“Said as ’e couldn’t afford to miss you, sir; so ’e’d wait, and take ’is chance.”
South always faced trouble, but he went more slowly upstairs. The door of his room was ajar, the lamp had been relit upon the table, and soused in its shaded dome of light was the figure of a man, stretched along the big chair before the fire. Veynes did not respond to his host’s hail of welcome; his eyes were staring into the shadowy mirror; and his face reflected there was like a ghostlight on the glass.
Knowing something of his visitor’s moods, South took no notice of his silence, but, drawing a chair beside him, brought his hand down on the other’s fingers with an exclamation of abusive kindliness.
One speaks of words frozen on the lips, but those seemed frozen in the air, ringing with an awful icy vibration in the silent room, as South started back, dumb with horror, for the hand upon which his had fallen was damp with the grip of death.
* * * * *
Of the days which followed, South could never give a complete account. A stranger to sorrow, almost, indeed, to every ruinous emotion, the scenes he witnessed seemed to alter the spacing of the hours so that no two were of a length.
The noise and crush of daily life were suddenly muted, as though death had closed a door and shut them out; and within, behind the bolted silence of despair, were tears, sad talk, mourning darkness, and the melancholy business of the dead, haunted, as with pale marsh lights, by the pitiful inquisition in the dead eyes which he had closed.
His consolation, in that dreary time, was that he bore half the burden of its grief.
The earl knew nothing of his son’s death but what the doctors could tell him, for Lady Veynes, with a curious, but to her a natural, discretion had kept the motive of her movements a secret even from her maid.
So the two chief agents in the tragedy carried the weight of it between them, and alone heard the inquest verdict of “an overstrained heart,” with the desolate knowledge of all it meant—South with dry eyes, so dry that their color seemed faded, and hers so wet that they seemed mixed with their tears.