“But it is midnight; what will people say?”
“I don’t care. You have insulted me too badly, and you shall pay for it.”
She started aside towards the wall and seized the bell-rope that hung beside the bed. Ophelia moved towards her with hand outstretched. She was too late, however, either for penitence or intimidation. Ten times or more Mabel Saker had jerked at the cord, and the bell clamored distantly in the silence of the house.
XLI
A LETTER came to Gabriel in his dingy rooms, where he was waiting to hear news of Joan and of her quest. There had not been money enough to take both of them to Rilchester, when possible defeat would have burdened the journey home. Gabriel had never known the full divinity of Joan’s love till she parted from him with a brave smile in her dear eyes. Her womanly courage had revealed itself to him in all its pathetic beauty when her golden head sunned the shadows of the room no more.
Gabriel was at his supper, a sorry meal enough, when the letter came to him from Rilchester. He had been in a desperate mood all day, nor had he slept the previous night, with dark doubts fluttering through his brain like bats through a ruin. Why had not Joan returned? At the dim and half-desolate station, Gabriel had watched, waiting and waiting as each night train came in. He had spent the next day in Lincoln’s Inn Fields and by the river, hanging a haggard face over the stone parapet, too sick at heart to eat. How often had defeat smitten hope down into the dust! Ever and again he had wandered back to the hot, dusty by-street, hoping to find that Joan had returned.
When Gabriel looked at the letter that the dirty servant tossed onto the table, he flushed like a boy, and his heavy, sleepless eyes grew bright. The writing was Judith’s. Visions of green woods and golden meadows flashed up before him like romance, the warm scent of a woman’s hair, the memory of her pale face and shadowy eyes. Judith! How he loved that name! Were not all truth and beauty built therein, purity and pity, the divine tenderness that makes earth heaven?
He tore open the envelope and read the letter, leaning forward a little towards the window, his hands trembling markedly:
“My dearest Brother [it began],—At last I am able to write to you after all these months of silence and distress. Oh, strange fate, that in finding a woman fainting on the road to Rilchester I should find my brother!”
The letter, warm and fragrant with the love of a good woman, went on to tell how Joan and Judith had come together after Joan’s flight from Zeus Gildersedge’s death-bed. The outpourings of hours of solitary yearning seemed to flow in the eager and impassioned words. Of Joan, Judith wrote with a fervor that brought a strange smile to Gabriel’s face: