"Couldn"t you take me?" she asked.
"I will next time," he replied.
The child still looked at him, unsatisfied.
"But what did you go for?" she asked, goading him suspiciously.
"To see the sea and the ships and the fighting ships with cannons--"
"You _might_ have taken me," said the child reproachfully.
"Yes, I ought to have done, oughtn"t I?" he said, as if regretful.
Gwen still looked full at him.
"You _are_ red," she said.
He glanced quickly in the gla.s.s, and replied:
"That is the sun. Hasn"t it been hot?"
"Mm! It made my nose all peel. Vera said she would sc.r.a.pe me like a new potato." The child laughed and turned shyly away.
"Come here," said Siegmund. "I believe you"ve got a tooth out, haven"t you?"
He was very cautious and gentle. The child drew back. He hesitated, and she drew away from him, unwilling.
"Come and let me look," he repeated.
She drew farther away, and the same constrained smile appeared on her face, shy, suspicious, condemning.
"Aren"t you going to get your chocolate?" he asked, as the child hesitated in the doorway.
She glanced into his room, and answered:
"I"ve got to go to mam and have my hair done."
Her awkwardness and her lack of compliance insulted him. She went downstairs without going into his room.
Siegmund, rebuffed by the only one in the house from whom he might have expected friendship, proceeded slowly to shave, feeling sick at heart.
He was a long time over his toilet. When he stripped himself for the bath, it seemed to him he could smell the sea. He bent his head and licked his shoulder. It tasted decidedly salt.
"A pity to wash it off," he said.
As he got up dripping from the cold bath, he felt for the moment exhilarated. He rubbed himself smooth. Glancing down at himself, he thought: "I look young. I look as young as twenty-six."
He turned to the mirror. There he saw himself a mature, complete man of forty, with grave years of experience on his countenance.
"I used to think that, when I was forty," he said to himself, "I should find everything straight as the nose on my face, walking through my affairs as easily as you like. Now I am no more sure of myself, have no more confidence than a boy of twenty. What can I do? It seems to me a man needs a mother all his life. I don"t feel much like a lord of creation."
Having arrived at this cynicism, Siegmund prepared to go downstairs. His sensitiveness had pa.s.sed off; his nerves had become callous. When he was dressed he went down to the kitchen without hesitation. He was indifferent to his wife and children. No one spoke to him as he sat to the table. That was as he liked it; he wished for nothing to touch him.
He ate his breakfast alone, while his wife bustled about upstairs and Vera bustled about in the dining-room. Then he retired to the solitude of the drawing-room. As a reaction against his poetic activity, he felt as if he were gradually becoming more stupid and blind. He remarked nothing, not even the extravagant bowl of gra.s.ses placed where he would not have allowed it--on his piano; nor his fiddle, laid cruelly on the cold, polished floor near the window. He merely sat down in an arm-chair, and felt sick.
All his unnatural excitement, all the poetic stimulation of the past few days, had vanished. He felt flaccid, while his life struggled slowly through him. After an intoxication of pa.s.sion and love, and beauty, and of sunshine, he was prostrate. Like a plant that blossoms gorgeously and madly, he had wasted the tissue of his strength, so that now his life struggled in a clogged and broken channel.
Siegmund sat with his head between his hands, leaning upon the table. He would have been stupidly quiescent in his feeling of loathing and sickness had not an intense irritability in all his nerves tormented him into consciousness.
"I suppose this is the result of the sun--a sort of sunstroke," he said, realizing an intolerable stiffness of his brain, a stunned condition in his head.
"This is hideous!" he said. His arms were quivering with intense irritation. He exerted all his will to stop them, and then the hot irritability commenced in his belly. Siegmund fidgeted in his chair without changing his position. He had not the energy to get up and move about. He fidgeted like an insect pinned down.
The door opened. He felt violently startled; yet there was no movement perceptible. Vera entered, ostensibly for an autograph-alb.u.m into which she was going to copy a drawing from the _London Opinion_, really to see what her father was doing. He did not move a muscle. He only longed intensely for his daughter to go out of the room, so that he could let go. Vera went out of the drawing-room humming to herself. Apparently she had not even glanced at her father. In reality, she had observed him closely.
"He is sitting with his head in his hands," she said to her mother.
Beatrice replied: "I"m glad he"s nothing else to do."
"I should think he"s pitying himself," said Vera.
"He"s a good one at it," answered Beatrice.
Gwen came forward and took hold of her mother"s skirt, looking up anxiously.
"What is he doing, Mam?" she asked.
"Nothing," replied her mother--"nothing; only sitting in the drawing-room."
"But what has he _been_ doing?" persisted the anxious child.
"Nothing--nothing that I can tell _you_. He"s only spoilt all our lives."
The little girl stood regarding her mother In the greatest distress and perplexity.
"But what will he do, Mam?" she asked.
"Nothing. Don"t bother. Run and play with Marjory now. Do you want a nice plum?"
She took a yellow plum from the table. Gwen accepted it without a word.
She was too much perplexed.
"What do you say?" asked her mother.
"Thank you," replied the child, turning away.
Siegmund sighed with relief when he was again left alone. He twisted in his chair, and sighed again, trying to drive out the intolerable clawing irritability from his belly.
"Ah, this is horrible!" he said.