The Call of the Blood Part 68

"She must know!" he thought. "She must feel the truth. My lips must tell it to her."

And when at last they drew away from each other his eyes asked her furiously a question, asked it of her eyes.

"What is it, Maurice?"

He said nothing. She dropped her eyes and reddened slowly, till she looked much younger than usual, strangely like a girl.

"You haven't--you haven't----"

There was a sound of reserve in her voice, and yet a sound of triumph, too. She looked up at him again.

"Do you guess that I have something to tell you?" she said, slowly.

"Something to tell me?" he repeated, dully.

He was so intent on himself, on his own evil-doing, that it seemed to him as if everything must have some connection with it.

"Ah," she said, quickly; "no, I see you weren't."

"What is it?" he asked, but without real interest.

"I can't tell you now," she said.

Gaspare went by the window leading the donkeys.

"Buona notte, signora!"

It was a very happy voice.

"Buona notte, Gaspare. Sleep well."

Maurice caught at the last words.

"We must sleep," he said. "To-morrow we'll--we'll----"

"Tell each other everything. Yes, to-morrow!"

She put her arm through his.

"Maurice, if you knew how I feel!"

"Yes?" he said, trying to make his voice eager, buoyant. "Yes?"

"If you knew how I've been longing to be back! And so often I've thought that I never should be here with you again, just in the way we were!"

He cleared his throat.

"Why?"

"It is so difficult to repeat a great, an intense happiness, I think. But we will, we are repeating it, aren't we?"

"Yes."

"When I got to the station to-day, and--and you weren't there, I had a dreadful foreboding. It was foolish. The explanation of your not being there was so simple. Of course I might have guessed it."

"Of course."

"But in the first moment I felt as if you weren't there because I had lost you forever, because you had been taken away from me forever. It was such an intense feeling that it frightened me--it frightened me horribly.

Put your arm round me, Maurice. Let me feel what an idiot I have been!"

He obeyed her and put his arm round her, and he felt as if his arm must tell her what she had not learned from his lips. And she thought that now he must know the truth she had not told him.

"Don't think of dreadful things," he said.

"I won't any more. I don't think I could with you. To me you always mean the sun, light, and life, and all that is brave and beautiful!"

He took his arm away from her.

"Come, we must sleep, Hermione!" he said. "It's nearly dawn. I can almost see the smoke on Etna."

He shut the French window and drew the bolt.

She had gone into the bedroom and was standing by the dressing-table. She did not know why, but a great shyness had come upon her. It was like a cloud enveloping her. Never before had she felt like this with Maurice, not even when they were first married. She had loved him too utterly to be shy with him. Maurice was still in the sitting-room, fastening the shutters of the window. She heard the creak of wood, the clatter of the iron bar falling into the fastener. Now he would come.

But he did not come. He was moving about in the room. She heard papers rustling, then the lid of the piano shut down. He was putting everything in order.

This orderliness was so unusual in Maurice that it made a disagreeable impression upon her. She began to feel as if he did not want to come into the bedroom, as if he were trying to put off the moment of coming. She remembered that he had seemed shy of her. What had come to them both to-night? Her instinct moved her to break through this painful, this absurd constraint.

"Maurice!" she called.

"Yes."

His voice sounded odd to her, almost like the voice of some other man, some stranger.

"Aren't you coming?"

"Yes. Hermione."

But still he did not come. After a moment, he said:

"It's awfully hot to-night!"

"After Africa it seems quite cool to me."

"Does it? I've been--since you've been away I've been sleeping nearly always out-of-doors on the terrace."

Now he came to the doorway and stood there. He looked at the white room, at Hermione. She had on a white tea-gown. It seemed to him that everything here was white, everything but his soul. He felt as if he could not come into this room, could not sleep here to-night, as if it would be a desecration. When he stood in the doorway the painful shyness returned to her.