In the room there was a faint, sweet, sickly smell of flowers and of
drugs, the scent that pervades the rooms of invalids. The sun was still
blazing outside, and through the drawn Venetian blinds three long
streaks of warm light forced their way, and fell across the white figure
lying on the couch. Bars of golden air, breathing with innumerable tiny
sparks of dust--they seemed in the hushed room to be the only living
things. Even the flowers drooped, like beings that had given up their
souls to the woman with the ashen yellow face, whose breathing scarcely
stirred the white swansdown ruffle thrown across her chest. Over the
bullfinch’s cage was drawn a grey silk covering that quivered faintly at
the opening of the door. The oaken furniture seemed to shrink dark and
ill-defined into the corners of the room.
It was so still there that Giles paused, and his heart gave a queer
thump. He shut the door noiselessly, and bent his head, looking into his
wife’s face. His tall, thin figure had a great dignity in the dim light.
She was not dead, as he had thought, she was asleep. On the little table
by the couch were the book she had been reading--Tolstoi’s “The Kingdom
of God is within You”--three roses, a medicine glass, and bottle.
Giles’s eyes fastened on the roses; by some twist of fate they were
Jocelyn’s favourites, the sunset-coloured Riviera roses. A bar of light
fell across two of them, so that they gleamed and glowed at him; the
third was in shadow, the colour drained from its petals by the blight of
the grey room. It seemed to him as an omen, and he shivered. He took the
rose, and turned its face to the sunlight. His wife sighed huskily in
her sleep.
Giles stepped back, he thought she would wake, but she did not. He
listened to her breathing, it was faint and strained; and but for the
faint, irregular monotony of it she might have been dead. She was very
far from death, as it seemed to him, with the insistent pain of
Jocelyn’s suffering, and the lurking shadow of possible shame ever
present to his mind.
A faint sound of voices rose in the outer corridor, and footsteps
creaked coming down the passage towards the door. Giles stepped behind a
screen, which sheltered the couch from a French window opening on the
garden. His nerves were so jarred and unstrung that he recoiled from the
idea of meeting any one, and having to talk in his wife’s presence. The
clasp of the window was not fastened; it was slightly ajar. He waited,
prepared to step out if any one came.
The door was opened softly, and he heard a whispered conversation in
French.
“Madame is asleep, Monsieur.”
“Ah! then do not wake her for the world! I will call again later. It is
of no consequence. I will take a little walk. Thank you, Pauline; shut
the door gently.”
Giles recognised the peculiarly soft, purring tones of Nielsen’s voice.
The door closed softly, and through the flower-covered trellis work, he
watched the Swede’s square figure as he tiptoed his way down the steps.
He noticed black clouds creeping fast towards the coast from over the
sea, and the olives below the road beginning to sway a little. He saw
very clearly, and with a childish feeling of irritation, Nielsen’s
broad, wrinkled face, with its great tawny moustache and gold-rimmed
eyeglass, lifted towards the sky at an angle which bared his short neck.
His brain was in an exhausted state of nervous excitement, rendering it
as receptive of outward impression as a photographer’s plate; everything
he saw and heard was graven upon it indelibly.
When Nielsen had disappeared, Giles turned back to his wife’s couch. The
bars of sunlight were gone. She was still sleeping heavily; would she
never wake, and let him get this over?
He fingered the medicine glass mechanically, there were a few drops of
moisture at the bottom. He smelled it--the sickly-sweet, unmistakable
smell of morphia--and put it down with a faint quiver of disgust. The
drug she took every day to make her sleep. He looked at the bottle
nearly full of a white liquid, with a kind of fascination. A tenth of it
would kill him! An easy death, that! He felt with indignation that the
bottle had no business to be there; his wife always put it under her
cushions before going to sleep, for fear of a mistake--he had seen her
many times. Fingering the cool, slippery round of the glass, he looked
mechanically about him for the medicine that she took the instant she
woke, heavy and dazed from the morphia. It should be there ready, it was
always there! There was no bottle upon the table except the wrong one,
that which should have been under her cushions.
A thought flashed through his mind, a vivid vision snatched from the
future. What if--! He stood up, hardly breathing, his hands behind his
back, looking down upon his wife. Her first waking act! Half
conscious--the wrong bottle!--the wrong....
He drew a deep breath, turned suddenly upon his heel, and passed swiftly
through the window.
The humming of insects and the long droning sigh of the coming wind was
in the breath of the warm air as he stepped out. A creeper went
swish-swish over his head, and a loosened spray of jessamine beat him in
the face. Its sweet, subtle scent penetrated his senses, and gave him a
queer feeling as if his heart were contracting within him, and the cool
beat of the leaves against his face felt like the touch of fingers,
forcing him back. He pulled the window to, very gently. A chance had
been sent!
A chance had been sent! He had a dim vision of black clouds driving over
the sky, olives swaying in a long line in front of him, and there was
the road, long, white, and dusty, and he knew that what he had to do was
to get down it, as far and as fast as he could. To get down it, before
he began to think. He began to run--he had no hat on, and he knew it,
but he knew that it was not his business to inquire into the reason why
he had no hat, it was to get over the ground quickly.
He found that he _was_ thinking as he went, but upon quite trivial
matters. He thought of a little shop at the bottom of the road, where he
could buy himself a hat, a peasant’s hat like Jacopo’s; he hoped it
might be clean. He thought of the weather; it looked like breaking up,
the clouds made a curious effect over the sea. He thought at a great
pace, as fast as he could, and his thoughts left no mark whatever on
his mind.
His tall figure striding along, bareheaded, with coat flying open,
created no small astonishment in Nielsen’s mind, who, seated on the edge
of the water-tank under the olives opposite, was waiting with his usual
surface apathy to renew his visit at the villa. Remembering the scene of
the night before, he made no attempt to attract Legard’s attention, but
sat fingering his long moustache, and staring patiently after him, with
mixed feelings of curiosity and commiseration.
Giles passed the shop without stopping--he was so busy keeping his mind
unoccupied--and he had to turn back to buy himself a hat. He had
exhausted his power of trivial reflection now, and he tried to think of
Jocelyn. He would see her--he must see her! And as he walked he found
that her image, to which he trusted to save himself from thought, danced
elusively just out of the reach of his mind’s eye.
He walked swiftly, a man haunted by the hidden, ugly shape of an unborn
remorse. At a turn in the road he came suddenly upon Jocelyn herself.