"I'm going to send him a wire, too."
"I'm very glad to hear it," said Lord Semingham.
CHAPTER XVI.
THE LAST BARRIERS.
Willie Ruston rested his elbows on the jetty-wall and gazed across the harbour entrance. He had come there to think; and deliberate thinking was a rare thing for him to set his head to. His brain dealt generally—even with great matters, as all brains deal with small—in rapid half-unconscious beats; the process coalescing so closely with the decision as to be merged before it could be recognised. But about this matter he meant to think; and the first result of his determination was (as it often is in such a case) that nothing at all relevant would stay by him. There was a man fishing near, and he watched the float; he looked long at the big hotel at Puys, which faced him a mile away, and idly wondered whether it were full; he followed the egress of a fishing boat with strict attention. Then, in impatience, he turned round and sat down on the stone bench and let his eyes see nothing but the flags of the pavement. Even then he hardly thought; but after a time he became vaguely occupied with Maggie Dennison, his mind playing to and fro over her voice, her tricks of manner, her very gait, and at last settling more or less resolutely on the strange revelation of herself which she had gradually made and had consummated that day. It changed his feelings towards her; but it did not change them to contempt. He had his ideas, but he did not make ideal figures out of humanity; and humanity could go very far wrong and sink very deep in its lower possibilities without shocking him. Nor did he understand her, nor realise how great a struggle had brought what he saw to birth. It seemed to him a thing not unnatural, even in her, who was in much unlike most other women. There are dominions that are not to be resisted, and we do not think people weak simply because they are under our own influence. His surprise was reserved for the counter-influence which he felt, and strove not to acknowledge; his contempt for the disturbance into which he himself was thrown. At that he was half-displeased, puzzled, and alarmed; yet that, too, had its delight.
"What rot it is!" he muttered, in the rude dialect of self-communion, which sums up a bewildering conflict in a word of slang.
He was afraid of himself—and his exclamation betrayed the fear. Men of strong will are not all will; the strong will has other strong things to fight, and the strong head has mighty rebels to hold down. That he felt; but his fear of himself had its limits. He was not the man—as he saw very well at this moment, and recognised with an odd mixture of pride and humiliation—to give up his life to a passion. Had that been the issue clearly and definitely set before him he would not have sat doubtful on the jetty. He understood what of nobility lay in such a temperament, and his humiliation was because it made no part of him; but the pride overmastered, and at last he was glad to say to himself that there was no danger of his losing all for love. Indeed, was he in love? In love in the grand sense people talked and wrote about so much? Well, there were other senses, and there were many degrees. The question he weighed, or rather the struggle which he was undergoing, was between resisting or yielding before a temptation to take into his life something which should not absorb it, but yet in a measure alter it, which allured him all the more enticingly because, judging as he best could, he could see no price which must be paid for it—well, except one. And, as the one came into his mind, it made him pause, and he mused on it, looking at it in all lights. Sometimes he put the price as an act of wrong which would stain him—for, apart from other, maybe greater, maybe more fanciful obstacles, Harry Dennison held him for a friend—sometimes as an act of weakness which would leave him vulnerable. And, after these attempted reasonings, he would fall again to thinking of Maggie Dennison, her voice, her manner, and the revelation of herself; and in these picturings the reasoning died away.
There are a few deliberate sinners, a few by whom "Evil, be thou my Good" is calmly uttered as a dedication and a sacrament, but most men do not make up their minds to be sinners or determine in cool resolve to do acts of the sort that lurked behind Willie Ruston's picturings. They only fail to make up their minds not to do them. Ruston, in a fury of impatience, swept all his musings from him—it led to nothing. It left him where he was. He was vexing himself needlessly; he told himself that he could not decide what he ought to do. In truth, he did not choose to decide what it was that he chose to do. And with the thoughts that he drove away went the depression they had carried with them. He was confident again in himself, his destiny, his career; and in its fancied greatness, the turmoil he had suffered sank to its small proportions. He returned to his old standpoint, and to the old medley of pride and shame it gave him; he might be of supreme importance to Maggie Dennison, but she was only of some importance to him. He could live without her. But, at present, he regarded her loss as a thing not necessary to undergo.