In the hall of the inn, he lit her candle, as usual, and gave it to her. She held it just under her chin, and it lighted up her face, blanched and spiritualized by the emotions she had gone through. He looked at her, for once, very closely.
“You look, to-night,” he said, in the dreamy voice he only used sometimes, “like the Spirit of the Greta that peered through the window at me the other night. I told you about it at the time, did I not? It was a strange hallucination! Quite white and pale, and its eyes fixed meaningly on me. The lines of the face, as I remember it now, were curiously like yours, or is it that you have identified yourself with that spirit in my thoughts? I have never got it quite out of my head, do you know!”
“Why should you try?” was all that Phœbe Elles could find to say. A mist seemed to have come over her eyes, and she bade him “good-night,” and stumbled helplessly over her gown as she went upstairs.
She lay awake all night. She cried quietly to herself. This was what she had wanted. This was life. She was very happy and yet most miserable.
Did this man care for her? Yes? No? A little? There was no knowing. His ways were not as the ways of other men—at least, not the men she had known—and the ordinary canons of flirtation, as she knew them, had no correspondence with his conduct towards her.
She thought he liked her; she knew she loved him; that was what it all came to.
She was an honourable woman, with a newly super-added canon of honour, and she did not dream of being false to her husband. If Rivers loved her as she loved him, she ought to go away. That was her clear duty to herself, to him and to Mortimer.
Mortimer would take her back—of that she had not the slightest doubt. There was no reason why he should ever hear of this, her vagary, among the green shades of Brignal. She might take the train back to Newcastle, refuse to give any further account of herself than that she had been away for a holiday or any reason for that holiday except the usual “nerves” of society, and resume her end of the matrimonial chain without let or hindrance.
But since she was uncertain as to Rivers’ feelings with regard to her, hardly that, indeed, since he gave her, literally, no reason to suppose that he looked upon her in any other light than the light of a friend, might she not—oh, might she not!—take the benefit of the doubt and stay there till he went away, and be as happy as she could for as long as she could? She felt that she must not quarrel with Rivers’ reserve, since it gave her the title to his company. She decided not to do so.
She was beginning to find him less obscure, for she had learned to seek for the expression of him in his art: the art by which he chose to reveal himself to those who had the will and the skill to read. Where other men spoke or wrote, he painted. She had only to look at the beautifully stained bits of paper that issued from his hand, to watch the wonderful combinations of colour—subtle, passionate, striking, tender—that were evolved by this man of few words, to see that he was no stranger to the whole gamut of human emotions, full of delightful, undisciplined moods, and mutabilities, and pleasant perversions of character. There were strength and force in certain abrupt combinations that stirred like the sound of a trumpet; there were tenderness and the fancifulness that women love in certain harmonies that moved almost to tears. She read sentiment and sweetness in the delicacy of his sunsets, and character and passion in the gloom of deep cloud-shadows, and sullen mist-wreaths lurking in clefts and hollows of the hills, and mystery in the tangled undergrowth whose complication and variety he rendered so well.