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 Omofaga," 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 Omofaga 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.