"What is the good of anything in this wide world without her? I _must_
see her. For good or ill, I cannot keep away."
He was deep in the toils of desire and passionate love for a woman
belonging to someone else and out of his reach, and for whom he was
hungry. Thus the primitive forces of nature were in violent activity,
and his soul was having a hard fight.
It was the first time in his life that a woman had really mattered or
had been impossible to obtain.
He had always looked upon them as delightful accessories: sport first,
and woman, who was only another form of sport, second.
He had not neglected the obligations of his great position, but they
came naturally to him as of the day's work. They were not real interests
in his life. And when stripped of the veneer of civilization he was but
a passionate, primitive creature, like numbers of others of his class
and age.
While the elevation of Theodora's pure soul was an actual influence upon
him, he had thought it would be possible--difficult, perhaps--but
possible to obey her--to keep from troubling her--to regulate his
passion into worship at a distance. But since then new influences had
begun to work--prominent among them being jealousy.
To see her surrounded by others--who were men and would desire her,
too--drove him mad.
Josiah was difficult enough to bear. The thought that he was her
husband, and had the rights of this position, always turned him sick
with raging disgust; but that was the law, and a law accepted since the
beginning of time. These others were not of the law--they were the same
as himself--and would all try to win her.
He had no fear of their succeeding, but, to watch them trying, and he
himself unable to prevent them, was a thought he could not tolerate.
He had no settled plan. He did not deliberately say to himself: "I will
possess her at all costs. I will be her lover, and take her by force
from the bonds of this world." His whole mind was in a ferment and
chaos. There was no time to think of the position in cold blood. His
passion hurried him on from hour to hour.
This day after the opera, when the hideous impossibility of the
situation had come upon him with full force, he felt as Lancelot--
"His mood was often like a fiend, and rose and
drove him into wastes and solitudes for agony,
Who was yet a living soul."
There are all sorts of loves in life, but when it is the real great
passion, nor fear of hell nor hope of heaven can stem the tide--for
long!
He had gone out in his automobile, and was racing ahead considerably
above the speed limit. He felt he must do something. Had it been winter
and hunting-time, he would have taken any fences--any risks. He returned
and got to Ranelagh, and played a game of polo as hard as he could, and
then he felt a little calmer. The idea came to him as it had done to
Anne. Lady Harrowfield was Florence Devlyn's cousin; she would probably
have squeezed an invitation for her protégées for the royal ball
to-night. He would go--he must see Theodora. He must hold her in his
arms, if only in the mazes of the waltz.
And the thought of that sent the blood whirling madly once more in his
veins.
Everything he had looked upon so lightly up to now had taken a new
significance in reference to Theodora. Florence Devlyn, for instance,
was no fit companion for her--Florence Devlyn, whom he met at every
decent house and had never before disapproved of, except as a bore and a
sycophant.