The wives had found her difficult of access during the customary calling hours, and mildly resented a reticence which might almost be described as unfriendly.
John mingled with the other children in the so-called "Gardens" of the Station, at first entirely as an onlooker, in charge of the impassive Burmese servant, but, later, in the capacity of a leader, of few words and indomitable energy.
John, at Black Towers, during those short years of his life when his mother, like Cyprian, was hiding from an Argus-eyed Society, had existed as a dreamer of dreams and an inventor of games peopled by imaginary companions. It was not long before the notion struck him to cast the youth of the Station for the various roles hitherto filled by bolsters, chain-armour and stuffed animals.
Ferlie noted with satisfaction that he fitted his own niche in Cyprian's heart, and, while remonstrating, she was secretly entertained when Cyprian discoursed with him in the terms of an equal.
"He simply inspires me with multi-syllabic expressions," pleaded Cyprian, "I think it is his insuperable gravity."
At that she sighed a little.
"One would imagine he had already learnt that, though we may make a game of Life, Life is often more successful in making game of us."
To which he answered, "Nonsense," adding, most inexcusably, the over-worked saw, "I am the Master of my Fate; I am the Captain of my Soul."
"I am delighted to hear you say so," Ferlie told him, "I can remember a time when your soul captained you pretty thoroughly, though, pagan that you are, you could hardly own to such domination."
She sometimes reflected upon that self-sufficiency which induced him to dismiss the Churches as unreliable excrescences upon a useful ethical foundation.
Cyprian was, undoubtedly, one of the characters which cling passionately to the Christian Commandments and let the Christ pass by.
"The woman Thou gavest me," accused Adam, meanly ungrateful, and, "The Brain Thou gavest me," blamed Cyprian and all his calibre.
Man's mentality, thought Ferlie, had not altered much since Eden, though he did not, now, make the Woman the sole excuse for his shortcomings, being obliged to admit that she was more often an inspiration than an obstruction to Faith. But there were other gifts for whose shoddiness and lack of wearing-power he could still taunt their Giver, and among them ranked that Brain which was incapable of surrendering to belief in One who could so love the world.
Ferlie, her own conscience still at rest with that Great Lover, simply because of her trust in a love which, knowing all, forgives, had never attempted to probe the blank agnosticism to which Cyprian speechlessly held. She was sensible of the admiration due to an intellect which, in the face of such pessimism, could stand for Right merely for Right's sake. He had no guide but an instinctive sense of duty and when that failed him he looked to her love. Only hers in all the world, remembered Ferlie, exultantly hugging the realization of his aloofness to her heart.
And then.
* * * * * *
"Mother," said John, "there are a nice little nigger-boy in the verandah, and a grown-up nigger-girl, too. And she's crying," he added as an afterthought.
Ferlie, suspicious of the diseases John might contract from mendicants on the steps of the picturesque but unclean pagodas had, nevertheless, acquired a well-merited reputation for filling the hungry with good things. To John, who knew by heart the exciting nursery epic dealing with a dusky youthful band, whose ranks dwindled in the course of their unforeseen adventures, from ten to one ("So he got married and then there were none!") all members of the Eastern races were descendants of that fortunate survivor.
"You didn't touch the little boy, John darling," asked Ferlie with misgiving.
She recalled the burnt-out lepers which crouched at the gilded god's feet, unmolested in sun-soaked apathy.
"They're very clean niggers," evaded John, "And they don't want you; it's Cyprian."
Now Cyprian did not suffer gladly these invasions of his premises by the lame, the halt and the blind.
He had more than once given Ferlie to understand that, in his opinion, charity to the guileless Burman should begin anywhere but at home. Therefore, it struck her that the couple announced by John would, in all likelihood, be connected with the labourers in the mines. Perhaps a dismissed washer whose wife and child had come to effect his reconciliation with Authority.
She found Hla Byu shrinking in the shadow of the riotous creepers, and smiled upon her.
Then turned particular attention to John's "nice little nigger." The first glimpse showed her that he was remarkably fair even for a young high-class Burman child, but after a closer inspection a bewildered and then an inscrutable expression came over her face. She looked from the child back to the tear-stained and apologetic mother.
Ferlie did not yet know much Burmese.
"Who are you?" she inquired haltingly.
The woman replied in clipped English.
"I come to see the Thakin."
The child screwed up his eyes in a way wholly familiar. They were exceeding blue: Cyprian's eyes in a small cream-coloured face.
John, regarding him with unbated interest, reiterated,
"Aren't he a nice little nigger?"
It seemed a very long while to Ferlie before Cyprian came home.
* * * * * *
As luck would have it, he had undertaken to meet a business acquaintance at the Club, demi-officially, to discuss the contract for some new machinery. They concluded the conversation in the now nearly empty bar-room, since it had been prolonged late and club-members were drifting home.
One man lingered; a breezy loud-voiced individual from Cyprian's former district, to whom Life was one long smoking-room yarn. Forrester had shown himself rather perturbed when the news leaked out that Sterne, on departing for his Leave, had provided for his Burmese "keep." Creating these Quixotic precedents! All very well for a blooming bachelor of his amiably inexpensive habits, but how in hell was a man with a missus and kids in England to pension off every little bit of yellow fluff that drifted his way?
Therefore, he was delighted, on this particular evening to run across Sterne in the one place where he could refer to the matters pertaining to men in general.
"Hullo, Sterne!" he roared joyously. "Have one with me. You'll need it. Saw your latestlune-de-mielletoiling up the long, long trail just now in search of your bungalow. She wasn't alone, neither. It's a good-looking kid, I must say. But isn't Mrs. Clifford going to sit up and take notice? You shouldn't have such characteristic eyes, man."
"Did you say you'd have a drink?" asked Cyprian jerkily.
"No, no, it's my shout. And it's no use your trying to change the conversation. Homer has nodded and we all know about it. Where you slipped up was in letting your past know your present address."
Cyprian saw the thing through, his brain working busily. He had been a fool not to gauge the possibility of Hla Byu's reappearance, considering the terms on which they had parted. And he could not excuse himself for having omitted to tell Ferlie. He supposed that his reluctance to do so sprang from the fact that, since their long acquaintance dated from her childhood, it was difficult for him to accept her even now as altogether a woman and, moreover, a woman who had touched pitch without being defiled.
He climbed the hill in the dusk, his face troubled, trying to decide how far Hla Byu would have succeeded in making herself understood. Unfortunately, his own memory convinced him that little Thu Daw's eyes would not take very much understanding of either Ferlie's instinct or her intelligence.
He had not the remotest idea what he was going to say to satisfy her of the strange truth that his very heart-hunger for her was responsible for Thu Daw.
Once more the word leapt out as if written in letters of flame across the blackening hill-side. No explanation could make him anything but "responsible" for his son, as surely as Ferlie was for hers.
He swung back the garden-gate and clashed it behind him, thereupon hastening his footsteps, urged by a nauseating desire to get this scene with Ferlie over.
And saw her in the grey gloom, coming to meet him between the two long borders of flaming lilies with his child in her arms.
When she reached him it was to lift a face glorified with the forgiveness he had not asked.
"My very dear," she said, "Why did you not tell me?"
Even thus far could Ferlie trust her earthly god.
So Cyprian did very little explaining.
Hla Byu settled down like a shadow over their existence in one of the rooms, awaiting suggestions, and for some time none were forthcoming.
John welcomed the addition of Thu Daw to the household, but he was the only person to whom the addition was not fraught with strain.
Neither Cyprian nor Ferlie knew quite how to handle the question of Thu Daw's eyes and the message they carried.
Cyprian was broodingly silent during those days and looked tired. Till, at last, Ferlie stole into his office, balanced herself on the edge of the writing-table and sat there swinging abstracted legs.
He gave her time; only laying down his pen and sitting back in his chair.
"Perhaps," she said presently, "I am being rather careless in my handling of high explosives. Women and gunpowder can seldom come to a perfect understanding."
"Which being interpreted is——?"
"That I have no right to force my opinions upon anyone so much older than myself as you are—and I do realize that a woman cannot feel with a man."
"I know one who seems to," Cyprian told her gently.
Her mouth smiled gratefully at that but she kept her head bent over the tangling fingers in her lap.
"Cyprian. One should not try to run before one can walk. In some ways I am stupidly ignorant about practical facts.... Is this life too great a strain on you?"
Then, as he hesitated, while searching for her exact meaning, she went on in a swift rush of breathlessness.
"Let me get it out—somehow.... Man cannot help his dual nature. Women mostly can. If you have found Her helpful—I know you are without the mystical help religion brings in its wake—when my absence was more than you could bear, I would be willing to subordinate my prejudices on this gigantic question, to your common-sense, and let her help again should there be times when my presence may be more than you can bear. After all, she is the—mother of your son."
The last sentence was whispered and she did not move as his chair creaked.
"Ferlie!" For the first time in their lives there was a very real anger in the eyes which, unflinching now, captured hers and held them steady. His lips closed in a thin line and for a full minute she watched him, almost fearfully, as he framed his reply.
"How dare you?" he asked at long last. "How dare you?"
He got up and walked to the open door, to stand in it with his back to her, looking up and down the verandah. The act was instinctive since they were always alone, but he drew the glass panels together with a quick snapping of the latch before turning to face her again.
"You can only be a child, indeed, to come cold-bloodedly to any man with such an insult in your mind; most of all to the man you profess to respect."
"Respect! Oh, Cyprian——" But he could not spare her anything just then. He was too cruelly wounded.
"How can you—how can I believe that you have the smallest respect for me when I see myself, through this indefensible proposal of yours, as you must see me? Cannot you understand that what constituted a drug to deaden the physical suffering—I repeat the word, for that mental pain was physical to me caused by your withdrawal and your silence in a life which had been unconsciously centred in you for nearly eleven years—must affect me like a corroding poison, even in retrospect, now that sanity and mental control have returned with your presence?"
She stirred restlessly, struck with the justification for this point of view.
"Then, there is the moral aspect. Sometimes, I think that you, despite your genuine religious mysticism, are absolutely unmoral in your normal outlook. One can condone wrong too far. Your very compassion for that which right-minded people should shun becomes, of its injurious weakness, a sin. But—Good God!—who am I to talk to you of sin. I have not denied that you are infinitely above me, but I did not grasp you considered the gulf between us quite so wide as this morning you have made it out to be."
"Cyprian!"
The anguish in her voice roused him to some realization as to how far he had lost his temper. Still dazed with the shock she had afforded him, he saw her crumple up like a victim of lightning herself, across the solid writing-desk.
He went to her then and gathered her against his angrily-beating heart.
Strange that neither of them wondered what lay hidden in the heart of Hla Byu.
Ferlie, whenever she met her about the house, would smile kindly in place of the conversation which was impossible, and Thu Daw's picturesque little mother invariably smiled back, but her slanting brows lent enigma to this acknowledgment of the white woman's recognition.
She had been told that her Thakin, on whose generous supplies she had patiently lived apart, had returned across the great water, bringing with him a sister. But this was no sister, determined Hla Byu. Once, also, in careless answer to discreet questioning, the Thakin had informed her that he was alone in the world; except for herself, she had understood.
She came of a race to which love is the be-all and end-all of its women-folk's existence. The Impassive Teacher had not succeeded in releasing them from its bondage. For this reason must a Burmese woman be re-born as a man before she can attain Nirvana.
Hla Byu, once established by Cyprian in his house, finally ceased to worry about any Nirvana that did not include him. Naturally quick and full of initiative, she gleaned something from the orderly regulation of his days and more from close association with the class-refinement of his habits. He was truly one of the greater Thakins and not one of that set which dines in the costume it also uses for sleeping; though, doubtless, it seemed sensible to choose one's coolest garments for the exertion of eating, thought Hla Byu, in those past days when she had been able to compare notes with other women in her position.
And, now, she was eminently suited for the post to which Ferlie relegated her: that of nurse-companion to John and Thu Daw. There was little enough for her to do but to superintend the games of her son with the Thakin's acknowledged nephew and to watch Thu Daw's latent intelligence developing daily along the lines of a European child's.
Yet, as the weeks slipped by, she did not appear to find them happy and the unguessed-at resentment, veiled under her submissive demeanour, was smouldering into a gnawing flame which hurt while it burnt. To Cyprian she had become more than a stranger, being of less account in his life than a table or chair.
The star-flowers she gathered to wear drew appreciative comments from Ferlie, which, oddly enough, angered her so that she ceased entirely from thus decorating the polished ebony of her hair. She had brought with her new lungis of soft gay silk, rejoicing in them as his gifts, but she might have gone in rags for all he remarked of her daintiness and charm. Not so immune does a man become on account of a sister's presence.
Even Thu Daw failed to sweeten the bitterness of her cup of humiliation. He would stretch out welcoming arms to Ferlie now for her to carry him away to look at pictures with John, and his Burmese mother began to feel alienated from the foreign blood in his veins. A child was of his father's nationality.
No one read her soul nor conceived the approach of the ultimate crisis.
One night Ferlie heard Cyprian call to her from the room he occupied at the far end of the long verandah. She had not begun to undress and hurried along to him immediately, carrying a hurricane lantern since scorpions sometimes lay out on the cool stone after dark.
He stood in the doorway, his face queerly expressive.
"I want you to look at this."
In the pale-lemon flame of an oil reading-lamp, the room showed shadow-streaked, but the air was saturated with the sweet heavy scent of some freshly-plucked flower.
He took the lantern from her hand and lifted it high, flinging its rays across the bed.
His pillow and counterpane were invisible for a mass of starry blooms whose warm sweetness petalled this prepared fairy couch. Ferlie caught her breath, uncertain whether she most wanted to laugh or to cry. True to her immortal tendency to snatch beauty from every corner of the world, however close it lurked, she said swiftly, "Cyprian, it's pretty! It's sopretty. Look just at the prettiness of it. But oh ... if only it had not been ... inevitable!"
He answered, simply enough, without facing her,
"I guessed you'd say that. I never dreamed of this. I never do seem to foresee things. But, however you look at it, she must go."
It was not then that they discovered she had already gone.
* * * * * *
She was taken out of the river very early in the morning when a silver film of dew veiled the rushes and new buds were blossoming to life upon the soaking trees. Flame-of-the-forest reared its scorching beauty above her when they laid her limp upon the shore; her bright draperies draggled, and the once shining coil of her hair hanging in a tangled shroud over her breast.
And so Cyprian saw her when summoned to identify her as his "servant." Well and truly had she served a Master more crushingly exacting than he.
In the haunted days—and nights—which followed for him, Cyprian felt that, but for Ferlie's gentle patience and sense of vision, he might easily have lost his reason.
At first he was merely stunned. Later, when he thawed to understanding of the part his own impotent hand had taken in directing the tragedy, he spoke of himself as a murderer.
Ferlie stepped in and sternly banished the word.
"It is pure hysteria that makes you use it," she told him. "I blame myself more than you, for I am a woman and should have been enough in sympathy with another women's mind to have prevented this. If you are a murderer then I am a murderess."
He railed at her foolishness but sped off on another track.
"Why should this have happened to me?" in bewildered anger. "No other man of my acquaintance has ever had to face such an experience, and I have done no more than what so many do. In this custom there is no disgrace to the woman. She usually settles down, in the end, with one of her own race. I—Ferlie, believe me—I tried to play the game. She need never have done it. I tell you there was no disgrace."
"There was something else though," she reminded him, "and that left her little choice. It is as I said, Cyprian; no one seems able to escape its scourge."
"But they don't love like that," he persisted. "How can they? There is no link but that frail fleshly one of which a man remains vaguely ashamed the whole time."
"There is that link," and she pointed to Thu Daw, perilously employed with a coloured wooden mallet and a rusty nail.
She moved across the room to take it away from him and, substituting a woollen ball, returned to lay her arm lightly about Cyprian's bowed shoulders.
"There has been enough in the past," he said. "Why should Fate have picked me out for this extra bruising?"
Thought Ferlie of the declaration that whom the gods love they chasten.
"Perhaps, Cyprian, because you are so worth while to try and teach things to."
But this was cold and cryptic comfort and she knew it.
In the night she heard him restlessly passing from room to room till, finally, his footsteps paused on the verandah. She slipped a wrap about her shoulders and went to him where he leant against the open trellis-work of the porch, astir with shivering leaves.
His face, clear-cut against a sheet of trembling moonlight, was drawn and ghastly, and when she touched his arm his whole body started violently.
"Cyprian," said Ferlie sharply, "Can't you take your medicine like a man?"
The taunt stung him to an effort of self-control.
"It's that damned frangipani," he told her apologetically, "And it is part of Burma—and so of my life henceforth—eternally."
She slipped a hand in his and drew him down the garden-walk till they stood beneath the trees, stiff with their own sweetness.
"You have got to face that scent, here and now. You have got to think of it for what it is: a rich passionate fragrance embodying all that was generous and brave and joyous in the spirit of Hla Byu. That is what she would have wished, Cyprian.That is what she is wishing now."
The velvet glory of the night was musical with faint sound and every flower and shrub raised a deified shadow to the searching purity of the inscrutable stars. Now and again a delicate moth rippled by, like the ghost of some dead blossom, on an unknown quest into the Unknown.
"And there, God rest her soul!" said Ferlie, presently.
The man at her side felt the Amen he could not bring himself to utter.
What he did reply was, "My dear, I love you. It's all right now because of that.... It will be all right."
* * * * * *
At the Club a few days later...
"Did you hear that Mrs. Clifford has adopted her brother's Indiscretion?"
"Lord! ... Wonder what he told her?"
"Maybe, that the lady represented the mourning and destitute widow of some mining accident."
"Mourning and destitute widow of your grandfather! Haven't you seen the kid?"
"I have. Never imagined anything so uncanny. The eyes, you know. Same old delphinium blue—but that might be explained away as a freak of Nature. Not much the identical trick of screwing 'em up and blinking at you! That's what betrays the whereabouts of Pussy."
"I don't care what he's told her. She's been married and is certainly no fool. She must be a good sort."
And, in that capacity, Ferlie found herself welcomed by the male population of the station when she, perforcedly, began to drift in and out of social gatherings. She was inclined to regret the precious hours thus wasted outside the borders of their Kingdom.
"We have so much past unhappiness to overtake, as yet, Cyprian."
But a whole year had slipped by and he decided that it was wiser that she should make friends with people now that she had no longer any excuse for isolation.
She had received a curious epistle from Clifford, through Aunt Brillianna, to whom he had sent it under the impression that Ferlie was occupying some Villa of hers in Italy.
"I hope you will agree," he wrote, "that I have, at least, proved myself no dog-in-the-manger. The only thing which might make it necessary for me to worry you with divorce proceedings would be if anything happened to John.
"You see, granted that you are right in considering the Greville-Mainwarings a decadent lot, it remains my job to carry on the line somehow, and the heirs would have to be legitimate. I am not actually apologizing for any lurid behaviour (as you might describe it) of the last four years, but I have notions of fair play and we are not living in the reign of the lady who wept to wear a crown. I might have more reason to weep if she were wearing it now.
"Mercifully, matrimony is not, these days, the shackled and testamentary thing it was reckoned to be before the Jews originally lost Jerusalem. If ever you outgrow your mysterious ideas and want to marry again, let me know and I'll see what I can do for you. For myself, I am content with the present position so long as there is John to carry on the title some time or other.
"I wish you well, Ferlie, and, if it comforts you, I do not think it would do any harm if you occasionally prayed for my unregenerate soul."
Ferlie laid this sheet before Cyprian, without comment.
"Swine," was his exact expression.
"Do you really feel like that, or is it only pose?"
"Pose? How do you suppose any average man would feel?"
"You're not the average man."
At the moment neither was his face good to look upon. She removed the letter and deserted the subject. And prayed quite a lot more for Clifford's weakened soul.
At the beginning of the next Cold Weather her mother died.
"We had drifted apart since my marriage," she told Cyprian, remorsefully tearful, "But, at the end of the first year, when I realized that things were hopeless and that Clifford and I must separate, I could not conquer the feeling that she should have been capable of protecting me instead of selling me to a title that had existed too long. After all, I was so very young to throw in my lot with any man."
"I got no thanks for trying to protect you from this one," said Cyprian.
She smiled up at him with wet lashes.
"Poor Mother! I see now that she thought she was doing her utmost for me."
Soon after, a happier species of news came from Peter.
Peter had qualified smartly and accepted a hard-worked job in a mental institution, which had offered him scant opportunity for leisurely experiment and involved very considerable strain on nerves already somewhat stretched by exams.
That old friend of the Carmichaels, Colonel Maddock, had now made him the unique offer of a free trip on his yacht which, he declared, had, like himself, entered on a very new lease of life. He was determined as a "Last Kick" to sail it again in Eastern waters, and required the attendance of a qualified medical man on this somewhat, at his age, hazardous undertaking. Peter, he pointed out, would be none the worse for a sea-trip, combining business with pleasure, and he would be able to find time for a certain amount of useful reading.
Peter gave details of their tour, adding that he was not sorry to get the chance of inquiring into the methods by which lunacy was treated in the East, and, also, that he was beginning to be "rather keen" on leprosy, the most common disease ever cured by psychical, or "miraculous," powers of old. He studiously refrained from mentioning Cyprian but, from the fact that his letter came direct to Ferlie, it would appear that Aunt B. had entrusted him with some sort of outline of the true facts.
"He was always rather a delightful person," said Ferlie, "But I am not sure that, in his present phase, he is likely to be particularly sympathetic."
"Peter! Why, I always imagined him at the head of the newest Communistic Party: his hand against every settled law of man or nature, from birth and vaccination to death and burial."
"That was Peter at twenty, seeking the freedom of the Universe. Peter at twenty-five, is a martinet for the regulations of taxes by Cæsar and of emotions by the Church through the Seven Sacraments."
"Never heard of them!"
"That is your loss, Cyprian," Ferlie assured him.
"I admit to having hoped," he said, ignoring the snub, "that you would think yourself out of that particular creed towards which circumstances forced you. The majority of your priests, in this country especially, hardly inspire me to follow, as an unquestioning disciple, in their footsteps."
"Nor me, as a rule," she owned calmly, "But what have the priests to do with the creed?"
"It is a priest-ridden creed. The Protestant section, at least, leave one to deal direct with the Highest Authority."
"Have you studied the teaching of either party?"
"I have not. There is no need. One judges the tree by the fruits. The Roman version of the law produces bigots; the Protestant produces——"
"Agnostics."
He laughed, and they left it at that. He knew himself to be soaked in prejudice and dreaded lest they should try to influence her against the visions which kept her at his side—those Men in Black. Had they not delivered over one of their, since acknowledged, girl-saints to the stake and its flames for seeing visions and dreaming dreams in which their own uninspired blindness could not share?
Infallible? Infallible!
He knew nothing of that other Cyprian, with whose condemnation she was familiar. He only knew that, having Ferlie, he meant to hold.
Certain inevitable consequences followed after Ferlie had once put in a public appearance.
It was hardly to be supposed that, in a land where women were scarce and men plentiful, her sovereign-coloured hair was to be allowed to glow unseen by the male contingent, nor her rather absent-minded aloofness to pass unchallenged by the solid phalanx of self-contented wives.
She could not be described as a general favourite. Her thoughts were elsewhere; she was obliged to act a part which failed to interest her whenever she descended the hill to mix with her own kind.
The men, slow-witted as to any point of feminine psychology that did not exactly jump to the eyes, were not aware of any concealing veil, and summed her up as quite a little bit of All-Right and decidedly a "Beaut," but women are not so easily deceived in one another. They were quick to suspect that this Ishmaelitish woman, too obviously pretty to need the support of her own sex, and round whose chair the men showed signs of clustering (of course!) had not put all her cards on the table.
They attempted to dismiss her nervily distracted attitude, her laggardly recognition of individuals to whom she had once been introduced, and her complete detachment from all rules of official status, as affectation.
The words would not quite fit because her manner was, if anything, unnaturally natural, and she was inclined to think startling things out loud when over-excited. They began to discuss her rather a lot in her absence so that new-comers became rather prejudiced before meeting her and convinced that here was a to-be-discouraged specimen of their sex, seeking notoriety. And notoriety with women in a circle on the "Ladies'" side of the Club means "Men"; while "Men" may mean anything.
Ferlie was to blame, in that she made no effort to conciliate. She had not, it must be remembered, known initiation as a débutante into the ritual pertaining unto the Mammon of Precedence. All women were alike to her, from the Leading Lady to the Most Junior Bride whom everybody had voted, "of the Country, my dear." Not all men, because, very shortly, they showed signs of desiring, one by one, to make an individual impression. They began to discuss Themselves with her, preparatory to fathoming that complex of laughter and jarringly grave philosophy which was Herself. And here, her youth affected matters. Her past tragedy had separated her, for some while, from her fellows: her knowledge of character necessarily rested upon her own experience. She was, as Cyprian had warned her, over-pitiful to confidences she should have checked, and tendered tolerant sympathy where a hurt, deliberately inflicted, would have proved the only curative physic.
This, since, ultra-sensitive to pain herself, she could not believe in the thickness of some folk's skins. Her encouragement therefore, of some unbalanced youth, whose voiced cravings for the Good, the True and the Beautiful, were rooted in a most natural desire to hold a pretty girl's hand, lacked wisdom, to say the least of it.
Some time passed before Cyprian began to speculate on her habit of drifting into corners accompanied by this pair of Shooting Boots or that, while a restrained current of Christian hostility, founded on the useful direction to be angry and sin not, oozed insinuatingly from the Women's Fellowship. He knew them for Nice Women, and was sorry; likewise puzzled. In his opinion, Ferlie should have taken all hearts by storm. By which he betrayed nearly as deep a simplicity of soul as Ferlie herself.
However, the Club, representing as it did the unimportant world outside their fairy gates, occupied too small a proportion of their days for him to put his misgivings into words, and not until Digby Maur came to the Station did a certain incident drive him to her with protest-framing lips.
Digby Maur was not his real name. Everybody knew that. But whether his mother had called him Maung Man, or whether his father was truly a connection of a certain Digby St. Maur, who had retired from the country with a string of exciting letters after his name, was never, so to speak, put on paper. People said things and people winked or maintained a priggish silence. Anyhow, Somebody had manipulated the wires of State to make a Government Servant of the man who called himself Digby Maur; who had received most of his education in a type of school connected with the Missions, and whose brain, if not his character, was inherited from one who did not come forward to share the resultant fruits of it.
In appearance Digby Maur was unexpected. Tall, supple, small-boned, his skin weakly tea-coloured and with hair so black and shiny that it might have been enamelled on to his head, his eyes were fine and slanted very little under their dark brows; his mouth was weak and romantically bitter.
He was a man with a grievance, and a passionate aptitude for slashing canvas with the warm bright hues of the Eastern land to which one of his parents belonged. His talent for drawing had smoothed the way for those who had placed him in a profession where it could be exercised in moderation. The Turneresque fruits of his recreation did not concern them.
But they did concern Ferlie, to whom he showed them, and enthralled her. For her he unbandaged his secret wounds. He understood that the world in general considered his nebulous father had done the decent thing by him. What was his grouse? What more could the fellow expect? All unknown to them, and him, his paternal grandfather had achieved a great reputation as an artist before he died. As things were, his own canvases told Digby much.
"If I'd only had the chance!" he said to Ferlie. "The power is within me. I feel it. And I know that I could make my mark; perhaps found an entirely new school of painting! Japan has, long ago, evolved her own style. It has outstripped primitive India and Burma. Say you believe in me! The faith of even one human soul would be an inspiration."
"Take it," Ferlie's admiring gaze told him, fixed upon a sure, swift, impressionistic splashing of Gul Mohur trees against a faintly emerald sky. The pictures spoke to her in some subtly intimate manner; she, the unswerving huntress after all elusive beauty.
She and Digby began to hold long colour-struck conversations and, under fire of her encouragement, he neglected his office table for his easel.
To a few discerning eyes, in the modern Art Schools of England, his latent genius might have been apparent, but to the handful of earth-bound treasure-seekers in the out-stations to which Digby was ever sent, the paintings remained somewhat incomprehensible efforts at self-expression.
Ferlie glimpsed the tragedy behind them; wondered complicated things about little Thu Daw and finally submitted to sit for an impression of herself, full-length against a background of those same fiery branches of blossom.
"The trees in my garden are now in full bloom," he told her. "My bungalow fronts the river and we shall be in perfect seclusion. Think of the sunlight flung back from those flower-flames to become entangled in your hair! A scattered splendour of strewn petals at your feet, shadowed to scarlet where the light falls low on the grass.
"I shall call the picture 'Imprisoned Flames,' and shall give it to you."
"I shall give it to Cyprian," said Ferlie, smiling.
"To your brother? Would he appreciate it? Could he? He doesn't"—with a laugh—"appreciate me."
Ferlie felt that to be true.
Cyprian and she had seemed, almost by tacit consent, to avoid discussion of Digby Maur. But then, they seldom discussed anybody, happy egoists that they were.
In this case Cyprian had definite reasons for his dislike though they were not reasons he would be likely to confide in Ferlie. His respect for Womanhood in the abstract was stringently old-fashioned for days when the modern débutante has been known to discuss the works of Havelock Ellis with her partner, between dances, at the latest fashionable night-club. Sometimes, in odd corners of the bar, men raised their eyebrows and shrugged at the mention of Digby's name. He was not boycotted by any means, but he was not exploited before their women-folk.
"What can you expect? This mania for 'enlightening' education which develops the vices of both Races and the—well, one can't but believe in the truth of the saying. Left to itself, the bazaar element triumphs, and why not?—so that it flourishes in the bazaar. Oil and water will never mix. And even under this broad-minded administration one must draw the line somewhere."
Cyprian heard, marked, learnt and inwardly digested.
Came a day when he overheard.
He had taken a hand at bridge, where the table stood close to the half-open door of the bar, and he sat nearest the voices which occasionally floated through into the card-room.
"What gets my goat is, that her brother should allow it."
"Do you think he knows?"
"She has had no use for anybody but—That—lately."
"It was a case of mutual attraction at first sight."
"Well, either someone ought to tackle him or he ought to tackle her."
"You don't be a damn fool! It ain't anybody's business to tackle a grown man about the doings of a married woman in his house. My wife says——"
Low murmurings.
"It can't be true!"
"Fact, I assure you. Cecily saw her actually going through his garden-gates."
"I must say I can't see the fascination these fellows seem to exercise."
"And you'd think a girl like that——"
"My dear fellow, do remember she is a married woman. Probably Sterne could do nothing, even if he wanted to, with that hair! What I say is, there can't be smoke without fire."
When Cyprian revoked, Dummy got up and, muttering of thirst, ordered drinks all round before closing the glass doors.
The bridge-players avoided Cyprian's eyes in saying good night.
He walked home slowly, his head buzzing.
What in the name of all that was impossible did they think and mean? What had Ferlie been doing, and—here the sting!—what had she been concealing from him?
She had, in fact, decided that the picture was to be a birthday surprise. She was still young enough to attach a joyous importance to anniversaries which he was beginning to regard as intervals of mourning, best celebrated by a black tie.
It would not have proved difficult to extract her simple secret had he not been too inwardly disturbed to approach her with an unprejudiced mind.
As it was, he began by applying an unflatteringly descriptive adjective to Digby Maur's name, which brought the championing colour to her cheek, before he demanded if it were true that she had visited him at his house.
Her chilled affirmative produced an equally chilled request for explanation. And now Cyprian, himself, might have remembered her much-discussed hair, the legacy of an Irish grandmother famed for a quick tongue and a plucky elopement. It made her granddaughter say the sort of thing easier said than forgotten.
"Narrow, narrow, narrow! You who ought to be so merciful to your fellow-creatures."
"No one in his senses attempts to show mercy to a poisonous reptile."
"That's simply melodrama. Digby Maur is a man whose position, you, at least, should hesitate to criticize."
"Thanks for the timely reminder. I had, of course, forgotten a good deal that you must constantly recollect. All the same, I will not have you visiting this pseudo-artist on the transparent pretence of arraigning his pictures."
"Did you say 'pretence,' Cyprian?"
He wanted to hurt her though in his heart he was ashamed. He twitched his shoulders impatiently.
"Very well," and her calm was heavy-laden. "To leave you no excuse for using the word again, understand that, in future, I will go where I please, when I please, and without pretence."
"Do you mean that exactly, Ferlie?"
"You have no right to prevent me."
For him that ended the discussion.
"I suppose not," he answered, and walked out of the room.
She made a quick movement as if to follow.
What she counted a sense of justice prevented her. It would not be fair to Digby Maur—poor boy!—to leave him with his picture uncompleted, merely on account of Cyprian's unprovoked animosity.
When Cyprian understood he would be sorry. But for his accusatory attitude she might have been quite willing to tell him the truth. She was a little eager to punish him and terribly miserable because she had left her pride no choice but to do so.
Meanwhile, he was asking himself what on earth she could see in Maur. The answer, as he supplied it, gave him furiously to think. Perhaps ... Youth.
An impossibly unsuitable comparison struck him. Worshipping whole-heartedly at Ferlie's shrine, what had he seen in Hla Byu? No wonder Ferlie refused to admit his right to protect her. He had forfeited it by his failure to protect himself from the insidious fascination of slant-eyed laughter and Youth's intense happiness.
Was Ferlie really attracted to——? But at this point Cyprian flung himself, with drawn brows, into his work.
They lived through three days of such Purgatory as only the great Lovers of this earth can inflict periodically upon themselves.
Then Ferlie, becoming desperate, betrayed her impatience to Digby, wildly immersed in his burnt siennas, chrome yellows and Venetian reds.
"You see, I dare say, Cyprian may be common-sensically right about my not coming here," she suggested with some hesitation.
"You stood up to his prejudices for my sake? You defied him for me?"
"I did nothing of the sort," contradicted Ferlie, hotly aware that that was exactly what she had done, and wondering why. If Digby took a day longer over his wretched picture she felt that, in the course of it, she should heave a stone at it and him.
She was angry with Cyprian for having upset her pleasure in it, angry with herself for not having explained accurately what was happening during the afternoons she spent in Digby Maur's garden. But—poor Digby again!—she all but laughed at the pathetic figure he cut with the splotches of brilliant paint on his forehead where he had run his fingers through his sleek hair in despairing moments connected with hers.
Her expression, as she regarded him in his neglected and, to the Club folk, unrecognizable state, reconsidering the ill-mated stock from which he sprang, became maternally tender.
He drew his brush with a last sweep across the canvas background and flung it down joyfully.
"Finished."
She smiled back, sensing with her uncanny insight all the delight of achievement tingling in his weary limbs.
That he should mis-read her sympathy was inevitable. The time was ripe for a climax of some sort on his side.
... His hot kisses scorched her throat and her disgustedly closed eyes. His arms imprisoning her were hungry.
It was a long while before she had hurt him sufficiently to make him understand....
Cyprian, savagely covering sheets of office paper with close paragraphs he constantly re-read and re-wrote, heard her hurried step along the drive and dully noticed that she had not stopped to sneck the gate and, therefore, the waterman's white cow would get at the lilies again. He supposed Maur had been talking more Art drivel. Why could he not find courage to check this nonsensical friendship once and for all? She did not really consider that he had no right to object.
His pen went flying as she flung herself against his chair. She curled up on his knees, hiding her face in his shoulder and breathing quickly as if she had been running. He glanced abstractedly at a running rivulet of ink down a confidential report. His relief to find her within reach again, and to know the cold mutual politeness of the last three days ended, was so great that all anxiety and doubt went out in thankful amusement at the unexpectedness of her. He wondered if she had blown up the whole Station with an experimental bomb, or whether she had merely been cut by the Leading Lady. At any rate, he was there to fill the post of Whipping Boy, and—Heavens—how willingly!
"Ferlie," he said, half-stifled by those dear slender arms, "What have you been doing?"
"Oh, Cyprian, I'm sorry, sorry, sorry. Just go on forgiving me hard. You have proved yourself so ghastlily in the right. Some men exist who are not ready for toleration of their weaknesses and sympathy in their sorrows. Sooner or later, they misunderstand what you offer them and turn into Circe's beasts—and blame your attitude for the change.... I suppose he had some reason to say I'd asked for it; but I didn't know...."
He took her flushed face between his palms and turned it round.
"Did he say that?"
"Yes. And more. Much more. But it was what he did that matters.
"Go on."
"He caught hold of me and held me against him and kissed me ... all over ... I thought I had done with that brand of kisses for ever. And he wouldn't let me move. And at last I got a chance to b-bite ... and, oh, Cyprian, it was all so hopelessly vulgar! I'm bruised with the smirch of it. I'll never leave the house again till I die, unless you are with me to tell me whom I can safely speak to. I'll never trust my wits, henceforth, beyond the front gate. I—what are you laughing at? Don't laugh! Why are you finding it funny, when I only want you towashme and—and comfort me?"
"It's all very well, but I am glad this has happened, my dear."
"Glad!"
"You needed some such"—he was about to say "lesson" and veered away from the priggishness of the word—"experience, to keep you in my despised conventional way. Now, tell me. Are Maur's intentions strictly—er—honourable?"
"Honourable! What are you talking about, and will you stop smiling?"
Her head tucked itself out of sight again under his chin and he rested his lips an instant on it before explaining.
"I mean, is he wanting to marry you?"
"I am sure I don't know. I should think it hardly likely now. If so, he can't have considered that my reception of his advances augured matrimonial bliss. But you were all out to put him in a lethal chamber before and now you seem to be excusing him."
"To him, I am your somewhat elderly brother; you are a widow, and of age, who lives with me pending the next suitor on the scene. No one could imagine, who does not know the truth, that there will not be several others, and, amongst them, someone to whom you might reasonably be expected to listen. I have my own small sense of Justice, you see," Cyprian finished dryly. "And I, of all men, should have learnt to be merciful."
"Touché," admitted Ferlie. "It is my turn to tell you to go on. But what do you expect me to do about his lunatic scheming and dreaming?"
"I expect you, just for this once, to do as you are told. What I am going to do is what I should have done in the first place: forbid him to speak to my—sister. So much is simple. But I am looking ahead, and I think you should, in the circumstances, cultivate women-friends more and men less!"
She made a little face before she said meekly.
"They don't seem so anxious to cultivate me, you see, as the men."
He chuckled. "I'd noticed that."
"You have no right to start being unexpected, Cyprian, at this stage of things. It's so humiliating when I have been browsing contentedly on the belief that I can foresee all that you are likely to foresee and notice."
"It is not the first time, is it, that I have made an effort to exceed my rights?"
"Please resist the temptation to go on driving it home. According to the Book you should be striding the room muttering dire threats through your clenched teeth."
"Concerning your behaviour or his?"
Then, as she wriggled her annoyance, the laughter in the heart of him materialized.
"My dear, I am incapable, at the moment, of taking anything seriously except the fact that you have come back to me. Which is a matter rather for rejoicing than for imprecations. If I seem to pass off this occurrence as unimportant, it is only because it is so over-shadowed by the importance of the realization that I exist again for you."
"I have never imagined you existed for anyone else," she protested indignantly. "Another time you'll know that when it looks as if I were thinking of someone else it's really that I am concentrating extra hard on something connected with your happiness."
"I'll remember," Cyprian promised, slightly catching his breath.
* * * * * *
They had dismissed Digby Maur and his picture too airily. His suffering was intense enough to cause his hatred of Cyprian to reflect again on Ferlie.
Everybody in the Club could see that he and Mrs. Clifford no longer held sweet converse together nor walked in that House of Rimmon as friends. Its numerous unmystical members openly rejoiced that Sterne had, at last, put his foot down.
The iron entered into Digby Maur's soul. His was not the nature to forgo visions of public revenge. Ferlie was involved in them because, although he had unjustifiably presumed upon her frank comradeship to the extent of insulting her, his desire, outweighing the elements of purer passion which she had primarily awakened in him, was an emotion more likely to breed wounded resentment than humble submission, on the well-deserved withdrawal of its star.
Ferlie, though secretly confessing herself blame-worthy, realized too thoroughly by now that dynamite, in proximity with a match-box however innocently decorated, is not a reliable combination, and, having once capitulated to Cyprian's judgment, could be safely trusted to abide by it.
Hence, even an armed truce was out of the question. She welcomed with relief the news that Digby had taken casual leave and gone to Rangoon.
"It shows he has accepted the position and means to be sensible," she told Cyprian. "When he returns we can meet as club-acquaintances and it will be forgotten that we ever appeared to be anything more."
"Burma does not forget," he said cloudily, and she understood that he had learnt that lesson bitterly enough.
She might have been less sanguine of a happy ending to her own affair if she had connected with Maur's departure a detailed announcement in the Rangoon papers of a forthcoming Art Exhibition, on a large scale, and for which contributions were invited in the form of original sketches, paintings, leather-work, pottery and all the usual articles universally acknowledged, on such occasions, a joy for ever.
Shrewdly positive that he possessed a work of Art worth exhibiting, and a golden opportunity of advertising his hitherto unexploited talent, Digby Maur had well-timed his leave. All individuals occupying the local seats of the Mighty would be present; besides, at this height of the Season, many outside visitors.
There must follow comment and inquiries as to the identity of the artist who had produced "Imprisoned Flames."
He was right. There were visitors, and, among them, a millionaire on a private steam-yacht and his personal physician; a young man with an inquisitive expression, reddish hair and a loud happy voice which he dogmatically raised upon matters which the Elderly and Unenterprising had long elected to approach with caution.
In due course the new-comers found themselves conducted by the residents, to the Art Show, where the chief item was already admitted to be a unique painting which most people only remembered as the Girl and the Gul Mohurs, though the artist had baptized it more erotically.
Said Peter to his neighbour, after a cursory glance, "Why, that's my sister!"
Several people turned, and, amongst them, a hovering Anglo-Burman, referred to in hushed tones as the artist.
Colonel Maddock put up his eye-glass with an astounded, "Bless my soul! ItisFerlie. Where on earth did the little minx have it done?"
"It's damned good," said Peter. "Probably it is Cyprian's. I'd like to have a copy. When we run them to earth we will ask them why they never told us it was here."
The Colonel and Peter never discussed the fugitives.
Aunt B., mistrusting the frailty of human flesh, had not mentioned the relationship under which they were masquerading. They might have already dropped it in anticipation of the divorce to which in common sense they must finally succumb. Better, she thought, to let Ferlie tell her own tale to Peter. She had not foreseen that Ferlie would delay too long in replying to Peter's letter, on the basis that least said on paper soonest mended.
So Peter and the Colonel only knew that the two were together and that Ferlie's name was Mrs. Clifford to stave off the world's curiosity.
Digby Maur was already lionized, and, being Digby Maur, his head already felt a little light.
He longed for Ferlie and Cyprian to hear of his triumph at first hand, and appreciated, with a tinge of malice, that the daily papers would afford Cyprian a resentful shock over the publicity bestowed upon the painting of Ferlie.
He decided to find means of introducing himself to explain that the picture was not for sale.
The opportunity occurred sooner than he expected, by way of a lady who had once known the man reputed to be Digby Maur's father, and who felt sorry for the quasi-European son, and glad of his success. She had met the Colonel, and, aware of the respect in which the Banks held him, thought to put the young artist in touch with a possible order for Burmese sketches. Finding herself near Peter she manœuvred the two opposite one another and was about to explain that Digby was the artist of "that red painting," when a friend jostled against her in the crowd and engaged her in conversation. Peter and Digby, barely introduced, were left face to face.
"I must say you have not even a family resemblance to your brother," hazarded Digby.
"Which is not surprising," and Peter eyed him with interest, "seeing that I have no brother."
Maur recalled the Club conclusion of Cyprian's relationship to Ferlie.
"I should have said your half-brother, Mr. Sterne."
"Oh, you've met old Cyprian? No, he is not even my half-brother, though people used to take him for an uncle. He is just an old family friend. But if you have met him you may know my kiddie-sister. She is staying with him in Burma at present."
A sudden unhealthy pallor left his companion's face putty-coloured.
"I didn't catch your name," Peter was saying when Digby recovered his breath. "Mine's Carmichael. My sister is a Mrs. Clifford."
He slightly over-emphasized the unfamiliar title.
The eyes scrutinizing him narrowed.
"I have had the honour of painting Mrs. Clifford."
"By Jove! Then it was you——" Peter studied him afresh and stopped, faintly uneasy. This man must know Ferlie quite well. What on earth had made him suppose Cyprian his brother—or hers? Better not inquire, lest he should put his foot on some unexplained situation. He drifted into enthusiastic comment on the portrait and escaped to warn Colonel Maddock of the artist's identity. He had been prepared for an equivocal attitude from the narrow-minded, who might criticize Ferlie's staying with a friend of Cyprian's calibre. Odd of Cyprian to rush her off like that to Burma. The uncle part could be overdone. Aunt B. had said they were living in the wilds and seeing no one, so it had appeared not to matter. He had assumed them lost to both hemispheres till Ferlie should become stronger after her troubles and able to make some satisfactory arrangement with Clifford.
She should have confided in her mother, or her only brother long ago. Of course he saw that she could not be left to the care of a chap who, from Aunt B.'s hints, was little better than a maniac on one point, however sane he might be on all others. Like the Vane woman, he would probably end in a Home, unless—and Peter eagerly recalled certain experiments he had been requested to make in Ruth Levine's flat and on the efficacy of which he was now awaiting her final verdict. He was so "keen" on insanity and if his ideas consolidated into success there seemed no limit to his horizon.
His gaze into space grew abstracted and he dismissed Maur's inquiry with a shrug. People always took for granted that old Cyprian was some sort of a relation: this fellow had obviously noticed that Ferlie did not use the prefix "Uncle," and had assumed the rest.
Rum chap, Cyprian. A queer friend for her to have stuck to all these years. He really must hint to her, though, that she could not, in any country, pay an indefinite visit to a man friend, however elderly, without asking for the acidulated comments of catty women and coarse-minded men.
By the time he found the Colonel that gentleman had already been presented to Maur; who had made hay to some purpose; having decided to try another tack and assume Cyprian something different from a brother, this time.
"Yes, I have had the great privilege of painting Mrs. Clifford, sir. Do you happen to be acquainted with her husband?"
The Colonel was grateful for the lead. He thought Peter had suggested that Ferlie was posing as a widow. Much better to have admitted separation, since, at this distance, awkward questions could not be answered anyway.
"I have met him and have no desire to meet him again. You can take it from me, Mr. Maur, that she was altogether wise in insisting that they should live their lives apart. As for your picture of her I should have much pleasure..." etc., etc.
He certainly thought he must have done Ferlie a good turn if this man should be a talker. The chances were now people would get to know the husband was impossible. He blandly concentrated on the picture.
"This one is not for sale," Digby assured him. "But if I can persuade Mrs. Clifford to sit again—and I think that will be possible—I should be happy to execute you a fresh order, though I never reproduce. I wonder if a bank of our red lilies and the hint of a gold pagoda-roof in the middle distance, reflected in water—you have visited the lakes?"
Maddock eventually gave the order for another portrait, subject to Ferlie's acquiescence.
"We shall be hoping to arrange a meeting soon. Must run up to Mandalay first."
However, after an interview with Peter, they both came to the conclusion that Ferlie should not have left her nearest friends so much in the dark as to her tactics.
"Aunt B. declared that she was calling herself a widow," said Peter, "hence the 'Mrs. Clifford.' It was easier to avoid publicity and the interest of the folk who covet their neighbour's peace of mind. The 'brother' mistake is fishy preceding his attitude to you. We must pick our way if we don't want to get Ferlie's name handed round with the ice-cream at every official show going. When we see her I shall put it to her straight."
Digby Maur's leave at an end, Government House had shaken him warmly by the hand. He had gained for himself a reputation, and the power to shatter one.
"Ferlie," said Cyprian, one morning, pushing back his chair from the breakfast-table, "are you feeling all right?"
"Feeling all—what do you mean?"
"You're not, then?"
Her smile was uncertain.
"Don't be silly! Why should I be feeling wrong?"
"That's just what I have been asking myself for more than a week. The Hot Weather is not nearly upon us yet."
"I'm quite well," she insisted listlessly.
"Then, what is the matter?"
"Nothing."
"Oh!"
"Cyprian, don't tease," and her unnerved vexation contained, he imagined, a hint of alarm; "there is nothing the matter. Though I see you are determined to believe that a lie."
"It is one," he replied, opening the newspaper.
She resorted to a stormy exit.
What else could she do when he was right? It seemed sometimes a great deal too high, the price she was paying to preserve their flawless peace. At least, it had been flawless until Digby Maur returned from Rangoon, but not to fall easily into his niche as a casual acquaintance.
She wondered, when she sat staring at him on the river-bank below the garden with its wild, concealing foliage, why she had never before thought of comparing his eyes to a snake's.
He painted on, grimly speechless, but when they travelled over her, devoid of expression, coldly alive, she could have fled in panic. And she had got to see the thing out or everyone would learn that Cyprian had brought her here under false colours and that, somewhere in England, dwelt her husband, complacently aware of their flight.
The scandal would force Cyprian to resign, to whom public criticism of his private affairs, even in simple matters, was real torture. For him, through her, to be obliged to retire on an inadequate pension in a tempest of slander was unthinkable.
Why had she been such a fool as to shrink from confiding, by letter, in Peter?
It had seemed immaterial whether she did so or not, considering that, in Rangoon, one could safely assume nobody had heard of her existence, and he and the Colonel were not contemplating a long stay anywhere.
Peter at present, she knew, made a remorselessly logical Catholic with no time for visions unsanctioned by the Pope. Order and discipline everywhere, if you please, for Peter, once as thoroughly lawless as he now showed himself law-ridden. But Peter was an extremist in everything. He had really little use for the non-fanatic who hesitates to sacrifice, at any rate, his neighbour's Life and Limb, for his opinions. But, while he had made his submission to Rome in calm, wholehearted conviction, which might or might not, in another ten years, be followed by as calm and wholehearted a recantation, annulled in its turn by a general clear-up of his whole life and a death-bed repentance—"for, though it may be a darned uncomfortable religion to live in, it's the only tidy one to die in," had ever, like Charles Stuart, maintained Peter—Ferlie had crept through the gate as a battered ship creeps gratefully into an unexpectedly discovered harbour, anchorless, after the storm.
She had found there warmth and healing and a kind of companionship among the angels that only very sensitive worshippers of abstract holiness know. The Unseen Hosts were to her lone spirit so really present at the altar steps that she could no longer consider the most deserted church empty. Doctrinally, she was unsound. Authority had recognized the bewildered pulsing of a heart too bruised for searching examination, and admitted her with far less circumspection than they accorded Peter of the minutely inquiring habit of mind.
The Peters are well known later to deny; not so the Ferlies.
By reason of that very loyal complex in her was Ferlie passively chained to the Force from which she had once drawn strength, since there could be no severing of her fetters without a severance also from those who had comforted her in affliction. How mean to accept the sweets and deny the obligations incurred! To question only the rules which affected her personal desires!
That Force had stood by her in her darkness: therefore she must stand by it now that she walked in sunshine.
Yet, Cyprian was wondering whether she would outthrow superstition when happiness set in, and she was sure that, if so, he would soon persuade himself, for her sake, that, though divorce in itself might be an evil thing, in their case it became a necessary good. Clifford could be trusted to make things easy; he to whom all women were merely, Woman.
The doors would swing wide on very little pressure (...Et ne nos inducas in tentationem).
Since, white-faced and petrified, she had undertaken to deceive Cyprian, and steal by secret ways and unworthy evasions into Digby Maur's garden, yielding him the triumph of another picture in return for his promised silence, she had conversed with him only in monosyllables and, since he earnestly desired to complete the commission which might set him on the road to future recognition, he had borne her self-absorbed misery without making any attempt to counteract it or effect a reconcilation. His feelings towards her at that time were an irreconcilable mixture of angry desire and aching remorse.
The picture completed, it was his intention to make a final effort to re-arouse her forfeited pity. If she should throw up the sponge before he were ready he determined to stick at nothing which should force her and that canting Sterne to eat the dust of the same humiliation they had publicly heaped upon him.
He was incapable of believing that they were not lovers in the term's worst accepted sense. And what man has done man can do, and the woman who takes one step in that direction will take another, he promised himself.