"Thank you," said Grey, accepting the offer.
The two left the room together, the banker upon the baronet's arm.
Neither the knee nor the head of Grey was suffering at that moment; but he felt a deadly faintness come over him when Mrs. Grant made the appeal to him to protect Miss Midharst against fortune-hunters.
"The blows come too quickly and too heavily; too quickly and too heavily; too quickly and too heavily for me."
The open air and soothing landscape calmed Grey. He always felt better out of doors now than between walls. Rooms had furniture, and furniture cast shadows, and no matter what part of a room you sat in you could not command a view of the whole. The atmosphere indoors was heavy, depressing, and often laden with scents a man's wife might use, had used once; and these perfumes, coming suddenly upon the sense of smell, brought memories of long ago and half-awakened expectation of seeing a certain woman of pleasing aspect the love-bearer of one. But with the dying breath of the perfume the loved familiar figure of the olden time faded away, and in its place came a ghastly face with open dead eyes and open dead lips, and temples dark with the blue veins of suffocation.
When that thing came in the house no one could avoid it. It seemed in all places at the same time, and if one raised eyes no matter to what, that thing met the eyes somewhere. Even when it had not followed the dying perfume of the musk, so long as one was in the house one might come upon it anywhere, leaning against the wall in the darkness between the double doors, huddled in the shadow of the great oak chimney-piece in the hall, lying across the mat on one's bedroom-door when one was retiring for the night.
Across the threshold of that bedroom-door this jaw-dropped thing never came. That room was one's only sanctuary. The old love of the long ago never left that place with the dying of the perfume. Here one's wife moved about the room and stood by the bedside as God had made her, comely, and as love had made her, happy; not as indifference had made her, wretched, and the devil's agent had made her, dead.
And yet to live in that sanctuary for happy memories was almost worse than wandering with a dim light through corridors against the walls of which stood shrouded indictments for the intolerable crime. It was hard to wake and smell the musk, and find one's young wife standing at the glass, with the golden-topped vial in her hand, and a smile upon her face, then to see her fade slowly away, to spring up, ask why she was taken from young and loving arms, and to be able to get no answer; until one opened the door, and found there one's own middle age, and that terrible thing across the threshold.
Yes; the open air was much better than the house. Out of doors one could keep at a distance from shadows, and, when there is the rustle of a dress, soon find out it is not hers. Then, when the worst comes to the worst, one, when out of doors, could run. Indoors, you cannot run any distance, and jumping through a window would attract attention and inquiry, neither of which could be endured now.
Leaning heavily on the arm of the young baronet, Grey walked up and down the terrace in front of the northern face of the Castle. In about a quarter of an hour he said: