CHAPTER VI.
Had I had nothing else to do but to read and muse I should have greatly missed Martelli. As it was, I felt his absence on the evening that followed his departure. I missed his dark face, his glowing eye, his rapid speech, his tart questions. His arm-chair looked very empty without him. My supper too was somewhat tasteless, wanting the sharp condiment of his tongue and gestures. But how should I feel his absence very sensibly with Mrs. Fraser to comfort me? I only wonder I felt it at all. Our parting had not been calculated to sharpen regret. I had no notion he was such a passionate man. There was no doubt he had been insulting. But what in the world could have provoked such an outbreak? He would have had me believe it was my resolution to marry Mrs. Fraser that angered him. But what was Mrs. Fraser to him? Was he a monomaniac—mad on the subject of women? We know that there are people born with antipathies which nothing can shake. Lady Heneage would faint at the sight of a rose; the Marquis de la Rochejacquelin would turn white with fear before a squirrel; and I have read in some author of a man whose antipathy to old women was such, that once when his friends, by way of joke, introduced an elderly female into his presence, he fell in a fit and died. I do not say that I quite believed this to be Martelli's disease: but I was strongly disposed to think that he had some eccentric aversion to living in a house where there was a mistress.
I did not pass a quiet night. I had resolved to propose next day to my beautiful neighbour, and my resolution rather agitated me. A man may do in a moment of impulse what he would fear to attempt in cold blood. I was rather sorry I had not proposed that afternoon. I had been surrounded by conditions highly favourable to a declaration. It would have been over now, and I should have been able to sleep the sleep of the accepted.
I had told her I would call in the morning. At another time she might have asked me in her odd sweet way "Why?" but her silence was auspicious. She had lowered her beautiful eyes, and the conscious curve of her mouth gave me reason to believe she had guessed my mission.
So at about eleven o'clock, when the sun stood high and the land lay hot and still beneath its fiery gaze, I took my hat and stepped over to Elmore Cottage. There was no need of ceremony now to gain admittance. The girl knew I was a privileged visitor and admitted me with a smile.
I entered the little drawing-room. It was empty. The blinds were half drawn, and the window stood wide open. Signs of her recent presence were visible in the garden hat upon the sofa, in some drawing materials on the table, above all, in the soft peculiar perfume which I associated with her. She was such a strange woman that I thought she might have hidden on hearing my knock; and I looked behind the sofa, and the door, and in the corner protected by the piano, for her. Then I drew to the table to see what she was drawing. It was a man's head, unfinished though complete enough to offer a good likeness. The hair was dark, the nose straight, the mouth firm, the eye sufficiently large. The slight line of whisker was not shaded. This sketch dissipated all my nervousness. I looked up with a smile, and met her eyes peering at me from the door.
"If I had known it was you I should have hid that," said she, coming forward in a somewhat defiant manner, but with a delicate pink on her cheek.
"Did you not want me to see it?"
"No."
"Why? It is charmingly done—the very image of me."