“You must be tired.”
“Don’t worry yourself on my account. James sent the carriage down to meet us. Ah, I have forgotten to introduce you to Miss Saker; she has come back with me for a fortnight. Mab, dear, my husband.”
It was like the wooden chatter of a pair of dolls, lacking warmth or the merest flicker of enthusiasm. The same spirit hovered in the air as of yore. Gabriel had been chilled and repelled from the first glance. Meanwhile a streak of green silk had risen from a neighboring settee; Miss Saker and the man had bowed to each other and extended listless hands. Miss Saker had been staring him over from his first entry, much as she would have scrutinized an interesting co-respondent bandying words with a barrister in the divorce court. Unfortunately he had disappointed Miss Saker’s malice, being not the Faustus she had expected, but rather a poor creature considered in the part of the melodramatic villain.
It was as sorry a clashing of moods as even a mediæval witch-damsel could have predestinated. Gabriel, after a stroll in the garden, followed his wife slowly up the oak staircase with its broad, shining steps and rich-wrought balustrade. His reason was too maimed for the moment to serve him with any warmth or virtue. He moved as one half-dazed, taking in the minutiæ of the scenes around him with that peculiar vividness that often accompanies pain. He marked how the lozenged panes in the blazoned windows gleamed with a singular and sensuous brilliance. How the dust danced golden in the slanting beams of the sun. How one of the old oil pictures, a coarse Flemish genre work, hung awry on the landing. He was in the act of levelling it when his wife came out from the “blue room,” closing the door with its painted panels carefully after her.
She stood there holding the handle of the door and looking at him with a peculiar expression of critical composure. The silver girdle about her waist glittered in the sun, and on her bosom she wore a cross set with garnets. Her eyes were unwaveringly bright and even more brilliantly blue than of yore.
Feeling for the moment more like a homeless child than a grown man, he yearned to be comforted even by this woman whom he had ceased to love. Was she not more to him than a sister! Indubitably beautiful as she stood before him, possibly some old tenderness not wholly selfish whimpered in his heart. The very touch of a human hand seemed precious in that hour of desolation and despair. Enigmatic though his sensations were, he yielded to them with the mute helplessness of one in pain.
“You are looking wondrous well, dear,” he said to her.
“Indeed!”
“I will ring to have our room set in order. Since you have been away from me I have been sleeping in my dressing-room.”
“My orders have been already given,” said the wife, with no softening of her mouth.