown her dressing-gown about her, to kneel on the broad window-seat and look out upon this strange new world, shivered, standing barefoot on the mossy carpet. Then she looked round the room, and smiled with delight. For she had found it, upon her arrival of the previous night, a reproduction, down to the smallest detail, of her blue-and-white bedroom at Harley Street, with this notable difference—that on the wall facing the bed-head hung a fine copy of a Millais portrait that was one of the treasures of Bawne House. Lady Bridget-Mary, in the glory of her beautiful youth, shone from the canvas splendid as a star.
How kind, how kind of Owen!... Her eyes filled as she gazed, comparing the glowing, radiant face upon the canvas with the enlarged photograph of the Mother in her habit that stood in an ebony and silver frame upon a little table beside the bed. A worn "Garden of the Soul" lay near, and the "Imitation" of inspired À Kempis. Both had been the Mother's gifts. The Breviary and the Little Office of Our Lady had belonged to the dead. Lynette had brought these treasured possessions with her from Harley Street, leaving the ivory Crucifix hanging in its place above the vacant pillow. So many sleepless nights she had known of late upon that pillow that there were faint bluish-shaded hollows under the beautiful eyes, and wistful lines about the mouth.
Since the revelation made to her by her own heart, when the heavy tress of hair dropped from her bosom upon the unconscious breast above which she bent, an insurmountable wall of diffidence and shyness upon her side, and of stern, self-concentrated isolation on her husband's, had risen up between them, dwarfing the barrier that was already there.
His writing-table lamp had burned through the nights, but she had never ventured upon another stolen visit to Saxham's consulting-room. The memory of that kiss she had put upon the velvety-smooth space above the broad meeting eyebrows stung in her like a sense of guilt, and yet it had its sweetness. She had claimed her right. The man was hers, though she might never be his.... To know it was to realise at once her riches and her poverty.
Out of a vague yearning and a formless, nameless pain had come to her the knowledge of the true herb needed for her healing. The unsated hunger for sympathy and love and loveliness, the loneliness that gnawed him, she comprehended now. And as she looked about her at the dainty, carefully-chosen furniture, and the exquisite old-world-patterned chintz draperies, recognising what his care had been to please her, and how every little taste and preference of hers had been remembered and gratified, a sense of her own ingratitude pierced her to the quick.
She had parted from Owen without one tender word, without even one glance of greater kindness than she would have bestowed upon a stranger. She ached with futile remorse at the recollection of that frigid, distant good-bye at Euston Station, when Lady Hannah's shrill laugh had jangled through Major Bingo's blustering admonitions to perspiring porters to put the luggage in one compartment, to stow canvas bags of golf-clubs and fishing-rods in the racks, and to damage bicycles at their personal peril, since the company evaded liability.
It had been Saxham's wish that Lady Hannah and Major Wrynche should be his wife's guests at Plas Bendigaid. Looking from her bedroom casements over the syringas and lilacs and larches, the laburnums and hawthorns and hollies of the low-walled garden that ended at the sheer cliff-edge, from whence you looked down upon the tops of the pines and chestnuts, whose green foliage hid the shining metals of the iron way, and made a sea of verdure in place of the salt blue waves that once had lapped and sighed there—gazing across the powdery sand-dunes that were prickly with sea-holly and gay with flaunting poppies and purple scabious, the pink and white convolvulus, and the thorny yellow dwarf rose, that somehow finds nourishment in the pale sand of Herion Links, to the line of white breakers that rose and fell more than a mile away. Lynette sighed a small sigh of resignation at the prospect of long weeks to be spent in the society of these pleasant, well-bred, rather fidgety people Owen had chosen to bear her company.