The Little Lady of the Big House / Маленькая хозяйка большого дома. Книга для чтения на английском языке

He noted the violet-blue shadows under her eyes, as he arose, without offering to touch her. Nor did she offer invitation.

“A white night?” he asked, as he placed a chair.

“A white night,” she answered wearily. “Not a second’s sleep, though I tried so hard.”

Both were reluctant of speech, and they labored under a mutual inability to draw their eyes away from each other.

“You… you don’t look any too fit yourself[532],” she said. “Yes, my face,” he nodded. “I was looking at it while I shaved. The expression won’t come off.”

“Something happened to you last night,” she probed, and he could not fail to see the same compassion in her eyes that he had seen in Oh Dear’s. “Everybody remarked your expression. What was it?”

He shrugged his shoulders. “It has been coming on for some time,” he evaded, remembering that the first hint of it had been given him by Paula’s portrait of him. “You’ve noticed it?” he inquired casually.

She nodded, then was struck by a sudden thought. He saw the idea leap to life ere her words uttered it.

“Dick, you haven’t an affair?”

It was a way out. It would straighten all the tangle. And hope was in her voice and in her face.

He smiled, shook his head slowly, and watched her disappointment.

“I take it back[533],” he said. “I have an affair.”

“Of the heart?”

She was eager, as he answered, “Of the heart.”

But she was not prepared for what came next. He abruptly drew his chair close, till his knees touched hers, and, leaning forward, quickly but gently prisoned her hands in his resting on her knees.

“Don’t be alarmed, little bird-woman,” he quieted her. “I shall not kiss you. It is a long time since I have. I want to tell you about that affair. But first I want to tell you how proud I am – proud of myself. I am proud that I am a lover. At my age, a lover! It is unbelievable, and it is wonderful. And such a lover! Such a curious, unusual, and quite altogether remarkable lover. In fact, I have laughed all the books and all biology in the face. I am a monogamist. I love the woman, the one woman. After a dozen years of possession I love her quite madly, oh, so sweetly madly.”

Her hands communicated her disappointment to him, making a slight, impulsive flutter to escape; but he held them more firmly.

“I know her every weakness, and, weakness and strength and all, I love her as madly as I loved her at the first, in those mad moments when I first held her in my arms.”

Her hands were mutinous of the restraint he put upon them, and unconsciously she was beginning to pull and tug to be away from him. Also, there was fear in her eyes. He knew her fastidiousness, and he guessed, with the other man’s lips recent on hers, that she feared a more ardent expression on his part[534].

“And please, please be not frightened, timid, sweet, beautiful, proud, little bird-woman. See. I release you. Know that I love you most dearly, and that I am considering you as well as myself, and before myself, all the while.”

He drew his chair away from her, leaned back, and saw confidence grow in her eyes.

“I shall tell you all my heart,” he continued, “and I shall want you to tell me all your heart.”

“This love for me is something new?” she asked. “A recrudescence?”

“Yes, a recrudescence, and no.”

“I thought that for a long time I had been a habit to you,” she said.

“But I was loving you all the time.”

“Not madly.”

“No,” he acknowledged. “But with certainty. I was so sure of you, of myself. It was, to me, all a permanent and forever established thing. I plead guilty. But when that permanency was shaken, all my love for you fired up. It was there all the time, a steady, long-married flame.”

“But about me?” she demanded.

“That is what we are coming to. I know your worry right now, and of a minute ago[535]. You are so intrinsically honest, so intrinsically true, that the thought of sharing two men is abhorrent to you. I have not misread you. It is a long time since you have permitted me any love-touch.”

He shrugged his shoulders “And an equally long time since I offered you a love-touch.”

“Then you have known from the first?” she asked quickly.

He nodded.

“Possibly,” he added, with an air of judicious weighing,

“I sensed it coming before even you knew it. But we will not go into that or other things.”

“You have seen…” she attempted to ask, stung almost to shame at thought of her husband having witnessed any caress of hers and Graham’s.