Darkness was definitely falling now, and she was aware that she ought not to be wandering thus in a strange place. But she had to go back and make amends if she could.
She came to the path she had been following. And there, she thought as she looked about to get her bearings, was surely the promontory. She looked left and right and decided that yes, that was certainly the place where he had been standing.
But he was no longer there.
She could not see him anywhere.
She hung her head and stood where she was for some time. She might have said good evening to him and nodded genially. He probably would have replied in kind. And she might then have walked onward, content with her behavior, and mourned whatever it was that had destroyed his beauty.
But she had recoiled from him, run away in fright and revulsion. How had he felt? Was this how other people treated him too? Poor man. At least all her hurts were inner ones. People—especially men who had looked on her with admiration and interest—sometimes shrank from her when they knew her for what she was, an unwed mother, but at least she could walk along a street or a cliff path without causing anyone to turn in horror and run.
Howcouldshe have done it? How could she? And now she had been suitably punished for her cowardice in running away from the house. She had been discourteous—worse!—to a fellow human being who had in no way offended or hurt her.
It was suitable punishment, she thought as she drew near to the house and her stomach rumbled with emptiness, that she must go hungry to bed.
She could not get the maimed man out of her mind all night. She kept waking and thinking of him.
Poor man. What must it be like to carry one’s pain and one’s deformities like that, for all to see? Ah, the loneliness of it!
Poor man.
But such beauty! Such physical perfection to have been so cruelly destroyed!
SYDNAM WATCHED HER GO. For a moment he considered going after her, but he would only increase her panic by doing that.
Besides, he did not feel at all kindly disposed toward her.
Who the devilwasshe? Lady Alleyne Bedwyn perhaps? She was the only one of the Bedwyn wives he had not met. But what had she been doing out here alone? Why was Alleyne not with her? And had no one warned her about the monster who was Bewcastle’s steward?
He had been in another world. Or rather he had been in this world, but he had been deeply immersed in the final, breathtaking moments of a dying day, with the sun just dropped behind the western horizon but the night not yet quite descended. It was a scene of grays and silvers and majesty. His right hand had itched to grasp his paintbrush more tightly so that he could reproduce the scene both as he saw it and as he felt it. But he had resisted the urge to flex the fingers of that hand, knowing that as soon as he did so he would have to admit to himself, yet again, that it was a phantom hand he carried at his side, that both it and his right arm were no longer there, just as his right eye was no longer there.
But he had still not come to the moment of that admission. He had still been transported by beauty. He had still been immersed in the illusion of happiness.
And then something—a flutter at the corner of his eye, a footfall, perhaps—had brought awareness crashing back and he had sensed that he was no longer alone.
And when he had turned, there she was.
For that moment before it happened the woman standing on the path had seemed part of the beauty of the evening. She had looked tall and willowy, her cloak flapping in the breeze and revealing a dress of lighter color beneath. She had not been wearing a bonnet. Her hair was fair, perhaps even blond, her face oval and blue-eyed and lovely.
She had looked like beauty personified. For one moment he had thought…
Ah, what was it he had thought?
That she had walked out of the night into his dreams?
It was embarrassing even to consider that that was perhaps what he had thought before he had come jolting back to reality.
But certainly he had taken a step toward her without speaking a word. And she had stood there, apparently waiting for him.
And then he had seen the horror in her eyes. And then she had turned and fled in panic.
What had he expected? That she would smile and open her arms to him?
He gazed after her and was again Sydnam Butler, grotesquely ugly with his right eye gone and the purple scars of the old burns down the side of his face, paralyzing most of the nerves there, and all along his armless side to his knee.
He was Sydnam Butler, who would never paint again, and for whom no woman would ever walk beautiful out of the night.
But he had left self-pity behind long ago, and resented moments such as this when defenses had been lowered and it crept back in like a persistent and unwelcome guest to torment him. He knew that it would take him days to recover his equilibrium, to remind himself that he was now Sydnam Butler, the best and most efficient steward of the several Bewcastle employed to run his various estates—and that was the duke’s assessment, not his own.
