DINNER that evening proved a lugubrious and problematic meal. The conversation was interjectory and spasmodic, the topics comet-like in character, smiting vaguely through a void of silence. Gabriel attempted a hypocritic cheerfulness for the better masking of his own discomfort. His vivacity inspired no feminine response. He was compelled to undergo the ordeal of being studied in detail by his wife and her brown-haired friend. From the first handshake he had conceived a sincere disrelish for Miss Mabel Saker, and her critical silence that evening did not tend to dispossess him of his antipathy. He was not grieved when the white napkins were laid upon the table and the women carried their perfumed persons to the privacy of the drawing-room.
Miss Saker bared the keyboard of the piano and suffered her slim fingers to produce musical etchings in black and white. She was considered something of a wit in her own circle, her humor emulating the spangled, short-skirted brilliance of the variety stage. Miss Saker was in a mischievous mood that evening, and the starched artificiality of the dinner-hour emphasized the reaction.
Putting down sundry chords in the base with melodramatic thunder, she glanced over her shoulder with a theatrical frown.
“Tragedy, my dear—tragedy,” she said; “the man is in a deep, deceitful mood. He has something ponderous and painful upon his conscience.”
Ophelia turned herself in her lounge-chair and lay with one cheek on the cushion, a diamond crescent shining in her hair.
“He is too talkative,” she remarked.
“True, O queen. When a man talks thus”—and Miss Saker evolved a rackety and hysterical air—“you may bet your boots his nerves are on the tingle. He is hiding something under his coat.”
“It was easy to see that from the first,” remarked the wife.
“He went green when he saw us in the hall.”
“Rather a shock, perhaps. The man had been out all day; I can guess where.”
Meanwhile Gabriel had wandered to the garden, where the hand of evening was crushing the red juices of the sunset, staining the cloudy steps of heaven. The lawns were of green silk, the flowers thereon like color fallen from the pallet of day. The cypresses stood clothed with azure, the pines like Ethiop maidens wrapped in gossamer work of gold. In the thickets two thrushes were singing, flinging lyric rivalry over the dusky leaves.
The man plunged to the more lonely depths, a broad hollow where flowers and shrubs were tangled in a mist of green. He walked, inhaling the perfumed breath of the hour, with head thrown back, as one who watches the heavens. All the damsels of the night seemed to steal out of their chambers, dewy-lipped, ebon-tressed, with eyes liquid as moon-kissed water. Love! What was it? A vapor and a shade? An intangible essence dying on the lips when tasted, with an infinite regret!
He passed again from the swarthy shrubberies, and saw the windows of his own home yellow and tiger-eyed towards the night. Roses beckoned in the gloom. What were they to him? With the grass like velvet moss under his feet, he drew near to a window and listened. Music came from within, and laughter, facile and light. They were merry, these two, merry at his heart’s cost, and perhaps Gabriel guessed it. Their words were like falling water to him, confused and meaningless. Despite the pleading voice of his woman of dreams, he grew full of bitterness and keen irony of soul.
It had grown dark when he went in to them. A constrained quiet seemed to pervade the room even from the moment that his hand had touched the door. Books were forthc............