Mechanically he took out his watch and wound it, and then went slowly up the wide staircase. At the head of the stairs he paused again. The great house had never seemed so silent, so empty, so purposeless. The rows of closed doors opening from the gallery seemed like the portals of some huge mausoleum, vacant and chill. A house of desolation that cried to him to fill its emptiness with life and love. With lagging steps he walked half way along the gallery, passing two of the closed doors with averted head, but at the third he stopped abruptly, yielding to an impulse that had come to him. For a moment he hesitated, as though before some holy place he feared to desecrate, then with a quick drawn breath he turned the handle and went in.
In the darkness his hand sought and found the electric switch by the door, and pressing it the room was flooded with soft shaded light. Peters had spoken only the truth when he said that the house was kept in immediate readiness for its mistress’s return. Craven had never crossed the threshold of this room before, and seeing it thus for the first time he could hardly believe that for two years it had been tenantless. She might have gone from it ten minutes before. It was redolent of her presence. The little intimate details were as she had left them. A bowl of bronze chrysanthemums stood on the dressing table where lay the tortoise-shell toilet articles given her by Miss Craven. A tiny clock ticked companionably on the mantelpiece. The pain in his eyes deepened as they swept the room with hungry eagerness to take in every particular. Her room! The room from which his unworthiness had barred him. All that he had forfeited rose up before him, and in overwhelming shame and misery a wave of burning colour rolled slowly over his face. Never had the distance between them seemed so wide. Never had her purity and innocence been brought home to him so forcibly as in this spotless white chamber. Its simplicity and fresh almost austere beauty seemed the reflection of her own stainless soul and the fierce passion that was consuming him seemed by contrast hideous and brutal. It was as if he had violated the sanctuary of a cloistered Nun. And yet might not even passion be beautiful if love hallowed it? His arms stretched out in hopeless longing, her name burst from his lips in a cry of desperate loneliness, and he fell on his knees beside the bed, burying his face in the thick soft quilt, his strong brown hands outflung, gripping and twisting its silken cover in his agony.
Hours later he raised his tired eyes to the pale light of the wintry dawn filtering feebly through the close drawn curtains.
He left that morning for Paris, alone.
It was still raining steadily and the chill depressing outlook from the train did not tend to lighten his gloomy thoughts.
In London the rain poured down incessantly. The roads were greasy and slippery with mud, the pavements filled with hurrying jostling crowds, whose dripping umbrellas glistened under the flaring shop lights. Craven peered at the cheerless prospect as he drove from one station to the other and shivered at the gloom and wretchedness through which he was passing. The mean streets and dreary squalid houses took on a greater significance for him than they had ever done. The sight of a passing woman, ill-clad and rain-drenched, sent through him a stab of horrible pain. Paris could be as cruel, as pitiless, as this vaster, wealthier city.
He left his bag in the cloakroom at Charing Cross and spent the hours of waiting for the boat train tramping the streets in the vicinity of the station. He was in no mood to go to his Club, where he would find a host of acquaintances eager for an account of his wanderings and curious concerning his tardy return.
The time dragged heavily. He turned into a quiet restaurant to get a meal and ate without noticing what was put before him. At the earliest opportunity he sought the train and buried himself in the corner of a compartment praying that the wretched night might lessen the number of travellers. Behind an evening paper which he did not attempt to read he smoked in silence, which the two other men in the carriage did not break. Foreigners both, they huddled in great coats in opposite corners and were asleep almost before the train pulled out of the station. Laying down the paper that had no interest for him Craven surveyed them for a moment with a feeling of envy, and tilting his hat over his eyes, endeavoured to emulate their good example. But, despite his weariness, sleep would not come to him. He sat listening to the rattle of the train and to the peaceful snoring of his companions until his mind ceased to be diverted by immediate distractions and centred wholly on the task before him.
At Dover the weather had not improved and the sea was breaking high over the landing stage, drenching the few passengers as they hurried on to the boat and dived below for shelter from the storm. Indifferent to the weather Craven chose to stay on deck and stood throughout the crossing under lea of the deckhouse where it was possible to keep a pipe alight.
Contrary to his expectation he managed to sleep in the train and slept until they reached Paris. Avoiding a hotel where he was known he drove to one of the smaller establishments, and engaging a room ordered breakfast and sat down to think out his next move.