“In vino veritas.”--_Latin Proverb._
The way of the Army woman is hard. She starts as a nice girl, with
a weakness for red cloth and jingles; but then she marries, and
discovers, amongst other shocks, what lies beneath the red cloth.
Her husband may still be her ideal hero to her, or he may be merely
the figure-head of a position in which she gets plenty of attention
and some amusement; but his profession will inevitably take her into
desert places of the earth where she samples discomfort until the
iron enters into her domestic soul. If it be in India she will do
pretty well, until he gets a bad Station, though even the horrors of
loneliness and fever may be mitigated by obtainable service. But by
the time she is suddenly transferred with him to another Colony there
will be a nursery in progress, and then the tragedy--the ugly, sordid
tragedy of a married life stripped of its decencies and privacies--will
very possibly begin. She will leave her comfortable staff behind her,
because of the Emigration Act, and on the troop-ship she will begin to
taste the joys of being her own nurses and maid. Then her temper wears,
and she has not quite so much time to spend over her appearance, but
instinct holding good she adopts the harder and more masculine style
as being easier to compass under all trials of circumstance. Foreign
Stations batter the daintiness of life out of her, the narrow limits of
the Army world distort her mental vision, the drawbacks she struggles
to overcome leave their mark on her. Finally there comes the day when
even the hateful little compensations to which she has become used
have to be given up--the snobbish sense of position, and the dangling
after her of men other than her husband, who find in her a _passée_
fashion,--for the soldier’s service is over, and then comes Ealing and
a dress allowance to be saved up for the sales.
Diana Churton had reached the ominous point in her career when she saw
half-pay darkening the horizon. It was unlikely that Major Churton
would ever be given the regiment, and, as he said, twenty years of
foreign service had made the solid dullness of England a home to his
weary eyes. Diana had no children to plot and plan for, and marry into
the same life that she had found a dubious success; their one little
girl had died at Agra, and the dumb tragedy of their lives was in the
moment when they turned away from the little grave, in a city for ever
sacred to the dead by that grand white memory called the Taj, and went
their separate ways. The child as she grew older might have drawn them
closer together again; her grave somehow thrust them apart.
“If he thinks I neglected her, or that it was my fault, I could kill
him!” thought the woman fiercely, jealous of her motherhood.
“If she hints that I do care, I shall lose my control--better let the
very subject alone,” thought the man, for he was afraid of his own
temper.
So Di Churton dropped the remnants of her girlhood into the void
of her husband’s silence, and life went on as before--always the
indefinite man who rode with her and danced with her, always the hard
tongues of the Station and the keeping just on the safe side, always
the restless, feverish desire to get something out of life and the
sense of disillusion. She never lost her husband’s confidence, for she
was a wise woman; but she learned a mutual accommodation when “Bute
was thick with Mrs. So-and-so.” Diana was attracted by men rather than
her own sex; she was in few senses a nice woman, and unless she had an
object in cultivating them, the other ladies in the garrison found her
frankly rude.
At Port Victoria she was fairly intimate with Mrs. Gilderoy until the
arrival of the Lewins, whereupon she transferred her preference to
Leoline, not only on account of Alaric, but because Chum was obviously
successful socially, and Bute was conveniently attracted. It would
have suited Mrs. Churton very well to have the Lewins nearer, for the
distance up to Maitso from their bungalow was a frequent reason for
Mrs. Lewin to slip out of an invitation there. It happened one morning,
for instance, that on a day when Diana had planned to have her company
Chum rode into town late, and gave herself a headache with the heat and
the exhaustion of the air. The smell of Port Victoria is peculiarly its
own, and seems to be compounded of all the mixed races that inhabit
it, not excepting the white, for the hot khaki certainly lends its own
peculiar flavour. The humid streets do not smell of the packed stores,
or of the decaying vegetation, or even of the need for drainage, though
they might do so, and it is a surprise to those who know the place that
they do not; but the juices of warm Chinaman and Negro and Arab and
Malagasy, seem to merge and produce an effect that is numbing to the
uninitiated. After six months or so in the town people declare that
they hardly notice it, but Mrs. Lewin had not reached that stage. She
turned Liscarton’s head towards the hillside, and felt thankful that
if her homeward way was to be overscented it would be with too much
sweetness rather than otherwise. For it was a characteristic of Port
Victoria that its rank nastiness should be succeeded by enervating
odours of flowers the minute one gets out of the streets and into the
blossoming tangle of hills round about.
The town seemed unusually glaring, and clattered with khaki. The
rattling by of an officer’s pony, and the salute flashed into her
dazzled eyes, made Chum’s head swim, until she was faintly conscious
of something else that distracted her attention from herself. It was
the hour of the Miroro--the noonday sleep--and the coloured people
had lounged out of store and wharf and were sitting in the gutters
and on the steps of the houses, eating fessikh and dozing and playing
native games. But above it and through it all rang a sing-song snarl of
patois, like the complaining note of a caged beast. Liscarton almost
stopped for the instinctive pressure on his rein, and Mrs. Lewin
turned in her saddle to look back at the streets she was leaving. She
remembered Gregory’s warning as to the signs of trouble; this sounded
like it, this strange note of dissatisfaction in the general hum.
“I will speak to Ally, and ask him if there is anything fresh--any
measure of the Government that is unpopular,” she thought, beginning to
canter up-hill mechanically. A Key Island pony will always canter his
hills, unless really tired, upon the principle that it is better to get
over a difficulty quickly and breathe yourself afterwards. He is bound
to be hot with the climb, and the impetus of a quicker motion carries
him over the rough ground with greater ease.
As Chum entered the delicious coolness of their own bungalow, the
telephone rang, and she went to answer it. Her husband’s voice spoke to
her, faintly muffled.
“Who’s there?... Oh, is it you, Chum? I’m at the club, and it’s too
late to come out. Brissy’s lunching with me.”
“Don’t drink too many céhos!” said Chum resignedly from her end of the
communication tube. “And tell Captain Nugent I expect him to dinner
to-morrow--he can bring the banjo.”
“All right. Well, look here, Chum, I’m dining with the Churtons
unfortunately--they want to know if you can ride out too?”
“My head is too bad. I’m only just out from town, and the heat made it
ache a good deal. I’m afraid I should be the skeleton at the feast if
I attempted to get up to Maitso. It’s nothing--don’t be a silly boy! I
shall have to make the effort and come to the Churtons if you bother.”
“No don’t, if you feel seedy. I’ll ride out and see how you are after
lunch.”
“You are not to do anything of the kind--it’s too hot for you. Stay at
the club. Oh, Ally----”
“Well?”
“Is there anything going on in the Legislature?”
“Not that I know of more than the usual--ahem!--grind. What’s up?”
“Nothing. I only thought--oh, nothing. Give my love to Di.”
“All right. Take care of yourself, dear.” Ally rang off hastily, and
turned to drink cého with relief. He was not a hypocrite, and he had
reached a point when he did not want Chum to send her love to Mrs.
Churton.
After all, he did not ride out to their bungalow, for he talked
horse with Captain Nugent to the accompaniment of many whiskies, and
then it seemed too late, remembering that he had to dress--he had had
his clothes sent down to the club--and get his pony and ride up to
Maitso. But Brissy was not pressed for time, and offered himself as a
substitute, whereby it came to pass that he turned up to have tea with
Chum, and impressed her anew in her secret heart with his absolute
inferiority to Ally, and the wearying vacuum of his brains.
“He is like a bad copy of Ally, too,” she thought critically, looking
at the burnt face and the young eyes drawn round with spurious wrinkles
by foreign service. Under the black moustache Brissy’s teeth flashed as
he talked, for he had a trick of drawing back his upper lip, and above
his low forehead the dark hair thatched an unusually flat head. Owing
to vivid colouring, he was considered a handsome man among his fellows;
but Mrs. Lewin did not admire him.
“His eyes have no soul in them--he is just a healthy animal!” she said
to herself disparagingly, as he stolidly drank his fourth cup of tea
and showed no signs of going. “Oh, thank Heaven, Ally is not like this!
What shall I talk about?”
It seemed ridiculous to think of Brissy as a father, and Mrs. Lewin
never drew him on to domestic subjects as she might other married
men, partly because it struck her as inappropriate to him, and partly
because there was a general belief in Key Island that he would have
liked to bring his wife out with him, but that Mrs. Nugent had not
been attracted by a small and dull Station such as Port Victoria, and
had preferred to wait until he had something better. Brissy staunchly
asserted that her health would not stand the heat, but Captain Gilderoy
had shrugged his shoulders to a select audience, and given it as his
opinion that at the last moment Mrs. Nugent had jibbed! The theory met
with credence, and therefore Chum talked banjos and ponies rather than
married interests, and had no suspicion that Brissy’s unemotional eyes
strayed round the home, for which he envied “old Ally Sloper,” with a
secret wistfulness. He was adding her presence at her husband’s side
to the long list of advantages with which he had already endowed her,
while she privately decided that a lifelong _tête-à-tête_ with Bristow
Nugent would exhaust the vitality of any woman, and that Mrs. Nugent’s
absence needed no explanation to a sympathetic mind.
Her thoughts touched Ally with fonder appreciation in contrast. He was
at the moment just riding leisurely up the winding road that led to
Maitso,--a handsome fellow, and well contented with himself, and his
wife with him. On his right rose the solid buildings of the Mess, and
as the path swung over the hill, corkscrew-wise, the dotted barracks
grouped themselves on either hand. It was like a town in itself,
intersected with the irrepressible vegetation which broke out into
guava and logwood brush even here. Maitso looked “greener” and more
deserving of its name than it really was from the town; but as Captain
Lewin rode up to the Churtons’ quarters, he passed through the slight
screen of logwood, and was shielded from the setting sun.
“Come in, Ally. Bute’s somewhere at the Mess,” said Mrs. Churton,
appearing on the stoep. “Where’s Chum?”
“She had a headache--said she was awfully sorry she didn’t feel up to
coming. I’m glad she didn’t try, it was so hot riding up.”
“I’m sorry she couldn’t, though, as we shall be odd numbers. Poor
old fellow! you are hot! Will you have a cého or whiskey?” Diana was
hospitable.
Ally chose cého, but the whiskey followed, and when the Major appeared
they had more, sitting out until dinner-time and talking in a desultory
fashion, while they watched the sky darken behind the solemn fans of
the ravenalas. How hot it was! Even up at Maitso the freshness seemed
to have been melted from the sea breeze before it reached them, and the
heavy air clung like a miasma. It was intoxicatingly sweet, but languid
and enervating until the beads of sweat stood on the men’s temples
without more exertion than their own vitality, and even Diana Churton
gasped.
“By Jove! it’s been a swilling day!” Major Churton remarked, as
he stretched his hand for the whiskey. “My throat feels like
blotting-paper. Have some more, Lewin?”
“Thanks!”
There were no ladies present at dinner besides Di, but two men from
Mitsinjovy dropped in, and presently they played Poker. Ally was one of
the winners, but more by luck than judgment, for the heat--or something
else--seemed to be making his head heavy. Twice he thought he got up to
go, and then some one said the night was yet young, and his limbs felt
comfortably indisposed to bestir themselves. When midnight struck he
dragged himself to his feet with a feeling of bewilderment.
“Great Scot! Chum will think I’m killed--had a headache, too, poor
little soul!” he said vaguely. His splendid, vacant face was turned to
the hot night beyond the open doors; he was wondering how he should
ever get down that winding hill in the dark with this stupid feeling in
his brain. He must trust to the pony, it was no good worrying.
Diana beckoned him imperiously on to the stoep, and he obeyed, pulling
himself together and walking straight, without control of his own body,
it seemed, into the cooler night air. She was holding one of the big
Mess tumblers, with the Wessex crest on it, sparkling with whiskey and
soda, and deliciously cold with ice.
“A stirrup cup!” she said hurriedly. “Come, you must drink it! You are
sleepy with the heat of the rooms. This will brace you up to get home.”
“Upon my word, Di, I’ve had enough.”
But she laughed and lifted it to his lips for him, and his hand closed
on hers and the glass together. Ally was smoking, but he took the
cigar from his lips as if he wondered what to do with it, and Mrs.
Churton held it for him while he drank, sniffing it appreciatively.
To some women the smell of smoke is a kind of lurid dissipation. The
taste of tobacco in their own mouths is not nearly so suggestive to
them. Ally finished the whiskey, and then something happened. He did
not seem able to hold the glass, and it fell and smashed at his feet.
He was troubled, because it belonged to the Mess, and those glasses
were expensive things, and had to be made in England; but Mrs. Churton
coolly kicked the fragments out of the way, and said it did not matter.
At least the whiskey had not been wasted!
How dark it was on the stoep, and how hot and still! Up in the further
corner no one could see them from the lighted room. He remembered
nothing of getting there, only that her face looked softer than usual
in the little light there was; and when she put her cool hands behind
his head and kissed him, he felt a sly amusement that she should be so
much more keen than he; there was a passion in her kisses, while there
was none, he thought, in his. And her voice rang in his ears, “Ally!
Ally! come to me when other women fail you!” while he wondered that it
seemed to mean nothing. He was far more conscious of the outspread fans
of the ravenalas, as if they would fain screen him from the night.
Some one brought his pony round then, and he mounted, surprised it
was so easy, and turned the brute’s head down the slope. Their voices
echoed after him and died away on the stillness of the air, bidding
him good-night, chaffing him noisily, confusing the way he was going.
It was impossible to judge one building from another now, and the
damned paths wound round and round like a maze. He should take a wrong
turning--no, this was safer! He drove his spurs into his pony’s flanks
and tore down the hill at a gallop, holding the animal mechanically
from stumbling, but trusting to his instinct to get down safely. Why
they did not pitch down the steep slopes he did not know, but he was
not in the least afraid; a mad exhilaration took hold of him through
the wild ride, and he urged the pony on still when he got to the foot
of the hill, and clattered through the sleeping town, but the pony knew
his way home. Stumbling and dripping with sweat, man and horse galloped
the last few yards, and swept up to the very stable door, where the
pony stopped with falling head and streaming flanks.
Ally slipped out of the saddle, feeling his mount vaguely, and trying
to find the words to explain that he was to be rubbed down and handled
carefully, but they would not come, and he gave the rein in silence
to a sleepy sais, who seemed to have risen out of the shadows of the
stoep. A minute later his voice came back in a curse, for he tripped
over the bodies of his own servants crouched close to the cool stones.
There were more than the men of his household there, but he did not
know. He fumbled at the door, got it unlatched, and reeling over to his
dressing-room, dropped like a stone on to the floor in the middle of
the room.
The heat of the night had prevented Chum from sleeping at first, and
though her headache had driven her to bed early, she had lain there
for an hour looking up at the white fall of the mosquito curtain, and
listening to the stupid bustle of a hard-back who had drifted in from
the outside world in company with a dozen moths, and was floundering to
find his way out again. She fell asleep at last listening for Ally’s
pony to come up the hill, and was in a deep slumber when the bang of
a door shook her awake as completely as if she had never closed her
eyes. She sat up in bed, wondering what had happened, and listening to
some one who seemed to be strange to the house, and was trying to find
his way about. A man must have got in, and she was all alone; yet the
boldness of the intruder’s movements as regarded noise, and his lack of
caution, were very unlike the stealthiness of the coloured thief. At
last the steps found Ally’s dressing-room, and passed in. There was an
instant’s pause, a heavy fall, and silence.
Mrs. Lewin was standing at the closed door between the two rooms
almost before the sound had ceased; she had no knowledge of how she
came there, or of how her fingers let down the rattling shutter with
some vague idea of seeing through the opened slits. But there was
darkness in the dressing-room, and she opened the door with one hand
and switched on the electric light with the other, even as she passed
in. Nothing had been touched from the time when she last saw Ally’s
man putting it in order that morning. His master having dressed at
the club, the place had had an air of lonely neatness all day, for
Ally was regally careless how he flung his clothes about when present.
Mrs. Lewin took a step forward and almost trod upon his prostrate body
before she saw that the heavy dark something in the middle of the floor
was a man.
He was lying nearly on his back, having turned in his fall with an
instinctive effort towards the air. She dropped on her knees beside
him, her heart beating heavily with the remembrance that the nearest
doctor was half-an-hour’s ride away, and trying to think what one did
for a fit. He was breathing heavily, and his face was flushed and
heated. She bent down to wrench open the soaked collar ... and drew
back with a choking breath.
Leoline Lewin had seen drunken men before--labourers, lying on alehouse
benches, or in the sun; ragged wretches soaked in gin to drown their
misery, and slinking past the police. She had heard stories, too, of
her own male acquaintance being overcome upon occasion, and had found
them funny enough to laugh at as told by their friends. But the real
experience had never touched her before, nor had she seen the man who
had always stood upright, to her imagination at least, suddenly cast
from his dignity to grovel on the earth from which he came.
In the revulsion of the shock she stood very upright herself, as if to
prove her own power--a grave, white figure overlooking the relaxed body
in its tumbled dress-clothes which lay at her bare feet. Through the
appalling silence sounded the man’s heavy snoring breath, and the thrum
of the hard-back which had followed her into the dressing-room, and was
hitting itself against the beams of the ceiling.
Suddenly the woman remembered where and who she was, and what had
happened. The little harassing details of the tragedy came back to her
and woke her to shuddering action. She had been standing there for
some minutes, and half-a-dozen dangers might have occurred to clench
the position. The servants might hear and come to ask what was wrong,
or some one might have followed Ally to see him safely home, though
a quick glance at the probabilities reassured her that this--this
prostrate helpless body, was a last stage that had not betrayed itself
before. She sprang at the door and closed it swiftly, slipping the
bolt; then she dragged the mattress off the couch and pushed it as
near that helpless thing, that seemed no longer her husband, as was
possible; and then, with her strong, young arms, she took it under
the shoulders and dragged it on to the improvised bed, spreading a
covering sheet over the betraying clothes. The exertion brought beads
of moisture on to her fair soft body, and she stood up again panting a
little, and trying to realise it all.
She must begin and love all over again, if she were to love so low
at all. This degraded Ally, helpless on her mercy, was no longer the
stalwart husband round whom she had built up her theoretical married
life. A dozen little things that had been but pinpricks of annoyance
started up in her mind suddenly, to intensify the final blow, and she
saw him as a weak man, without the strenuous love of fighting and
winning which she had tried to coax into him, self-contented, the mere
tool of her own ambition whenever he had been forced into action.
The bitterness of her thwarted instincts was uppermost as she turned
away. That was the mate of her own ripe womanhood, the force round
which her eager life was to centre--that poor weak nature which would
resist one temptation as little as another, for in the cruelty of this
revelation she acknowledged what she had been so pitifully denying to
herself,--that Alaric Lewin was no master of life, but the sport of his
own idle inclinations.
She was moving back to her own room with dragging feet, when a new
terror seemed to spring up and startle her back into action again.
Some one was coming up the garden path with a heavy tramp that came
straight on towards the stoep and the house. It was no barefooted Arab,
but the impatient tread of a white man who was his own messenger, and
with a horrible premonition she knew it from any more probable one
that it might have been. It was the Administrator, and he had some
purpose in thus coming to his Secretary at one o’clock in the morning.
The sing-song snarl outside the stores and in the gutters, during the
Miroro, came back to her mind ominously.
With some idea of stopping him before he could rouse the servants to
get into the house, she hastily left the dressing-room, and closing
the door behind her, as if it held an ugly secret, she sped across the
large bare dining-room and slipped back the bolt of the rough wooden
door. But she need not have troubled herself for the household. Evelyn
Gregory had almost brushed against the sleeping Arabs in his rapid
transit from the garden gate to the house, but as he passed along the
stoep he coolly stepped over the slumbering tangle at his feet with
the briefest passing scorn for men and women. It meant nothing to him
in his absorption, and indeed he hardly knew that the humanity he
spurned with his foot was there. He did not expect any of the servants
to answer his knock, but he meant to rouse Captain Lewin, and with
this grim intent he swung his heavy riding-whip round and brought
the weighted end rattling down on the slight panels of the door. The
whip was his constant companion, and served not for his ponies, but
as a weapon of defence or of punishment in an emergency. Its weight
was consequently no slight one, but before he could shake the door
again it was quietly opened, leaving him with the upraised whip in his
hand, the long lash coiled round his wrist, and his whole attitude
unintentionally threatening.
In the doorway stood a marvellous fair woman in her nightdress, the
open neck showing her so warm and white, that with a little instant
thrill he guessed at the delicious shoulder under the lace. She had
come so swiftly that she had not even drawn the white silk wrapper
closely round her, and one little slipper had fallen from her; he saw
it lying in the waste of floor behind her, where it had slipped from
her running foot, and he thought of another white satin morsel that
he had held between his own. The coil of her hair was tossed sideways
over her shoulder, and brushed away from her forehead, leaving her
unusually girlish without its customary mature dressing, but in her
large eyes he saw that there was not the least thought of him. She was
as unconscious of her sweet bare foot as of his cognizance of it, nor
did she know that her careless whiteness was a seduction in itself. All
her conscious life centred round the terror of the last few minutes, so
that she saw only the situation she had to face.
“Come in, Mr. Gregory,” she said under her breath, drawing aside for
him to pass in. “What is it? _What_ is it? Something is wrong!”
She had turned on the light as she came, and it shone in their two
faces, the man still struggling with his personal thought, the woman
strained by her private dread of discovery. But the light mechanically
influenced her, so that she put up a slight hand and tugged at the silk
wrapper vaguely to veil her laces and frills. He watched her as if
fascinated, without will-power to turn away, and when he spoke it was
in short clipped phrases, as though it were an effort.
“There is a threatening of a rising. The police are out. I want the
troops ready. Will you call your husband?”
There was a blank of silence, while it beat into her brain that
somebody was required to ride to Maitso and take the alarm. She thought
of a dull figure lying heavily on the floor, breathing stentoriously....
“Captain Lewin was very late in coming home. He is sleeping heavily. I
am afraid it will take some time to rouse him,” she heard her own voice
saying, in sentences as concise as his. “Would it not be better to send
one of the men? I can call them in a moment.”
She turned towards the door, but his outstretched hand guided her back
without his having moved a step.
“I’ll rouse him!” he said grimly. “Which is his room?”
There was a touch of resentment in him, which he himself did not
know was there, that this heavy sleeper owned the woman before him.
A man should sleep lightly with her near by, nor ever lose his happy
consciousness of her even in sleep. There was something gross in the
suggestion of her husband’s heavy slumber.
“Where is Captain Lewin?” he said curtly.
Again she saw in her brain the quiet, orderly room, the degraded
figure, the drunken lethargy that no imperious summons would break.
Here was Ally’s chance, and he had tossed it away for a momentary
self-indulgence. She felt in her bitter impotence that his whole life
might be squandered after such a fashion, for where was her confidence
now?
And the Administrator was waiting.
“He is very tired,” she repeated dully, looking up at Gregory’s
sinister height with eyes which had grown piteous. It seemed to her
as if the foundations of the man were made of granite, and she were
hurling herself against them vainly.
Something in her face seemed to strike him, however, for he bent a
little nearer to her, and looked almost curiously in her face.
“Is he ill?” he said; and the suppressed tones of his voice were a mere
vibration.
She paused, with a lightning review of such a lie and its efficacy.
“Yes,” she said in a low voice, her shamed eyes dropping from his. “I
think--it is--a touch of fever.” Then in a tone which did not realise
its own despair, “I _cannot_ rouse him!”
He stepped back with a long breath, and turned his face from her for a
minute, as if listening to something afar off. She heard his chest rise
and fall with an extra sense that was not hearing, and realised that he
understood. All the sting and shame that had gone before seemed to be
nothing in comparison to that moment. He knew, and he was a hard man
who gave no second chances. Alaric Lewin was a failure to his judgment;
not because he had got drunk on a hot night, which was nothing, but
because he was useless in an emergency. The cause was little to a
mind like Gregory’s, but the weakness that might fail him again was
unforgivable. He had the reputation of sweeping such men from his path
as useless, without enmity, but without pity. The hopelessness of it
all!
Suddenly she heard him speaking, and the whispering voice had a new
kindness; he spoke gently, as if to some small frail thing that must
not be hurt.
“Never mind--don’t try and wake him. I’ll go myself. Don’t worry. Go to
bed and rest. It will be all right.”
He laid a large hand on her shoulder, as if to impress the words; she
hardly noticed the action, but felt a dull surprise when he as quickly
drew it back. The man was nothing to her, but a sudden glow of comfort
sprang up in her heart at his last sentence. If he said it would be
all right, he meant his own coadjutancy to make it so. She felt the
power of his will, but not of his manhood, and her face was broken into
softness as she turned it to him in farewell, and opened the door for
his hasty departure.
“Good-night,” he repeated. “Don’t worry; go to bed yourself, and be
quite easy. I am so sorry to have roused you.” There was a touch of
mastery in his voice, as if he had taken possession of the situation to
heal her physical and mental weariness. She rested on it unconsciously,
with the woman’s craving for the strong man who shall not fail her. And
Ally, alas, had failed!
As Gregory swung back along the stoep he looked down, consciously
this time, at the sleeping Arabs, and there was interest and a secret
sympathy in his heart. For the touch of the Eternal Feminine was on
him, and he remembered that to love a woman was a goodly thing. His
footsteps died away into the darkness of the garden, to the gate
where he had tied his pony, and then after a pause came the sound of
galloping hoofs as he rode off on his own errand. Mrs. Lewin heard
it as she stood at the open shutters of her own window, for she had
mechanically gone back to her room, and leaned there conscious of
nothing but a horrible reaction from the tensity of the past few
minutes. With a primeval instinct she turned from the shelter which
civilisation has raised over men’s heads to the healing of the outside
world, for she had a restless craving to get away from the confinement
of the house and the ugly thing of which she knew in the next room.
The night was quick with fireflies, and the air was soft and warm to
touch. Some winged thing sailed lazily by and made her start by the
whirr of its heavy body close to her hair--a giant moth it seemed,
with a barrel-like body and wings like a dragon-fly’s. Down below on
the stoep the Arabs lay asleep.... She pressed her hands over her
wakeful eyes and tried not to sob, schooling herself because she was
a woman--not a child who cries away the bitterness over a broken toy.
This was more serious than a toy, and yet it seemed just like an old
unreasonable nursery grief, that fretted for a thing it had endowed
with spurious life.
She must begin and love all over again. There was no stronger nature
above her to look up to and lean on in fancy, even though she guided by
her brighter wits and keener vitality. She had cheated herself happily
in thinking that Ally was really the moving spirit in their married
life, and that he had a reserve of strength upon which she could lean
in an emergency. He was nothing but a weak man, who must be shielded
before the world, and watched and helped with tenderest care, but never
more looked up to at quite the same height. No one should know or guess
that he had so fallen; she would not even have to make excuses for him,
she would manage so cleverly, for that was her new phase of wifehood.
Even as the thought crossed her mind she turned her head nervously and
listened, fancying that the servants were awake and coming to ask who
her late visitor had been. If she could only keep it from them till
the morning, things would look more natural. Captain Lewin had slept
in the dressing-room not to awaken her--he had thrown the mattress on
the floor and lay there in hope of greater coolness. There was more
draught on the floor--at least she could make it appear so. She went
over the details in feverish haste, shielding and managing already with
a woman’s tragic skill. But that it should have to be so!
Back on her mind flashed the damning certainty that the one man who
should have been ignorant had found out. She had felt his knowledge
through the horrible pause after her stammering excuse, through his
courteous sparing of her, and quick substitution of himself as a
messenger, through the kindly fall of his hand on her shoulder.
“Don’t worry; go to bed yourself, and be quite easy. I will make it all
right. I am so sorry to have roused you.”
She had his promise then to make it all right. Yes, he could gloss it
over too,--he would take the onus of the situation on himself, and
thrust his own known energy and personal supervision in the face of
comment. At least her success with him had brought her that--enough
interest in herself to make him spare her husband, for she acknowledged
boldly to herself that it was her own handling of this man during the
past few weeks which had saved the situation to-night. Yesterday she
might have daintily skirted the truth, but it seemed a small thing
beside the bitter failure of her most intimate life. Gregory would
spare Ally for his wife’s sake, but--the Administrator having to ride
to Maitso in place of his own A.D.C.! She almost laughed aloud with a
sudden hysterical sense of humour.
“Oh, I shall go mad--mad!” she said desperately, as the keenness of
the humiliation stung her afresh. “It is all spoilt--all that I planned
and worked to do. There is nothing but the Man left to me.”
But with the word the bitterness passed as swiftly as it had come. The
Man was left her, to guard and cherish if no longer to love, honour,
and obey, for the positions were reversed. Her eyes filled with lovely
tears, and all that was best and most maternal flooded the soreness
from her heart. She could begin and love all over again--love as one
loves a child, without looking for adequate return, less selfishly
than a wife her husband; she could be strong for him, and putting her
own craving for protection on one side, thrust her strength between
his weakness and what life had to offer. Her very first trial would
begin to-morrow, when she cringed to think of the shame awaiting his
returning consciousness. She must help him through that first, and then
arm him for the result of his folly with the world at large.
Leoline Lewin turned from the window, and quietly throwing off her
wrapper, lay down on the bed and went as fast to sleep as if nothing
had disturbed her rest. Part of her theory of life had been torn from
her, and the sting of keen experience had wounded her into quicker
life. But she was turning her face bravely to meet it, and stood up
under the new stress of life to prove her womanhood.