Once he nearly fell.
He was gasping like a wounded beast.
When he got into his room he flung himself on the bed and clenched his fists and the dry, painful sobs that tore his chest broke into tears.
He evidently had a violent attack of hysterics.
It was all clear to him, clear with the ghastly vividness with which on a stormy night a flash of lightning can disclose a ravaged landscape, clear, horribly clear.
The way the man had dried her and the way she leaned against him pointed not to passion, but to a long-continued intimacy, and the pipe by the bedside, the pipe had a hideously conjugal air.
It suggested the pipe a man might smoke while he was reading in bed before going to sleep.
The Sporting Times!
That was why she had that little house in the Street of the Knights, so that they could spend two or three days together in domestic familiarity.
They were like an old married couple.
Humphrey asked himself how long the hateful thing had lasted and suddenly he knew the answer: for years.
Ten, twelve, fourteen; it had started when the young footman first came to London, he was a boy then and it was obvious enough that it was not he who had made the advances; all through those years when she was the idol of the British public, when everyone adored her and she could have married anyone she liked, she was living with the second footman at her aunt's house.
She took him with her when she married.
Why had she made that surprising marriage?
And the still-born child that came before its time.
Of course that was why she had married Jimmie Welldon-Burns, because she was going to have a child by Albert.
Oh, shameless, shameless!
And then, when Jimmie's health broke down she had made him take Albert as his valet.
And what had Jimmie known and what had he suspected?
He drank, that was what had started his tuberculosis; but why had he started drinking?
Perhaps it was to still a suspicion that was so ugly that he could not face it.
And it was to live with Albert that she had left Jimmie and it was to live with Albert that she had settled in Rhodes.
Albert, his hands with their broken nails stained by his work on the motors, coarse of aspect and stocky, rather like a butcher with his high colour and clumsy strength, Albert not even very young any more and running to fat, uneducated and vulgar, with his common way of speaking.
Albert, Albert, how could she?
Carruthers got up and drank some water.
He threw himself into a chair.
He could not bear his bed.
He smoked cigarette after cigarette.
He was a wreck in the morning.
He had not slept at all.
They brought him in his breakfast; he drank the coffee but could eat nothing.
Presently there was a brisk knock on his door.
'Coming down to bathe, Humphrey?'
That cheerful voice sent the blood singing through his head.
He braced himself and opened the door.
'I don't think I will today.
I don't feel very well.'
She gave him a look.
'Oh, my dear, you look all in.
What's the matter with you?'
'I don't know.
I think I must have got a touch of the sun.'
His voice was dead and his eyes were tragic.
She looked at him more closely.
She did not say anything for a moment.
He thought she went pale.
He knew.
Then a faintly mocking smile crossed her eyes; she thought the situation comic.
'Poor old boy, go and lie down, I'll send you in some aspirin.
Perhaps you'll feel better at luncheon.'