“I will come in a minute. Have you seen the sunset? It is grand over the heath.”
She went back into her bedroom, humming some old song, her very happiness hurting the man’s heart. What was this lust, this appetite, this thirst in the blood, that it should make him the creature of such a chance? Had he not free will, the self-respecting strength of his own manhood? Strange irony of life that six bottles of choice wine should typify the father’s sins visited upon the children! A scientific platitude! And yet the thought was pitiful to him, pitiful that the spiritual beauty of a woman’s love could be challenged by such a pathetic thing as this. He had grappled and thrown the passion time on time, and yet it had slunk away to come grinning back to him with open mouth and burning eyes.
He was still sitting on the settle with the letter crumpled in his hand, when Catherine called to him again from her bedroom.
“Do look at the sky, dear, it is wonderful.”
His wife’s innocent happiness stung him with its unconscious pathos. She had conceived this Eden for him, and lo—the serpent was amid the flowers her hands had gathered. He roused himself, picked up the hamper by the cord, and carried it into the little dining-room beyond the hall. Ignorance was bliss for her; knowledge would dash her joyous confidence in a moment. There was no need for her to know; he felt sure of himself, safe with her in such a place. Looking round him a moment, he pushed the hamper under the deep window-seat, where it was hidden by the drapings. Poor Porteus, how little he thought that an asp lurked under the leaves of the vine!
A full moon was rising in the east when husband and wife went out into the garden. The glimmering witchery of the night bathed the world in silent splendor. From the cottage the broad swell of the heathland rolled back under the sky to where a forest of firs rose like distant peaks against the moon. Mists, white and ghostly, were rising in the meadows of the plain, vistas of woodland, vague and mysterious, shining up through the gathering vapor. In the garden the scent of the lilies mingled with the old world sweetness of the herbs. The flowers stood white before the cypresses, and the dew was falling.
Not a sound save the distant baying of a dog. Murchison opened the little gate to the path that wound amid the gorse and heather. The turmoil and clamor of the world seemed far from them under the moonlit sky; the breath of the night was cool and fragrant.
Catherine’s head was on her husband’s shoulder, his arm about her body. She leaned her weight on him with the happy instinct of a woman, her face white towards the moon, her eyes full of the light thereof.
“Eight years,” she said, as though speaking her inmost thoughts.
“Eight years!” and he echoed her.