For a moment she smiled in recollection. Then her face grew sad.
"Much of Omof.a.ga I shall have!" she said.
"Oh, I"ll write," he promised carelessly.
"Write!" she repeated in low, scornful tones. "Would you like to be written to about it? It"ll happen to you, and I"m to be written to!"
"Well, then, I won"t write."
"Yes, do write."
Willie Ruston smiled tolerantly, but his smile was suddenly cut short, for Mrs. Dennison, not looking at him but out to sea, asked herself in a whisper, which was plainly not meant for him though he heard it,
"How shall I bear it?"
He had been tilting his chair back; he brought the front legs suddenly on to the ground again and asked,
"Bear what?"
She started to find he had heard, but attempted no evasion.
"When you"ve gone," she answered in simple directness.
He looked at her with raised eyebrows. There was no embarra.s.sment in her face, and no tremble in her voice; and no pa.s.sion could he detect in either.
"How flat it will all be," she added in a tone of utter weariness.
He was half-pleased, half-piqued at the way she seemed to look at him.
It not only failed to satisfy him, but stirred a new dissatisfaction. It hinted much, but only, it seemed to him, to negative it. It left Omof.a.ga still all in all, and him of interest only because he would talk of and work for Omof.a.ga, and keep the Omof.a.ga atmosphere about her. Now this was wrong, for Omof.a.ga existed for him, not he for Omof.a.ga; that was the faith of true disciples.
"You don"t care about me," he said. "It"s all the Company--and only the Company because it gives you something to do. Well, the Company"ll go on (I hope), and you"ll hear about our doings."
She turned to him with a puzzled look.
"I don"t know what it is," she said with a shake of her head. Then, with a sudden air of understanding, as though she had caught the meaning that before eluded her, she cried, "I"m just like you, I believe. If I went to Omof.a.ga, and you had to stay----"
"Oh, it would be the deuce!" he laughed.
"Yes, yes. Well, it is--the deuce," she answered, laughing in return.
But in a moment she was grave again.
Her attraction for him--the old special attraction of the unknown and unconquered--came strongly upon him, and mingled more now with pleasure in her. Her silence let him think; and he began to think how wasted she was on Harry Dennison. Another thought followed, and to that he gave utterance.
"But you"ve lots of things you could do at home; you could have plenty to work at, and plenty of--of influence, and so on."
"Yes, but--oh, it would come to Mr. Belford! Who wants to influence Mr.
Belford? Besides, I"ve grown to love it now, haven"t you?"
"Omof.a.ga?"
"Yes! It"s so far off--and most people don"t believe in it."
"No, confound them! I wish they did!"
"Do you? I"m not sure I do."
She was so absorbed that she had not heard an approaching step, and was surprised to see Ruston jump up while her last sentence was but half said.
"My dear Miss Valentine," he cried, his face lighting up with a smile of pleasure, "how pleasant to meet you again!"
There was no mistaking the sincerity of his greeting. Marjory blushed as she gave him her hand, and he fixed his eyes on her in undisguised approval.
"You"re looking splendid," he said. "Is it the air or the bathing or what?"
Perhaps it was both in part, but, more than either, it was a change that worked outwards from within, and was giving to her face the expression without which mere beauty of form or colour is poor in allurement. The last traces of what Lord Semingham meant by "insipidity" had been chased away. Ruston felt the change though he could not track it.
Marjory, a bad dissembler, greeted him nervously, almost coldly; she was afraid to let her gaze rest on him or on Mrs. Dennison for long, lest it should hint her secret. Her manner betrayed such uneasiness that Ruston noticed it. Mrs. Dennison did not, for something in Ruston"s face had caught her attention. She had seen many expressions in his eyes as he looked at her--of sympathy, amus.e.m.e.nt, pleasure, even (what had pleased her most) puzzle, but never what she saw now. The look now was a man"s homage to beauty--it differs from every other--a lover hardly seems to have it unless his love be beautiful--and she had never yet seen it when he looked at her. She turned away towards the sea, grasping the arm of her chair with a sudden grip that streaked her fingers red and white.
Marjory also saw, and a wild hope leapt up in her that her task needed not the doing. But a moment later Ruston was back in Omof.a.ga--young Sir Walter being his bridge for yet another transit.
"How"s Mr. Dennison?" asked Marjory, when he gave her an opportunity.
"Oh, he"s all right. You"d have heard, I suppose, if he hadn"t been?"
It was true. Marjory recognised the inappropriateness of her question, but Mrs. Dennison came to the rescue.
"Marjory wants a personal impression," she said. "You know she and my husband are great allies!"
"Well," laughed Ruston, "he was a little cross with me because I would come to Dieppe. I should have felt the same in his place; but he"s well enough, I think."
"I was going down to find Lady Semingham," said Marjory. "Are you coming down this morning, Maggie?"
"Maggie" was something new--adopted at Mrs. Dennison"s request.
"I think not, dear."
"I am," said Ruston, taking up his walking stick. "I shall be up with the Baron this afternoon, Mrs. Dennison. Come along, Miss Valentine.
We"ve been having no end of palaver about Omof.a.ga," and as they disappeared down the cliff Mrs. Dennison heard his voice talking eagerly to Marjory.
She felt her heart beating quickly. She had to conquer a strange impulse to rise and hurry after them. She knew that she must be jealous--jealous, she said to herself, trying to laugh, that he should talk about Omof.a.ga to other people. Nonsense! Why, he was always talking of it! There was a stronger feeling in her, less vague, of fuller force.
It had come on her when he spoke of his going to Africa, but then it was hard to understand, for with all her heart she thought she was still bent on his going. It spoke more clearly now, stirred by the threat of opposition. At first it had been the thing--the scheme--the idea--that had caught her; she had taken the man for the thing"s sake, because to do such a thing proved him a man after her pattern. But now, as she sat in the little garden, she dimly traced her change--she loved the scheme because it was his. She did not shrink from testing it. "Yes," she murmured, "if he gave it up now, I should go on with him to something else." Then came another step--why should he not give it up? Why should he go into banishment--he who might go near to rule England? Why should he empty her life by going? But if he went--and she could not persuade herself that she had power to stop his going--he must go from her side, it must be she who gave him the stirrup-cup, she towards whom he would look across the sea, she for whom he would store up his brief, grim tales of victory, in whose eyes he would see the reflection of his triumphs. Could she fill such a place in his life? She knew that she did not yet, but she believed in herself. "I feel large enough," she said with a smile.
Yet there was something that she had not yet touched in him--the thing which had put that look in his eyes, a thing that for the moment at least Marjory Valentine had touched. Why had she not? She answered, with a strong clinging to self-approbation, that it was because she would not. She told herself that she had asked nothing from her intercourse with him save the play of mind on mind--it was her mind and nothing else that her own home failed to satisfy. She recalled the scornful disgust with which she had listened to Semingham when he hinted to her that there was only one way to rule a man. It seemed less disgusting to her now than when he spoke. For, in the light of that look in his eyes, there stood revealed a new possibility--always obvious, never hitherto thought of--that another would take and wield the lower mighty power that she had disdained to grasp, and by the might of the lower wrest from her the higher. Was not the lower solidly based in nature, the higher a fanciful structure resting in no sound foundation? The moment this spectre took form before her--the moment she grasped that the question might lie between her and another--that it might be not what she would take but what she could keep--her heart cried out, to ears that shrank from the tumultuous reckless cry, that less than all was nothing, that, if need be, all must be paid for all. And, swift on the horror of her discovery, came the inevitable joy in it--joy that will be silenced by no reproofs, not altogether abashed by any shame, that no pangs can rob utterly of its existence--a thing to smother, to hide, to rejoice in.
Yet she would not face unflinchingly what her changing mind must mean.
She tried to put it aside--to think of something, ah! of anything else, of anything that would give her foothold.
"I love my husband," she found herself saying. "I love poor old Harry and the children." She repeated it again and again, praying the shibboleth to show its saving virtue. It was part of her creed, part of her life, to be a good wife and mother--part of her traditions that women who were not that were nothing at all, and that there was nothing a woman might take in exchange for this one splendid, all-comprehending virtue. To that she must stand--it was strange to be driven to argue with herself on such a point. She mused restlessly as she sat; she listened eagerly for her children"s footsteps mounting the hill; she prayed an interruption to rescue her from her thoughts. Just now she would think no more about it; it was thinking about it that did all the harm. Yet while she was alone she could not choose but surrender to the thought of it--to the thought of what a price she must pay for her traditions and her creed. The payment, she cried, would leave life an empty thing. Yet it must be paid--if it must. Was it now come to that?
Was this the parting of the roads?