Chapter XIII

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.