CHAPTER XIV
“When two have set their minds on each other, a hundred cannot keep them apart.”—English Proverb.
“When two have set their minds on each other, a hundred cannot keep them apart.”—English Proverb.
The confidence of two young married women is amongst the most interesting experiences to be obtained; but it is about as easy to get at by an outsider as a Masonic ceremony of initiation. For a time they are bound to skirmish over the surface of facts, and compare notes on their households. From this they may advance to their husbands, but it is not till they reach Themselves and their own point of view that they are really instructive. Had Mrs. Ritchie Stern been remaining in Key Island, it is possible that she and Mrs. Lewin might have reached that stage when a broken sentence conveys more to the sympathetic hearer than a whole explanatory treatise would do to one who had not the key to such mysteries. But the hours she spent at the bungalow were too contracted for this; only the stress of their mutual circumstances could have made them get as far as stage number two, for they did talk of their husbands.
“I am glad Alaric has gone with Captain Stern,” Leoline said frankly, because she had something to conceal in her piteous knowledge of Ally. “It makes the journey at least so much less tedious. And I hope they will be pals—that is my husband’s inevitable word, so you must excuse it.”
“It is so much more expressive than friends, or even chums,” said Mrs. Ritchie pensively. “To ‘pal’ always suggests a comfortable arm-in-arm state of intimacy, eh?”
“Exactly! Ally makes friends rather easily.” The last words were almost abrupt.
“I don’t think Ritchie is so good at that as at listening. If you know what I mean, other men make friends with him, and he listens. I should think Captain Lewin was always very popular.”
“Invariably. I cannot remember, on looking back through my life, any single person who knew Ally and disliked him.”
“It is rather a fatal gift at times,—if you do not mind my saying so.”
Chum did not answer directly. She spoke with a touch of unintentional wistfulness. “Captain Stern gave me a sense of such innate control. He is like one of those Biblical examples that are greater by reason of ruling themselves than the noisier men who take cities. It always struck me as such a very sane ideal.... I hope he will be a friend of Ally’s!”
Mrs. Ritchie looked at her with the full bounty of her nature, and her words were not so irrelevant as they seemed.
“My eldest boy is like me rather than his father, and I am quite sorry! It is dreadful to have to look out for your own little failings, and recognise them. They seem such much more nasty little things in some one else; and yet I always know that they are just mine.”
“You must hate leaving the children!” said Mrs. Lewin slowly—just as Blanche had meant her to do.
“Yes!” she responded. “But I would rather have them, though on the other side of the world. Just as I would rather have my sailor, even though I cannot always follow his ship.”
“Captain Lewin has a great objection to having children while he is on foreign service—particularly in a hot climate,” said Leoline quietly. She was looking down, her long lashes a brown shadow on her unflushed cheeks, and her manner was too composed for resignation. Suddenly she raised her eyes with a flash that seemed to come all across the room to Mrs. Ritchie.
“I was so awfully disappointed!” she said, almost in a whisper. “At first I longed for one——”
Her voice trailed into silence. Mrs. Ritchie held her breath. The hint of being contented with things as they were now frightened her.
“You will not always be abroad—at least in such places as this,” she said hurriedly.
“No. One begins to see though, that there are more selfish advantages to be gained from married life without a nursery. It isn’t that Ally doesn’t want children—he will some day. But then—I mightn’t, you see.”
“You will,” said Mrs. Ritchie consolingly. “Let alone the feeling you will have that you ought to (I wish we didn’t have these feelings, but women keep the conscience of the household, always!), you will want to because it is natural. You needn’t be afraid.” She waited a minute, meeting those shining eyes steadily, and reiterated, “You needn’t be afraid.”
Leoline turned her face to the window, and looked across the garden, with its hot, dusty roses, to the latched gate through which Ally had gone to, and come from, Government House. At the gate a shadow stood, and a voice said, under breath, “I never came this way—before!” She thought of the child denied her because of Ally’s selfish fear of discomfort, and the safeguard of its presence in her arms now; for she might be called in this a good woman, that had she been a mother, she would not have been afraid, not even of that dangerous proximity. As it was, in spite of Blanche Stern’s presence throughout the day, there was a horribly lonely feeling about the bungalow, and after the rush of her departure had died away, the empty rooms seemed as if they listened for a step. The fear of being alone and of listening also made Leoline Lewin insist on riding down to the harbour again to see her off, and for the second time in twenty-four hours she found herself loitering about on the wharf among the walls of coal, waiting with that horrible sense of departure for the boat to start. There is nothing more trying to those left behind than one of these lingering “send-offs”—the going on board and forced little conversations with one ear always attentive for the bell and “Any more for the shore?”—the interminable time of standing about on the quay while the mails are got in, and the boat turns so very slowly from the shore—the waving of handkerchiefs, and hollow cheering, and then the going home with a blank feeling that life is just the same in its dull grooves, and all the chance of movement and adventure has gone out with the ship beyond the horizon line. It is a particularly depressing ceremony in Key Island, whose inhabitants feel it a prison at the best of times, but it seems to possess a kind of hideous fascination to the residents, who never let a boat depart without thronging on the quay and wishing vainly that they were going with her.
There was a much larger gathering to see Mrs. Ritchie off than there had been for theGreville. The Gilderoys, Captain Nugent, the Arthur Whites, Miss Denver, Mrs. Clayton with the gunner’s boy in tow,—Mrs. Lewin counted them over with wearied eyes and found none missing save the Churtons. They were not there and Captain Gilderoy amicably suggested that Diana had got a headache from too many céhos, and the Major was forced to stay away to cover her indisposition.
“But does she drink, Captain Gilderoy?” Mrs. Clayton asked eagerly, her pretty vulgar face thrust up to his. She had experienced the roughness of Diana’s manner when there was no need to be ingratiating, and sought for the joints in her armour.
“I didn’t say that, Mrs. Clayton!” Captain Gilderoy raised his cynical eyebrows, and smiled as a dog snarled, on one side of his mouth. His “smiling acquaintance” with Mrs. Clayton had developed, with no desire on his part, to a more conventional one, and a further knowledge of her had intensified his sentiments with regard to her rather than otherwise. He disliked Mrs. Clayton every bit as much as he did Mrs. Churton, and his comments on her freedom from social restrictions were at least as withering as on Diana, but that Eva Clayton had not the capacity to guess. “I did not say she drank,” he said in his most pleasant manner, “but she has the advantage of a strong head! She can take two drinks to my one; I have seen her get through two tumblers of whiskey and soda when I stopped prudently at the second.”
“You don’t say so!” Mrs. Clayton’s loud, vacant laugh jarred after Gilderoy’s polished words—he spoke charmingly, and his voice was deep and rather sweet,—and she caught her gunner by the arm.
“Mr. Rennie, listen! Captain Gilderoy says that Mrs. Churton drinks—that’s why she isn’t here to-day. She can toss off five whiskeys faster than the men. Disgusting, isn’t it!”
Young Rennie was a fresh-faced boy, with eyes which still danced carelessly with youth. All Mrs. Clayton’s tuition had not yet left its impress on his smooth, flushed face, but it was tainting his tongue.
“By Jove!” he said. “What fun! I’ll have a drinking match with her one night—get her well on and stake glass for glass.”
“Yes, do,” Mrs. Clayton said eagerly. “It would be so amusing!” and Miss Denver turned round and laughed too, but without spite. She was a very tall girl, whose clothes were always a bad copy of the last garrison lady’s who had come to the Station, and there was a certain exuberance about her that made women—nice women—say that she had something maternal even in her generous girlhood. Men, being coarser or more practical, called her a finely-built girl, and thought of the children she might bear them.
Leoline Lewin heard the comments on Di and the laughter, and moved by instinct a little nearer Mrs. Stern. Perhaps she was out of tune with her world to-day, but it seemed to her as if the whole of her surroundings were shoddy,—the very tone of the people was like the little native huts with their lack of stability and general uncleanness. When Brissy Nugent appeared at her side, as if her husband’s absence constituted him her cavalier, she turned away almost like a pettish child with a feeling of aversion to his familiar burnt face and immaculate riding dress. She felt as if she knew exactly what he was going to say, too, before he said it; but all Brissy’s conversation appeared the inevitable.
“Old Ally Sloper must be somewhere about lat. 20 by now, I suppose,” he said, as they stood at the liner’s stern, waiting with melancholy patience to say good-bye to Mrs. Ritchie.
“Yes, I suppose so.”
“Hope you won’t be very lonely.”
“Do you?” For the life of her she could not avoid the little ironical question.
“Pity I’m not a woman, and then I could come up and stay with you and keep you company—eh? Wouldn’t there be a lot of talk?”
“If you were a woman?”
“No, as we are. You knew what I meant, Mrs. Lewin.”
Oh, this wearisome talk that led nowhere, and always had a vacant laugh in it. And the sameness of the fringe of ravenalas lifting solemn hands along the shore—and the blue bay—and the zinc-roofed, gim-crack town. She looked at the glare of sunlight on Maitso and Mitsinjovy, and her eyes ached, and then at the black walls of coal to cool them, as she had done hundreds of times before. They were all in the rat-trap, and her fellow rats were no better off than she—save that perhaps the others had not the soul-haunting sweet dread that she had put behind her all day. For when she was free of these people and went back alone to the bungalow, there was nothing to prevent her thinking of the nearness of Government House, and the short cut through the grounds, while all the rooms listened for a step.
She heard Hamilton Gurney urging some one to come and drink a final cého with the U.C.L. men, and her heart sank, for this was always a last ceremony. Then Mrs. Stern came up and said good-bye, her blue eyes very large and gentle, with their strange gift of divination, and by a mutual impulse the two tall women kissed each other. Even after the boat had swung out into the harbour and passed between the gates, Leoline stood watching it as she had theGrevillethat morning, as if it carried away yet another barrier of her safety, and lingered to chat with one and another of her acquaintance. Captain Gilderoy came up to ask her if she were selling any of the ponies—she could not ride three during Captain Lewin’s absence, and he rather fancied Snapshot. She caught at the discussion, and suggested his coming over one day to look at Nanton, Ally’s last purchase.
“Will you come back with me now, you and Mrs. Gilderoy?” she said, with a strange eagerness. “And dine? I am very much alone.”
“Thanks, I wish we could, but we are bound to the Jacksons’.”
“Are they at By-Jovey? Another night then.”
“Thanks.”
No hope of rescue there! They all seemed to be engaged, those who had useful wives, and the unattached men she would not ask, with the pattern of Mrs. Clayton and Miss Denver before her eyes; for, as Mrs. Clayton passed her with Mr. Rennie, Leoline heard the latter say, “I’ve got the hump with that boat going—haven’t you? Let’s go up to the Denvers’ and make a noise!” Mrs. Lewin’s lips curled a little. She would not make her house into a recreation ground for the idle men of the Station, even though of better manners and more intellectual tastes than this fresh-faced boy, who after all, was harmless enough in his ill-breeding. “Let’s go up to the Denvers’ and make a noise” was no worse than “Let us drop in on Mrs. Lewin because her husband is away.” No, such help as that would not do. She must face it alone.
The shadow of Tsofotra, the Sunset Gate, stretched far across the sea as she gathered up her reins and rode home by herself, with so little attention to the way she went that Liscarton took advantage to snatch a hasty supper from the low bushes and tall grass, munching as he went, and expectant of a call to order that did not come. Mrs. Lewin had other thoughts to fill her mind, and as she sat at her solitary dinner, she faced the new problems of her existence with saddened eyes. It seemed to her as if her life “were all read backward,” and her intentions twisted by providence to a horrible issue. She had been honest in her desire to spur her husband on to success, and her first efforts to attract Gregory had been actually on his behalf; but where had she gone astray? For the original strategy of arousing his interest for Ally’s sake, coupled with a little innocent enjoyment of her own power no doubt, had gradually altered its quality to a personal pleasure in the companionship of a stronger nature, and so she had drifted to this dangerous brink of a new relation between them. Looking back, it seemed to her as if all the mischief had sprung from that night when she left her husband in a drunken sleep to cover his incapacity as best she might with the Administrator. And yet that night at least she had hardly realised that Gregory existed as a man: he was nothing but a power to be feared. She could not see the natural development of the situation from the affinity of such natures as Gregory’s with her own, which was its feminine complement. All that her mind could grasp was the plain fact that bound in duty and honour to a man to whom she had submitted the most sacred rights of her womanhood, her very nature yearned treacherously away from him to another who stood for ever beyond the pale. Alaric had shown himself a weak man, and represented the failure of her life; but it was her instinct to hide her failures, and to make the best of her own action in marrying him, rather than to ask the world’s sympathy and justify herself in infidelity. Where neither teaching nor principles would triumph over Nature, her dear self-respect stands like a guardian angel to such a woman as Leoline Lewin, and becomes a giant virtue.
She took some work and moved into the further room when her dinner was over, a very gracious feminine figure with the atmosphere of civilisation about her dainty gown andchichead, contrasting strangely with the lawless tropical world outside the open windows. All the danger of the sensuous Earth seemed to be threatening her out of the night and its insinuating scents,—all the safety of convention to be inside the pretty room with its electric light where she sat. As the monotonous needle passed through and through the silk, she was schooling herself to fearlessness, and soothing her own nerves by the occupation, until she ceased to start at a rustle on the garden paths, and was no longer haunted by that mad fear of one man’s approach. So composed had she grown at last, that she missed the very step that she had expected along the stoep, and the opening of the door by the butler. The first intimation she had that her fate was hard upon her was Abdallah’s voice announcing the Administrator almost as he withdrew to his own quarters again.
She put aside the work on her lap carefully, running the needle in and out the silk that she might not lose it, and rose without hurry, every precious second gained helping her to recover her breath, which seemed to have been swept away by the sound of his name. As she came forward to meet her guest there was not a tremor about her, nothing but the composed grace of a well-bred woman in her own house.
Gregory had stood still under the electric lamps; the light was strong in spite of the soft red shades, and it seemed to show them to each other in merciless revelation. He held out his hand to take hers in conventional greeting, and let it go again after the legitimate few seconds during which palm rests in palm. They had not really spoken to each other, save in broken disturbed sentences, since the Deputation interrupted his avowal of his reason for sending Lewin away alone. It seemed to her that they must take it up just there, as if nothing had intervened, and she sought desperately for something to avert it. The hours that lay between his whispering voice, saying that he could not part from her, and the present moment rolled back into nothingness. They were not, and this sentence to be answered still seemed to hang in the air.
“I saw Captain Lewin off this morning,” she said baldly, as if proving that what he had said was true. He could not part from her—well, he had not. In another sense, the sentence was a warning that questioned his right to be there. “I saw Captain Lewin off this morning—I am alone!” added the significant pause.
“I know.” He did not deny the accusation of his having paid her a visit at this late hour, if she intended to insinuate it. He accepted it rather, and a clock struck nine in the further room as if to punctuate and affirm his acceptance.
Then there was one of those strange pauses which seem like the visible boundary between one phase of existence and another—the possible crossing the rubicon, the possible drawing back and remaining in safety. It comes before many a declaration, while Mr. Brown and Miss Smith are still conscious of their former titles, though the next instant may convert them into John and Jane to each other.
“Oh, the little more, and how much it is!And the little less, and what worlds away!How a sound shall quicken content to bliss,Or a breath suspend the heart’s best play,And life be a proof of this!”
“Oh, the little more, and how much it is!And the little less, and what worlds away!How a sound shall quicken content to bliss,Or a breath suspend the heart’s best play,And life be a proof of this!”
“Oh, the little more, and how much it is!And the little less, and what worlds away!How a sound shall quicken content to bliss,Or a breath suspend the heart’s best play,And life be a proof of this!”
“Oh, the little more, and how much it is!
And the little less, and what worlds away!
How a sound shall quicken content to bliss,
Or a breath suspend the heart’s best play,
And life be a proof of this!”
For just that brief pause Gregory and Leoline stood facing each other in the strong artificial light. Then, as though drawn by something much stronger than the restraint of convention, they moved nearer never breaking that long painful gaze until something that seemed like a sigh passed through the room, as though for relief that the tension was relaxed, and their lips met. Neither could tell exactly how that kiss came about. It was so inevitable, once it was done, that there seemed no cause for it. The embrace was a thing that belonged to their lives as much as their vitality. To the woman, however, it was a mental thing, and seemed a decision of her brain as to what shall become of all her further life; but the man was conscious of the warmth of her mouth, the very breath of her life mingling with his.
The modes of artificial society would demand a word of explanation before such a stride in intimacy between the sexes as is meant by a kiss. There should be a request for permission to go further—anything to soften the extreme suddenness of the change of attitude. But Nature is too ready for us in a crisis; she does not use the acquired power of speech, but the instinctive one of action. Gregory had said no word at all of explanation or apology—two ornaments of plain speaking which belong emphatically to civilisation! He was a savage for the time being, and used the methods of the primeval man with the single improvement of gentleness. There was no roughness of passion in that instinctive embrace; nothing but the irresistible attraction of the two pairs of lips to each other, until, satisfied, they parted as simply as they had met.
Almost before she was conscious that he had loosened her Leoline found that he was leading her across the room to a low-cushioned lounge, his arm still guiding her, and as she seated herself he sat down beside her side. His breath came a little thickly, but his iron self-control was instanced in his quiet voice when he spoke.
“Now we will talk this out!”
“Is there anything to say?” she asked almost in a whisper. Now that the natural moment was over she shrank before the acknowledgment of her own action. All her habit of convention came back to her and shamed her horribly, though she would not deny, even to herself, the new position she felt she had taken, and still meant to take.
“There is a great deal to say,” he said in that decisive suppressed voice that had never been more characteristic. “We have neither of us come to this without thinking what it means.”
“I know. And yet there seem so many other things to hold by—honour, decency, self-respect, justice (for what has my husband done that he should be my sacrifice?), perhaps even the fear of God.”
“You will find all these included in what I feel for you. Do you think I am offering you a little trivial passion—a thing of the senses, that will only last a day?”
“Does it make any difference when the effect on others is the same? Some one must suffer through my disloyalty—that is the real stumbling-block. Will any feeling of yours, however sacred to us both, alter the fact that I am another man’s wife?”
“Even that is not an impassable barrier. Such ties have been broken before.”
“You are asking me——”
“I am not asking you for anything you might not give if you were an unmarried woman—as yet. How am I to make you understand? If I had wanted you for my mistress I should have told you so long ago. At least you could only have given me mycongé. I don’t understand beating about the bush, if that is all that one wants of a woman, because it can’t be much loss if she says no—there are a great many more who will say yes!”
She thought of her husband’s often assertion that “every woman in the island had had a try for Gregory’s Powder,” and winced to see that he had appreciated his own power of choice—if he had chosen. She almost hated her own sex for giving him some ground at least for the brutality of his speech, and herself for listening to him.
“With you,” he went on, with that same terrible finality of a statement that could not be questioned, “it is different. I should be depreciating my own property. Some day I mean to make you my wife”—he drew a breath, and added her name, as if to say it were a natural joy—“Leo!” he whispered, the familiar contraction of Leoline giving her a little thrill of pleasure, even while it seemed dreadful to her that she felt she had no right to flinch from his bold statement. She had not thought over the situation without facing such an issue, as he had seen was inevitable, and she was too honest and too strong herself to weakly cry out that she had not considered this, or made up her mind. She had counted the cost to Alaric Lewin and to herself; perhaps passion weighed down the scale in which she placed her own risk, but she knew that her decision had been tacitly in favour of such a step as Gregory prognosticated to her mind by speaking of her as his wife. There was just one terrible difference in their point of view that she could not realise; his words simply meant to her the horrible publicity and degradation of the Divorce Court—but in his mind was that olden letter of which his own seemed a reflex—
“Set Uriah in the forefront of the battle ... that he may die....”
All the wrong against her husband that was credible to her was done to his name. That Alaric must suffer from the blow she saw, and knowing no injury that he had done her, it seemed an intolerable thing that she meditated in cutting the tie between them. She knew him for a weak man too; what would be the result, to a nature like his, of her desertion? If every fibre in her heart had not seemed to her to be rooted in the man beside her, she would never have permitted herself the choice; but for the time being her whole soul was in revolt, demanding its desire, crying out that its very life depended on the chance of happiness. She could not argue or reason just now; she felt the necessity of her own being a greater thing than the slighter nature’s pain. Was she always to be sacrificed to Alaric’s weakness? her heart cried out impatiently—Ally, who was as easily comforted as a child by a new toy for the one that had been broken! Within a week of her flight he would be playing tennis, and petted and consoled by other women for his unmerited misfortune. She saw him more harshly than ever before, and her velvet eyes grew sombre as she raised them to Gregory’s watchful face. There was no remorse or vacillation in him—there would be no repining word hereafter. What he did he had stood by all his life, and he neither excused nor forswore himself. He was a hard man at worst—a strong man at best. Some day she would know him for unscrupulous, but always and for ever she would love him, because his qualities were the essential for her, and also because love goes deeper than reason and outruns rule.
“I am not asking you to take such a step to-morrow or next day,” he urged in that under-breathed voice, “only it would be unfair not to set my ultimate goal before you.” Then his manner grew warmer, he half leaned against her lace-clad shoulder, and his arm stole around her waist. “Is it so hard to think of me as a husband, darling? I believe you are half afraid of me as a lover!”
She felt the masculine eyes above her dominating her, and her head drawn back against his shoulder. As he kissed her again and again, closing the velvet eyes and holding her lips with his own until she was breathless, his constraining clasp gradually bound her close to him. Through the thin linen suit she could feel every tightened muscle of his body, and for a moment was blinded by his caresses. She had not realised until then the feebleness of her own passions compared with his. It seemed as if he were built upon such a gigantic scale that lesser mortals dwindled beside him as beside one such as the old Greeks used to believe was endowed by a deity in parentage.
But when she slipped out of her gown that night she was conscious of a painful soreness, as though her soft elastic flesh had been badly bruised. There was no mark on the white skin, but she could not pass her hand down her side without feeling the hurt. It could not have been a blow, for a blow would have left a visible bruise. Yet her very muscles ached.
For a moment, as she rubbed her hand softly to and fro over the warm satin surface of her body, she could not understand the cause. Then her face flamed. She was half ashamed and half exultant. For she realised the strength of Gregory’s clasp, and felt as Danaë may have felt in the grip of her god.