Clare looked at him, sitting sunk in his chair, and presently she would thaw, as though those wits which he said she had left out in the blizzard were creeping back little by little into her body, and then she would put her hand kindly on his head and tell him not to fret. But that was all the explanation or comfort he ever got, to his great exasperation, being a man who liked to know how his wife had occupied every moment of her time,—to know, indeed, every thought which passed through her head.
Fortunately for himself, he soon forgot; the next morning he would descend, serene as ever, and set himself after his breakfast to his usual mild pursuits. Only in a sudden suspicious glance shot at Clare would his anxiety reawaken, and he would look at her feet, to see whether she wore her black strapped shoes and white stockings, peeping out under the fulness of her skirt. And sometimes, for a day or two after one of her escapades,—her evasions, as he called them in his own mind,—he would follow her upstairs if she went up to her bedroom.
Inquiringly she looked at him.
“Yes, Richard?”—for she was always gentle, save when she gazed past him with that far-away look, that seemed to range the Downs though her husband’s body and the walls of the house stood in her way,—“Yes, Richard?”
He mumbled, half-ashamed.
“I came to see what you were doing....” He could not bring himself to say, “I came to see whether you were changing your shoes,” for that seemed ridiculous, beneath his dignity.
He had his happy moments. Sitting in his little room with her after they had dined, in the firelight, he beheld the very picture he had so often imagined. He had got her there, for his own; and his eyes rested long upon her grace, travelling, with delicate sensuality, over her young body and the little hands lying idle along the arms of her chair. “You never sew, my Clare,” he observed to her once, regretting this, for he luxuriated in all the pretty attributes of woman. She smiled at him. “What are you thinking of?”—his favourite question, and he bent forward to pick up her limp hand and fondle it. “Tell me what you were thinking,” he repeated jealously.
For once she lifted frank eyes and gave a frank answer.
“I was wondering how much real need you had of me, Richard.”
“Remember the man I was before you came to me,” he said reproachfully, yet with a certain pride in recalling the gloom which had been his to discard.