CHAPTER XVII
“He needs a clever counsel who stands at the world’s tribunal.”—English Proverb.
“He needs a clever counsel who stands at the world’s tribunal.”—English Proverb.
Mrs. Lewin had not seen Diana Churton, save at passing moments, for a period of some weeks, but she encountered her on the day she started for Vohitra. Diana had called in company with other women in the Station, during the time following Ally’s departure; but Leoline had always looked upon her as her husband’s friend, and did not expect, or desire, an equal attention to herself. Diana’s scanty visits had not impressed her in any way, and her own absorption during those drifting, golden weeks blinded her usual observation. It struck her with a positive shock that Mrs. Churton had aged when she came face to face with her in the morning sunlight on the quay; but the knowledge even then lay dormant in her mind, not to be considered upon until some day she might have need of it.
The Administrator had placed his yacht at her disposal, and she made use of it in preference to the coasting steamer, which otherwise was the only means of transport to Port Albert. The yacht was a fussy, old-fashioned little steamboat in itself, prone to kick in the deep current that washed the east coast of the island; but at least she did not smell of oil, and she had passenger accommodation, while the coasting steamers had none save the dirty deck, which was crowded with fruit and coloured people in about equal proportions. Mrs. Lewin accepted the hospitality of theHova, and found herself the only passenger.
Liscarton came also, to his deep disgust and the degradation of his dignity. He had been Captain Nugent’s last gift to Leoline, who accepted him with a faint smile at the remembrance of Mrs. Gilderoy’s comments on the significance of a pony in Key’land. Brissy left by the mail that also took Halton out of the Rat-trap. He came up to the bungalow to say good-bye, and sat looking desperate for twenty minutes, while Mrs. Lewin unconsciously made him more unhappy by loving him across the room with her speaking eyes. He had so often bored her by lingering at her tea-table that she felt her reluctance to let him go on this occasion a judgment upon her, and was always a little ashamed in her after life to remember that she had very nearly kissed him. Fortunately for his peace of mind, Captain Bristow Nugent thought his chance of heaven no more remote than such a privilege.
It was in turning round to watch Liscarton’s vagaries in embarking that Leoline Lewin saw another pony being led off by a groom, and a dust-coloured habit that she knew advancing on her. Beneath the white helmet Diana’s face seemed to have fallen in and grown pinched; her hard-burnt colour had faded somewhat, and her eyes were the eyes of an uncertain beast—some wild thing in captivity that awaits a chance to bite its keeper through all its habit of obedience. Her loud voice was alone unchanged. It greeted Mrs. Lewin with the same bluff comradeship she adopted in her feminine friendships.
“So you’re off to Vohitra! Best thing you could do. I wish I could get up there too.”
“I hoped you might come up later, perhaps,” said Mrs. Lewin as they shook hands. It struck her as hopelessly indecent that she should stand here on the quay chatting after Key’land fashion, when she had only had news of her husband’s death about a week since. But the conventionalities of tradition seemed squeezed out by the narrow limits of life in the tiny Station. For a day or so she might shut herself out from public view behind drawn shutters, but the instant she appeared in the open air an encounter was unavoidable; and why should she turn her back upon friends because her husband was dead? she thought blankly. After all, life had to go on. She was dully surprised to find herself talking much the same as usual, of the narrow round of intimacy, of the people she knew, of monotonous, local interests. “Mrs. Gilderoy joins me on Thursday,” she found herself saying, as if it were an ordinary summer outing. “Won’t you come too?”
“Can’t, unfortunately. Bute came back this week.”
“He has been for quite a long shoot, hasn’t he? Ah, he rode round the island—I forgot.” Again Mrs. Gilderoy occurred to her mind, and a dull speculation crossed it as to whether she were right, and Diana’s face bore testimony to a domestic tragedy.
“Yes, he wanted a change,” Mrs. Churton said naturally, and in so composed a manner it dispelled the idea of anything being wrong. “He was awfully seedy before he went. This place doesn’t suit him. But it doesn’t suit any one long. How are you?”
“I don’t know,” said Leoline simply. “What does it matter? One just goes on living. Tell me the news of the place.”
“There is none. The Clayton woman has taken a religious craze, Rennie tells me. He can’t stand her any longer, so he’ll probably revert to Trixie Denver. There’s nothing else to amuse him until he gets transferred. You go home next mail, I suppose? How I envy you!” She drew a long rasping breath that seemed to hurt her.
“I would have been contented to stop here if I could have kept as I was,” said Mrs. Lewin bitterly, for the shock that her life had sustained had driven her back on a former mental attitude. She felt at the moment that if she could wipe out the horror of her suspicion about Gregory, she would be content to live out her life with Alaric Lewin and all his weakness and failure. She glanced down at her long slim figure in its new black, and Mrs. Churton’s eyes followed her own.
“Mourning is awfully hot,” she said simply. “You can wear white if you like at Vohitra—there will be no one to see. I don’t see that it matters—when one feels much, clothes seem so insignificant a proof, don’t they?” Her sharpened face took a strained hurt look that made it pathetic.
“Oh, what do I care!” said Chum, impatient of her own pain and remorse, missing all hint of the other’s. “One cannot lose one’s instincts of course, but I would wear sackcloth—with a cut,” she added honestly.
They parted there on the quay, unconscious of the bitterness in each other’s hearts, Diana to go back to the house that held a grim tragedy for her in her husband’s face—Leoline to take ship and flee from herself, if such a miracle had been permitted. She could not get away, any more than Bute Churton and his wife could get away from the degradation of that every-day life in which he had always a memory to shame him, she one that had driven the iron into her soul. She had never given him a chance to ask her pardon. It was the one revenge left her, for she knew that he could not rest in the sense of his own lost self-esteem. He was trying to speak of it, and she would not let him. Sometimes she watched the big man moving about uneasily, with hard brown eyes that hated him, and knew that his mind was troubled, until she would have liked to have mocked him. She grew cruel in those days, for the grinding intimacy of their narrow life prevented either of them gaining a long enough respite to think, and learn patience apart. Truly Key Island was a trap!
It looked so in reality to Mrs. Lewin from the deck of the yacht, as she was carried out of harbour. Once more her eyes rested on the green circle of Maitso and Mitsinjovy cuddling the bay. She looked back at the little palm-ridden place, and the ravenalas lifted solemn hands in blessing on the shore even as she passed through the gates and out to the open channel. For a minute Leoline breathed more freely as the heat of the harbour was replaced by a warm sea wind, but she had not got rid of Key Island even yet. The yacht hugged the coast, and the lovely shore was flashed on her line of vision as she lay in her deck-chair and looked idly at her surroundings. Maitso Hill faded round a point, and the deep water enabled them to pass closely to the warm green slopes that seemed to hang right down over the water. Some way inland, among the desolate native villages of the Company’s day, a brotherhood of priests had settled themselves, with the fervour of their Order for conversion of the hopelessly intermingled black races. The Domicile was not visible from the coast, but with a very lovely expression of their religion they had set up here and there a white cross in the dense green vegetation. They did not mark either grave or shrine—they were simply placed there for the love of the symbol, and the sudden pure white thing uplifting its pathetic memory against the riotous growth of the cliff, brought the relief of unhoped-for tears to Leoline’s eyes. There seemed something infinitely gracious in this memory of God set up for chance passers-by—a gleaming, plain white cross, standing out in strong relief against the wild green, clinging as it were to the very edge of the land, above the sea. For so the priests of Notre Seigneur have set them up on the East coast of Key Island, like a beacon.
By and by the yacht passed a point of land where the Captain pointed out an old battered gun, still thrusting up a helpless muzzle through the guava and logwood which had triumphantly woven it a grave. He gave Mrs. Lewin a telescope to make it out, and she wished she had not looked—its futile mouth, agape through the green, seemed like a discarded servant whom man had ungratefully forgotten and left to rot among the forces of Nature.
“In the time of the Company they fortified all this coast, because of the French cruisers,” said the Captain, in explanation. “You will find all the Madagascan side of the island ready to fight—but we expect peace from our African neighbours.”
“Besides, the sand-banks are a safeguard against any enemy,” said Mrs. Lewin dryly. “And Africa Point is hardly the kind of coast on which to effect a landing! What is the name of this Point where the poor old gun stands?”
“Tifiro—it means, briefly, shoot! Not that they could have done much execution with that old thing. It’s about as much use as the guns that the Government give to our Volunteers at home! The Company themselves removed their fortifications to Port Albert during the last few years of their reign in Key Island, and since it became a Government affair they have been added to and improved.”
Another long luxuriance of coast brought them into harbour again; but the little town of Port Albert looked a mere village after the important coaling-station of Port Victoria, and the vaunted fortifications seemed in a very unfinished condition. There was a landing-jetty, but more for the convenience of shipping the sugar than for the accommodation of passengers or general cargo. It looked like a native settlement at first sight, all the huts raised on their four little feet above the ground, and the cluster of thatched roofs suggesting China Town over again. As it happened, Leoline had never been to Port Albert before, and had imagined it a much larger place. She stood forlornly among her baggage as it was placed on the jetty, the servants who had accompanied her huddling round with the thrust-out lower lip of native disapproval.
The Administrator’s yacht had attracted some attention, and a staring group of coloured people were pushed aside by a tall burnt man in the universal riding-breeches and linen coat, who came forward and lifted a broad hat to Mrs. Lewin.
“I am Mr. Ambroise, the Town Warden,” he explained in the pleasant free manner that men gain in such small corners of the Empire, where they feel their nation all one big family. “Mr. Gregory sent me word that a lady would put up at my house for a night on the way up to Vohitra. Are you Mrs. Lewin?”
“Yes. But I don’t like to trouble you to turn out!”
“Oh, it’s all right. I always go to the hotel when any one comes up, and leave them my place. Mosquitoes don’t hurt me for the night, you see, and the hotel is—well, rather impossible for ladies!”
“I know, I’ve tried the Natale!”
“At Port Victoria? It’s a palace compared to this, I assure you!” He laughed his pleasant, unrestrained laugh, as if his lungs had never been cramped. Then, glancing at her black gown, the eyes under the broad hat grew graver and a little pitiful. Mrs. Lewin looked unintentionally girlish and appealing in the simplicity of the clothes which were all that the native dressmaker could accomplish. But because she was herself it seemed bound to fit her, and the beauty of her figure was quite as obvious under their plain folds as in her more elaborate gowns. Mr. Ambroise thought with honest sympathy of the poor fellow who had made such a hash of things in East Africa, and looked into Mrs. Lewin’s eyes with a little sense of awe. Like every one else, he could never tell their exact colour; he only knew that they were most wonderful, and held a tragedy.
“Is this all your baggage—and your servants?” he said, looking round him at her property, which seemed to her rather overwhelming on the elementary jetty. “Everything you have?”
“Except my pony. They are disembarking him now—with some difficulty,” said Leoline drily.
Liscarton had a character of his own, and was showing it. He might have been a member of Parliament in some former state of existence from his tendency to argue. When he had done his best to demolish the jetty with his hoofs, and had scattered the crowd to the safety of the beach, he consented to walk quietly into the little town, his ears laid back among his ragged mane, and the whites of his eyes showing wickedly.
“I have no cart, and it is only half-a-mile—will you walk?” said Ambroise simply. “You won’t get on that brute, will you?”
“I think he would behave better if I rode him,” said Mrs. Lewin. “It does not matter about a habit—I can ride in this skirt.”
It seemed to her a strange procession through the dirty little streets—herself mounted, by gracious permission of Liscarton, Ambroise walking at the pony’s shoulder, the servants behind, and half-a-dozen natives following with the boxes. The men here she noticed, with the knowledge gained in six months, were more Malagasy than Negro—a much finer race, brown-skinned and blue-eyed, with flattened slender limbs, and features which had the pensive dignity of the Hindoo. Ambroise’s servants were of the same tribe, from Anossi, and waited on her that night with strange words that she did not recognise, even from the Patois—Inona izao?for What do you wish? andSalamafor greeting. The night was intensely hot—far hotter than any she had spent in the bungalow—and she was not sorry to rise at four next morning to ride out to Vohitra. At all events it was in the hills, and would be cooler than this low-lying, crowded little town.
“I sent up some supplies,” Ambroise said, as he marshalled the little procession, and mounted his own pony—he was going to ride out with them some way, and show them the road—“and my butler is up there waiting for you. I hope you’ll find everything in order. I have sent plenty of tinned things, as it’s difficult to get them out sometimes, and you might run short.”
“It is most kind of you to take all this trouble. Mrs. Gilderoy did not warn me that I should be so helpless on other people’s bounty.”
“She took it all for granted, most likely. They always stay with me when they go out to Vohitra, and I send up and open the place for them beforehand.”
“You know the Gilderoys?”
“Oh yes. She’s a clever woman. He’s rather too caustic for my taste. It’s like an overdose of quinine to talk to him for long!”
“Do you often have visitors?”
“Only during the summer as a rule. But it’s always summer, more or less, isn’t it? The temperature does not alter much. My most frequent guest is Mr. Gregory. He is round about once a fortnight, and since he has been Administrator the accommodation has had to be looked to, owing to his fashion of visiting every part of his little domain at a minute’s notice. Not that he would mind if one gave him a Karross and the bare ground; but his unexpected appearances have had a salutary effect on the police stations, at which one generally has to stay in a native village.”
Leoline was silent, while a sudden fear gripped her heart. Even here she was not safe from him, it seemed. She had come away from Port Victoria with some idea of leaving it all behind her—the horror and the pain; she had forgotten his constant visits to Port Albert as well as China Town, and the native settlements on the Tableland. She felt the confinement of the island again, which, for a time, she had lost in the distraction of seeing its further extent. It was no less a trap because the rats ran round it in their desire to escape.
After a time they left Port Albert behind them, and were out in the Tsara Valley—the great centre of the sugar-growing industry in Key Island. They were leaving the river, and crossing the wide fields to their right, the ponies going single file to keep the narrow paths which were all the greedy Planters allowed through their rich plantations, save the lines of rail for the trucks. As the valley opened before them, Leoline felt blinded by the cane. It spread on all sides, a sheet of liquid sunshine, from the bed of the Volofatsy River, which cut it in two, up even to the hillsides, clear gold-green, waving with every breath of wind that crossed it, a sight to see once and remember always. The valley was clothed with it, and the dark sides of the mountains, that shot up out of its reach, seemed only to throw it into greater prominence.
“It’s a fine crop,” Ambroise said, drawing rein and looking round him. “And nearly ripe. You’ll see the sugar industry in its glory, Mrs. Lewin. They will begin cutting next week.”
“Where is the factory?”
“Behind us, but the other side of the river. I must say good-bye to you here. There’s your road, that track up the mountain side. Good-bye! Please send out to me if you want anything.”
He rode off in the increasing day, and Leoline went on her lonely way, the coloured people closing in behind her. She could not miss her road for there was but one, though it wound in and out what looked like unbroken forest from the valley. High up on the hillside hung Vohitra, a long building with the inevitable stoep and an old tiled roof. It looked nothing but a toy thing, like a Swiss châlet, against the massed woods of the mountain crest, but below it in the hollow the vegetation was less severe. There was a grove of bananas tossed down the very slope where the house rested, and below this again the plaintive tone of bamboo—not the insistent liquid sunshine of the cane that filled the valley, but the hesitating green that is pale and golden and infinitely soft by reason of the feathery mass of its foliage. Down the heart of the valley came the river, a shallow stream that sang loudly to the silent listening heavens and the kites, for there seemed no one else to hear. Even Vohitra, with its hint of humanity, was infinitely lonely.
Breakfast was laid for her on the stoep, and Ambroise’s butler, a tall comely Malagasy, bowed low before her with the murmured “Salama!” and asked her pleasure before he left the hill and returned to Port Albert. She looked at his picturesque figure in its deeply fringedlamba—the Malagasy at Port Victoria had in general discarded the native dress—and wished that she might have kept him in preference to Hafez, already grumbling among the calabashes. But she had no orders to give, save a pathetic request for a bath, and that, she learned, already awaited her.
She ate her breakfast in sight of the cane, which was beginning to assert its old influence upon her. There are two crops in Key Island; the one she had seen cut and crushed in Mr. Denver’s factory was the lesser yield, but the Tsara Valley was now in its full glory. Her eyes strayed down the hillside to the rich harvest in the valley again and again, with a kind of fascination. It soothed her in some strange fashion to see the clear colour that always suggested spring and new life, and hope, even though the season was really autumn. Tsara—spring o’ the year! The very name seemed to breathe the pure green of ripened sap, the rejuvenescence of Nature. The shock and jar of sudden death had come so near her of late, that she felt as if it had dinned her senses; now it hummed off into distance again, and life closed peacefully round her, leaving her time to think....
She sauntered through the house after a while, and looked at the long rows of closed doors, for the bungalow was a large one and built to accommodate many visitors, being in a sense a government hotel for the use of sorely-tried officials. The rooms were like loose boxes, and not much larger, but the heat was far less oppressive than in the lower portions of the island, and when the doors were fastened back the cool breeze that blew straight through the house, down the long corridor, made them bearable even at night. Mrs. Lewin’s room was exactly like all the others, save that it possessed a key, which she had sternly demanded of Ambroise’s butler. None of the other doors appeared to have any fastening beyond a rickety handle.
From the house itself she found the stable, and Liscarton, who received her with distrust as one who had lured him into the wilderness. Nor would he accept the sugar she offered, which for a pony who was always hungry was a proof of great offence. But sometimes he would sulk for days if his temper were upset. She pulled his head down in spite of his resentful manner, and kissed the white blaze between his wild eyes and the rough fringe on his forehead. Neither his mane nor tail had been cut, for he had never played polo, and it gave him an untamed appearance in contrast to other ponies. Mrs. Lewin hid the sugar in his manger in case he should change his mind, and went in search of the bath-room.
She discovered it at the end of a steep path which took her a hundred yards down the hillside. It was nothing but a rough wooden shed, with a zinc roof that did not touch the further wall by some inches. As Mrs. Lewin undressed she looked up and saw a slit of azure sky and the crowned head of a cocoanut palm that kept watch above her, but the palm had no appreciative eyes for a new version of Eve. The floor was just warm mother earth, for it had neither been flagged nor matted, and the bath itself was a deep zinc tub with a foot of dubious water in it. Leoline balanced daintily on the piece of board which was all the carpeting allowed to save her from the gritty ground, and observed that the other furniture of the place consisted of an old cigarette-tin nailed to the wall for a soap dish, and a wooden peg on which the towels hung. It was not luxurious, but any means of washing is respected in Key Island, and she had learned humility in this respect. By the time she sauntered back to the bungalow it was nine o’clock, and the broad heat had begun.
One day was very like another at Vohitra; it seemed as if the hours had melted into each other, and the solitude and rest were healing her nature from the wrench it had sustained. She could think now, and face her own evolution. She did not read much, though she had brought a box of books with her. Curiously enough, it was none of these, but a little broken-backedRubaiyatthat she found on a dusty shelf at Vohitra that was her closest companion when she desired a book at all. It had probably been left behind by a former visitor, and it opened so invariably at one stanza that she never seemed to get any further—
“Some for the riches of the world, and someSigh for the Prophet’s Paradise to come;Ah, take the cash, and let the credit go!Nor heed the rolling of a distant drum.”
“Some for the riches of the world, and someSigh for the Prophet’s Paradise to come;Ah, take the cash, and let the credit go!Nor heed the rolling of a distant drum.”
“Some for the riches of the world, and someSigh for the Prophet’s Paradise to come;Ah, take the cash, and let the credit go!Nor heed the rolling of a distant drum.”
“Some for the riches of the world, and some
Sigh for the Prophet’s Paradise to come;
Ah, take the cash, and let the credit go!
Nor heed the rolling of a distant drum.”
The volume used to lie open in her lap at this verse, while she looked so long at the cane, and thought of Gregory.
She could bear to think of him now, even though with a consciousness of her own responsibility she recognised that her intuitive fear had not been one to argue away—he had foreseen and looked for some such removing of the barrier between them, as had actually occurred. If she could, she would have screened him with the impression she had first had of his motive in appointing Alaric to the difficulty and danger of East Africa; she had thought that his words had a literal meaning when he said that he could not part from her, and that he had sent her husband away to indulge the momentary impulse, perhaps even to come to an understanding between them, and woo and win her. Anyhow, she had looked at it as an indefinite move, a respite from Ally’s presence—no more. That would have been a woman’s way—her own way, perhaps, but not Gregory’s. The strong man looked further ahead, he had no motiveless actions. There was a darker object in Captain Lewin’s appointment than a mere desire to be rid of him at the moment.
She seemed to have discovered this without effort on her part, as soon as she realised that he had known of Alaric’s death the night before it was made public. He had been afraid of losing her—his own consciousness told him that he might, if she knew. Had he been innocent of this blood, the fear would not have struck him at all. She never masked the situation to herself any more, once she had faced it; this man that she loved had no scruples, he struck at what stood in his path, though it might be human life, and his career was a proof of such fearless murder. Well, the kings of the earth have succeeded so. But the marvel to her was that this knowledge of him had not killed her love. It had been numbed with the blow of her discovery of his pitfall for the man who stood in his way; but as the first horror passed off, as the mental life flowed back to her in the solitude of Vohitra, she realised that her heart had only been paralysed—the pain of returning feeling proved it alive through its very wounds. The last of her theories fell before the very anguish that cried out for him, the yearning of all her womanhood to his master touch. She had thought that she could not love save at a certain standard; Evelyn Gregory could only reach that standard in one particular, that of ruthless strength, but the knowledge of his shortcomings, though it might appal her, did not make him one whit less dear to her.
The very pain of it seemed to have developed her into something alien, a character not her own. She had been so sure she knew herself, that the revelation of that in her which could overthrow her theories made her more patient and anxious to learn of her own fundamental nature. It was a new education, for she proved what is true of women in all ages—that love teaches them a sorrow so deep that they hide it in their secret consciousness, and swear they are happy. They never are happy, from the days of Eve and Adam until now; yet the woman does not exist, and never did exist, who, having been in love, would part with the experience. She would often willingly part with her after-memory of the man, and her disillusion; but with her own private emotions, and the glow and glory of which he was only the trivial cause, she would not part if God tried the experiment of offering her a miracle and showed her her past undone.
The few days of solitude before Mrs. Gilderoy joined her were invaluable to Leoline Lewin, for they gave her some sort of a real insight into herself. By the time Mrs. Gilderoy climbed the hill on her pony, bringing a breath of the stale life of Port Victoria with her, Mrs. Lewin could listen and pay a courteous attention without moral dislocation. Mrs. Gilderoy was both kind and shrewd; but the habit of many years will not be held in check by dormant good qualities, and she had used her quick wits on the social world around her until a smart saying became her second nature. It was irresistible to her to score off people, however much she might like them, and sometimes the talent even surprised her into a lie.
“Is Major Churton back yet?” Leoline asked, as they sat at their first dinner together. “I saw Diana the day I left. She told me he was coming.”
“He looks a good deal browner and older. I encountered him at the Denvers’, lifting Trixie in and out of the hammock which she hangs up with that end in view. Some man has always got her in his arms. She likes them to paw her! Bute Churton goes there far too much.”
“Di told me that Mrs. Clayton had taken to religion—has Miss Denver tasted conversion also?”
“No, but it’s true about Eva Clayton. She talks about God as if He were an intimate acquaintance whose views she could always command on the telephone. And of course they always coincide with her own conduct! Wray wants to ask her if the Deity approves of ladies smoking! He hates her cigarettes, does my good man.”
“God has come into fashion,” said Mrs. Lewin rather bitterly. “At one time we kept our knowledge of Him to ourselves, as if ashamed of it, except in church, but now it is quitechicto drag Him into daily life. One almost gives His name as a reference—with one’s banker’s!”
“Yes, and so even the name has become cheapened.”
“It is inconsistent of me perhaps,” Mrs. Lewin confessed, “but I would rather hear a man use it as an oath and blaspheme that Name, than a woman turn it to account and use it for effect, even though half unconsciously.”
“It is after all the worse blasphemy—and so common now-a-days. Sentimental people always fall back upon God as an excuse for their own self-indulgence.”
Mrs. Lewin thought of the one sin that shall not be forgiven—the sin against the Holy Ghost, which is the sin of the spirit and worse than the sin of the letter. But she did not say so, being possessed of the grace of silence.
“The result of Eva’s hypocrisy, however, has not been exactly satisfactory, from her point of view,” laughed Mrs. Gilderoy. “The Rennie boy has defected, and now wanders about looking for a new pitfall. He wants to come out and see us, by the way. Is it too soon? Would you mind?”
“I do not mind,” said Mrs. Lewin slowly, “in the sense of its being too soon after my husband’s death. There is no real sooner or later in these things—it is merely a decent custom of civilisation which makes us pull down the blinds, and pretend to the world that we are weeping. Every one knows in their own minds that one cannot weep for more than a few hours at most. Why should I mind seeing visitors? Particularly in such a community as this! But I wish, if any one must come out, that it had been Mr. Gurney. Simply because I should like to hear him sing.”
“Yes, he is always a voice with a man tacked on. Unfortunately he can’t realise it though,” said Mrs. Gilderoy drily. “If you asked him to come he would tell the whole Station. I think the Rennie boy is really safer, Chum.”
Mrs. Lewin assented absently, and Mr. Rennie arrived in due course, and became an unconscious factor in spinning the web of her fate. She had made an effort in raising no objection to his presence, partly on Mrs. Gilderoy’s account, for though that lady was good-natured enough to come out to Vohitra without the stimulant of a larger party, it must, as Leoline knew, be both dull and monotonous to her. The reward of her virtue was a new revelation in the diagnosis she was making of her own self, and the touchstone nothing but the light words of a boy.
Mr. Rennie stayed some days at Vohitra, sitting figuratively and sometimes literally at the feet of both ladies. He was shy of grief, and at first looked with distrust at Leoline’s black-gowned figure. But her composed manner reassured while it puzzled him. The women with whom he had been best acquainted had been of a type that hysterically wails its sorrows in the market-place, and is consolable the week after. But Mrs. Lewin was even capable of smiling at a small joke, though the flowerful softness of her face had a new gravity that seemed to have touched it with a shadow. Chum’s eyebrows were always a little suggestive of tragedy, from a curve belied by her smiling eyes; but Rennie saw, vaguely, that the face he admired had gained something—a greater womanhood perhaps, almost the strength of maternity. Not having the key he put it down to Alaric Lewin’s sudden death, but he did not think that she would be easily consoled. Lewin, poor fellow, had been of a type which Rennie could conscientiously admire. His good looks, coupled with a certain air of breeding about him, made him a model for younger men; and to play polo and tennis as Ally did by nature was attainment enough for military ambition. Ally, as a married man, almost made bachelorhood look puny, for the tie had never interfered with his attractiveness to the opposite sex. Rennie would have been a married man on such terms. No wonder that Mrs. Lewin’s grief for this hero went deeper than a pocket-handkerchief.
He was sitting on a stool—but not of repentance—at her feet, on the evening before his departure. The stoep was their usual sitting-room, and they had gathered there after dinner for desultory chat, Mrs. Gilderoy swinging her small compact body in the paintless remains of a rocking-chair, Mrs. Lewin leaning back against as many cushions as Rennie could find for her basket-work lounge, Rennie himself with his back to one of the pillars of the stoep, and his hands clasped round his knees. He had ridden down into the valley that afternoon with Mrs. Lewin to see the sugar factory, and while becoming a little heady with the changing colours of her eyes, he did not know that the smell of the rich sugar brought back the day she went over Denver’s, and that a ghost walked by her in his place and pointed out all the transformations of the cane to her, from the crushing and ejection of the waste for fuel, to the last refinement and glittering heaps waiting to be bagged. The dark, luscious-smelling place was a dream of sugar, but the two who wandered about among its thunderous machinery were thinking of an alien sweetness.
“I must write a note to my good man for you to take back with you,” Mrs. Gilderoy remarked after a time, and she went into the bungalow to do it. Mrs. Lewin and Rennie sat silent. She did not notice that he was plaiting a frill of her gown between his confident fingers; his presence was as little to her as the fireflies and lamp-beetles starring the grass, for she was thinking of Ally. It was one of her hours of remorse when an intolerable sense of responsibility for the ceasing of his strong young vitality bowed her with irresistible force. At such moments she would have sacrificed all her after life to his memory, and done penance because she felt herself the indirect cause of a fate she could not foresee. When she was less morbid she saw that even a strong woman cannot stand between a weak man and the consequence of his own actions, but her torturing conscience accused her of complicity with Gregory because for the space of some weeks she had allowed herself to be happy. At such moments she did not plead innocence of any participation in his darker plans; she felt that to expiate her own sin she must sacrifice both herself and him for all the years of strong life that lay before them.
“I wish I knew you better, Mrs. Lewin,” Rennie said suddenly.
“Why?” she asked, coming back to the present with a start. She looked down at his young good looks and audacious eyes, and realised that he had been playing with her gown, which she quietly drew away.
“I should so like to call you by your Christian name,” said Rennie, with the happy safety of his youth. Women never snubbed him very severely, because the flushed colour of his face suggested the school-boy still.
Leoline smiled a little whimsically. “That is the disadvantage of going by a general nickname,” she said good-naturedly, supposing that the compromising “Chum” on so many lips had tempted him.
“Oh, I don’t mean your nickname,” he said somewhat loftily. “Every one uses that—all the women, at least. They have made it common. But I envy Gurney when he sings that song about you.” He began to hum “Leoline.”
“We sang our songs together till the stars shook in the skies—We spoke—we spoke of common things, but the tears were in our eyes.And my hand I know it trembled to each light, warm touch of thine—Yet we are friends, and only friends, my lost love Leoline.”
“We sang our songs together till the stars shook in the skies—We spoke—we spoke of common things, but the tears were in our eyes.And my hand I know it trembled to each light, warm touch of thine—Yet we are friends, and only friends, my lost love Leoline.”
“We sang our songs together till the stars shook in the skies—We spoke—we spoke of common things, but the tears were in our eyes.And my hand I know it trembled to each light, warm touch of thine—Yet we are friends, and only friends, my lost love Leoline.”
“We sang our songs together till the stars shook in the skies—
We spoke—we spoke of common things, but the tears were in our eyes.
And my hand I know it trembled to each light, warm touch of thine—
Yet we are friends, and only friends, my lost love Leoline.”
“I always think it is a little high-flown for every day,” said Mrs. Lewin, with a view to the salutary effect of being matter-of-fact. A big, white moon was shining down the valley and silvering the sweep of cane, and the fireflies and intoxicating scents made sentiment a little excusable.
“I shouldn’t call you Leoline,” said Rennie, with a conscious sense of his own cleverness in distinction. “I should shorten it for every day, as you say. I like Leo better. No one calls you Leo.”
She rose abruptly, with a movement of protest beyond the power of control, and walked to the further end of the stoep, remarking, “I am sorry that I do not feel inclined to accord the privilege.”
Just a boy’s light words! Yet she remembered with a rush of pain how, long since, Mrs. Churton had asked leave to call her Chum, and she had said yes, and Mrs. Gilderoy had apologised for using her husband’s name for her. She had not cared—“Every one calls me Chum!” she had said lightly, and the name had grown, as Rennie said, common. Yet the sound of that natural contraction of Leoline on other lips than Gregory’s had aroused all the tigress in her to defend a sacred right. It was Gregory’s name for her—one, curiously enough, that no one else had ever used, even in her home-life before her marriage. As Rennie said, “No one calls you Leo”—no one, that is, before a prying public. In the sanctity of their closer love it had been the dearest of sounds to her, the little tender name that his suppressed voice had made a mere whisper for her ears alone.
She leaned there, at the end of the stoep, looking out into the blaze of the moonlight which greyed the wooded mountains, and made the cane a magic harvest for fairies to reap. She longed at this moment for some one to confide her doubts to, and the tumult in her mind, and curiously enough her thoughts turned to Mrs. Ritchie Stern, the comparative stranger with the sea winds haunting her blue eyes—the wife who loved her husband, and had spoken of children to a childless woman.... Some pulse seemed to beat and burn in Leoline’s bosom. Her heart turned to water in her, and all her life demanded the man she had been schooling herself to renounce—demanded not only him, but to be completed in him, bound by the strong tie of the flesh that earth at least can give, be the communion of saints what it may in Heaven.
The most pitiful and natural outcry ever put into a woman’s mouth, was that despairing “I loved him—and I did not bear his child!” It is very indecent, because no woman who is not indemnified by law and the Church has any right to feel the life quicken in her veins for any man, no matter how much her mate by instinct and suitability. She may, however, ask God’s blessing on a loveless union, and know that she lies through every vow she makes, and then—the joys of the flesh are no more lust! Without a legal right love itself is a sin, but the woman who is so forgetful of convention that she can yearn for the natural outcome of childbirth is pilloried in every moral market-place of the world. It seems a pity that, since we have accepted the decalogue, nature must always be immoral; but looked at in one sense even the marriage service is only sanctifying a breach of divine commandment. Leoline Lewin was traditional enough to feel her modesty damaged by her own unruly pulses. There was an accusation in every memory of Gregory’s clasp, and yet she could not conscientiously confess herself repentant, or say in truth that she would undo one moment of that too-keen pleasure. She looked up blankly at the inscrutable heavens, serenely blue and out of reach of question.
“How can one repent for being perfectly happy?” she said.