“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 the _Hova_, 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? and _Salama_ for 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 fringed
_lamba_--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-backed _Rubaiyat_ that 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 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 quite _chic_ to 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.”
“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.