She bent forward very slightly and looked into the man’s eyes with a gracious self-consciousness that made her face more luminous under her splendid hair.
“I want to help you to realize your ideals,” she said. “Can I do that?”
“Who else?”
“For the good of those unhappy ones whom women pity. You will hold the red wine of joy to the lips of the feeble; you will point to the golden cleft in the heavens. I have learned so much from you that I am no longer a mere egotist. I am ambitious for you, dear. I believe you have great work in the years to come.”
Gabriel did not look into her eyes. He was loath to confess, even to himself, that his strength was as nothing without hers, that even she thought too well of him. Yet for her sake and her pride in him he could play the man to the strain of her ideals. Had not Beatrice made Dante Dante? To have quailed and doubted would have shamed the great love that this woman had set like a sun in the firmament of life.
“For the thought of you,” he said, “I will do my duty. God help me to be worthy of your pride in this life. And after death—”
Her face grew radiant like the face of a saint to whom visions of splendor are unveiled in the infinite.
“After life—immortality!”
It was not long that year before Gabriel saw the slimed track of the beast, grass flattened by the belly of a creeping thing, toad’s eyes glinting yellow in the dusk. The truth was gradual but none the less sure. The suspicion deepened as the days went by; nor was he left long in the shallow waters of doubt.
One morning he had fancied himself followed by a man in the dress of a game-keeper. For the moment he had thought nothing of the incident. More sinister convictions were only established as he wandered out with Joan from the amphitheatre with its fringe of trees. He had seen a bearded face disappear behind a bush, like the face of a savage scout watching the march of a hostile host. Yet another evening a laboring fellow had shouldered by them in a narrow path through the woods with a rude stare at the girl’s face. Yet again Gabriel had seen the figure of a man squirming like a lizard into the undergrowth fringing a thicket not far from Zeus Gildersedge’s house. These signs were sinister enough to arouse the cynic in the man and to set the world-wise part of him thinking. To be watched, and for what purpose! This was a moral that did not need the fabulous phraseology of Æsop to hide its nakedness.