The weary hours till night passed by. She tried to read. She tried to eat. She thought of going over the road to the Philimores’ for company; but her mood forbade. For all their delicacy they would ask reasons for this sudden abandonment. She magnified its importance. She could have said: “My husband has gone to London on business.” But to her brain, overwrought by sudden emotion, the commonplace excuse seemed inadequate. She shrank from the society of her kind friends, who would regard this interplanetary mystery as a matter of course.
If only Alexis had taken his watch! Perhaps he would have time to buy another—a consoling thought. Meanwhile she strapped it on her own wrist, heroically resolved not to part with it night or day until he returned.
She sat by the lamp on the sitting-room table, looking out over the veranda at the pitch blackness of a breathless night in which not even the mild beat of the surf could be heard. She might have been in some far Pacific desert island. Her book lay on her lap—the second volume of Motley’s Dutch Republic. All the Alvas and Williams, all the heroes and villains, all the soldiers and politicians and burghers were comfortably dead hundreds of years ago. What did these dead men matter, when one living man, the equal of them all, had gone forth from her, into the unknowableness of the night?
Myra came into the room with an amorphous bundle in her hand.
“The camp bed in the dressing-room isn’t very comfortable—but I suppose I can sleep on it.”
Olivia turned swiftly in her chair, startled into human realities.
“No. It’s a beast of a thing. But I should love to have you to be with me. You’re a dear. You sleep in my bed and I’ll take the dressing-room.”
“You once gave signs of being a woman of sense,” said Myra tonelessly. “It seems I was mistaken.”
She disappeared with her bundle. Olivia put out the light and went to bed, where she lay awake all the night, fantastically widowed, striving with every nerve and every brain-cell to picture the contemporaneous situation of her husband. Three o’clock in the morning. He would be in mid-Channel. Had he secured a berth? Or was he forced to walk up and down the steamer’s deck? Thank Heaven, it was a black still night. She stole out of bed and looked at the sea. A sea of oil. It was something to be grateful for. But the poor boy without his watch—the watch which had marked for him the laggard minutes of captivity, the racing hours of approaching death, the quiet, rhythmic companion and recorder of his amazing life.
She forced all her will power to sleep; but the blank of him there on the infinite expanse of mattress she felt like a frost. The dawn found her with wide and sleepless eyes.