Silas became unwontedly withdrawn into himself, neither Nan nor Morgan knew what to make of him. At times he avoided them, at other times silently sought their company. Gregory, to whom Nan turned, after one glance at his brother, replied, “Let him alone,” and she followed the brief formula as being the best advice, finding that Silas only snarled at her whenever she spoke to him. She was relieved rather than dismayed; Silas surly was preferable to Silas honeyed.
He roamed alone, spending hours in the abbey after dusk; or ordered up Hambley, and under the little man’s guidance made his way to the secluded summer-house at Malleson Place. Lady Mallesonwas also at a loss to understand his altered manner; towards her he relaxed his taciturnity, and his speech was more than ever wild and varied, but although he ranged erratically she had the impression that his mind rarely departed from one central subject, and she had also the shrewd idea that that subject was his little sister-in-law, whom she had once seen, and whom she vaguely thought a pretty, delicate, rather appealing girl, unimportant until she had become the preoccupation of Silas’s thoughts.
So long as she had Silas with her, however, she cared very little what he talked about. The utmost that she deplored, sometimes, was his restlessness. It made her wonder whether she really held him. She wondered, indeed, sometimes whether her hold on him was too light to satisfy her vanity, or too secure—all too secure!—for the preservation of her safety and her convenience. She liked danger well enough, but there was a point where danger might become too dangerous.
“Wild man,—Ishmael,” she said to him.
But he went on regardless with what he had been saying.
“There’s but one use for the body,” he exclaimed, “health. Not mortification—that’s morbid. Buthealth, lean and hard. Sinews like whips.” He bared a magnificent forearm. “The only instance where I practise what I preach,” he added bitterly, causing the muscles to rise at will.
“Then you should respect your brother Gregory,” she said, languidly content.
“You have seen him lately, my lady?”
“Yesterday, in the village.”
“The neatest of minds, in the body of a blacksmith,” said Silas.
“Neat?”
“Why, yes—so long as he doesn’t break out. Then he lays all around him, smashes everything he can see, without comment—that makes it quite uncanny, I assure you—and in a trice returns to his quiet and his neatness as though nothing out of the way had happened. He’s very inaccessible, my brother Gregory. No warnings. No explanations. No remorse. Nothing apparently, but action.”
“You respect that,” she said, looking at his fine bony face, and his thick rough hair.
“Think, if a man’s killed,” he brooded, “killed by violent means, what an outrage on the body. Blood spilt, that ran secretly and private in his veins.Bones, no one had ever seen. Entrails. What a bursting!”
She pictured his mind as a landscape ravaged by war, here a wreckage of stone and twisted iron, there a grave, here the stark Calvary of a stricken tree, there the bright blare of poppies striving for life amongst the rushes and rank weeds.
“You waste yourself,” she said; “you should be a martyr,—or a poet.”
She liked to stir him, by such calculated remarks.
“A second-rate poet? not I,” he sneered instantly; then, as the flattery stole over him, “More likely a martyr, of the two,” he said, responding.
“You waste yourself,” she repeated, drawing meanwhile slowly through her fingers the long silk fringe of a shawl that lay thrown across her sofa, “you waste yourself, out of contempt. You eagle with broken wings!”—she knew with what gluttony he accepted such metaphors, and amused herself when he wasn’t with her by thinking out new ones that she might serve up to him,—“you repudiate comfort, don’t you, in your dream of grandeur. Will you end, I wonder, by getting neither?” “No one speaks to me like your ladyship,” he muttered reluctantly. She laughed. She enjoyed pretendingto an ideal of him that, his pride well fired, he would strain himself to live up to; an ideal, moreover, that coincided so adroitly with his own ideal of himself. “I never knew a man so vigorously reject the second-best. It was a pity,” she continued, smoothing out and patting down the fringe of the shawl, “that you never came across a woman to suit you.” She raised her eyes to watch him as she talked, and modulated her phrases according to the expression she found on his face, nor did she trouble to conceal the busy mischief in her own; there were advantages, certainly, in his blindness. “How would you have behaved, I wonder?” she went on; “you would have made a stormy lover, I fancy, once your resistance had been thrown to the winds. Stormy and exacting. Poor woman! Yet I dare say she wouldn’t have minded. Women are like that, you know. And for you,—no more loneliness, no more unsatisfied longings, no more misanthropy. I believe you’d have grown into a different man. You would probably have achieved a good deal.... But it would have taken a clever woman, a very clever woman, to steer you without your knowing that you were being steered.”
“Women in my walk of life don’t have time forcleverness, my lady,” he said acrimoniously, giving a literal answer to her words because he must ignore the meaning which he read into them, and which, as he well knew, she had intended him to read. Her ingenuity was tireless over insinuations that put him on the rack. Clever, she had said; she was clever enough! why hadn’t they, he wondered, appointed women to sit upon the tribunals of the Inquisition? “If you had been born into my class, or I into yours ...” he burst out.
“I don’t admit impertinence, you know, Dene,” she said in a voice of ice, “and anyway I am afraid I cannot give you any more time at present.”