When she said good-bye to Dick Carey, she was simply unable to grasp that he could be taken from her, and when the news of his death came she had passionately and vehemently fought against the agony and pain and desolation that came with it. She had genuinely and really loved him, and nothing, absolutely nothing, seemed left. There was no pleasure any more in anything. That was what she could not understand, could not cope with. Her conventional faith fell from her, and she let it go without a struggle. But her happiness she refused to let go. She clung to it, or to the mirage of it, savagely, desperately. Dick was dead, yes, and she wanted him with a devouring hunger. But all the other things were left. Things she had loved. Things that had made her happy. She would not let them go.
After a brief space, in which the devils of bitterness and resentment and impotent wrath rent her in pieces, she took up her old life again, with apparently added zest. Her friends said “Violet was very plucky,” and no one was astonished when after a year she accepted and married Fred Riversley. It was altogether a more suitable match than one with poor Dick Carey. Riversley was of more suitable age, rich, devoted, and a good fellow, and as North said to her best friends, “Violet was never suited for the wife of a poor man.” Only Roger North watched her anxiously at times. She had been her mother’s child before, but since Dick’s death she had turned more and more to her father. Something of his dogged patient strength of mind seemed to become clear to her. Something of the courage with which he faced life.
She remembered a saying of his one day when her mother had been flagrantly unjust and bitter to him on some matter of expenditure, so that even she had felt ashamed. Whatever her father’s faults, his generosity was past question. She had gone into the study and striven to make amends, and he had looked at her with those tired humorous eyes of his and said:
“My dear, nothing can hurt you if you don’t let it.”
She seized on that as some sort of creed amid the welter of all she had ever thought she believed.
She would not let things hurt her, She plunged more eagerly than ever into the amusements of her world. After her marriage she started and ran a smart officers’ hospital in London. Mrs. Riversley’s name was on many committees. She was a noted giver of the then fashionable boy and girl dances. A celebrated personage said she reminded him of a human fire. There seemed a fever in her body, a restlessness which never left her. Since the cessation of hostilities this restlessness had increased, or possibly now that others were ceasing their activities it was more noticeable.
While North sat smoking his cigar she fetched a racquet and began to practice her service on the court nearest him. She served over-hand a swift hard service, and North watched the long slim line of her figure, her exquisite poise, as she swung her racquet above her head and drove the ball home. It was typical somehow of the driving force that seemed behind her restlessness.
Presently she stopped, and came and sat down close beside him, and when he looked at her he saw that her mask was down and the tormented soul of her for a moment bare.
“It all looks just the same as ever, doesn’t it!” she said. “And we’ve got to get through it somehow to the very end.
“My dear,” began her father, and stopped. A blank hideous horror of emptiness possessed him. He shivered in the hot sunshine. There was nothing to say. He had no comfort to give her.