“Sean, how unmanly, how cowardly! Oh, if you knew how I despise you now. Oh, I need air—air!”
She turned from us abruptly, then paused. Her bosom moved in a long, slow breathing, and she turned her head to look at her lover, whose gaze did not meet hers. A veil of anger seemed to fall from her features, and the fire softened in her eyes. But this was no melting mood. Instead, a serene aloofness reigned in her face, and she seemed like one who studied Cosgrove from some region above, studied him with sympathy and compassion. For a space of time—perhaps a minute—there was this silence. Then, as if she had shown enough that she was not embittered by passion, she departed swiftly.
Through the passage of the french windows she strode, out to the lawn, and across, to be lost to sight in shrubs alongside the gate-house.
So, splitting into new faction and fresh enmity at every hour, the Bidding Feast at last witnessed the discord of the lovers themselves.
Cosgrove’s rebuke of his betrothed had stunned us, and her answering rebuke had left us wild and speechless. None stirred to follow Miss Lebetwood. In me, at least, the strife of feeling was comparable to the mad stress of the night before, when the first message of Parson Lolly had been found. I knew a delirium of bewilderment, a very horror, in the instants following those outbursts.
Cosgrove’s face, now so blotted with blood, took fantastic dimensions, seemed twice its size. The room appeared an enormous room, and the people pigmy people. Sir Pharamond’s portrait leered and sneered. Every proportion was indecently distorted, and time, like space, was bereft of its comfortable conventions. The seconds seemed to stagger past.
Then Pendleton, no longer held by Alberta, rose so hastily that his chair banged backward against the stair-post of the little gallery. “Yes, by gad! Let’s all get some air. This room is stuffy as blazes. That’s what puts us all at sixes and sevens.”
“I really think,” observed Eve Bartholomew, “that it’s the absence of Sir Brooke that gets so on our nerves.”
“Let’s declare a truce—no, let’s make peace,” smiled Alberta Pendleton. “Sean, you and Bob haven’t any ill-will, have you?”
Since his betrothed’s condemnation of him, no petty enmity could very well find hold in Cosgrove’s soul. His defeat told in his dejected head and drooped lids. He didn’t answer Alberta.