So they went in and joined the children at their merry noisy meal.
CHAPTER XXI.
A JOINT IN HIS ARMOUR.
Willie Ruston slept, on the night following his return to London, in the Carlins' house at Hampstead. The all-important question of the railway made a consultation necessary, and Ruston's indisposition to face his solitary rooms caused him to accept gladly the proffered hospitality. The little cramped place was always a refuge and a rest; there he could best rejoice over a victory or forget a temporary defeat. There he fled now, in the turmoil of his mind. The question of the railway had hurried him from Dieppe, but it could not carry away from him the memories of Dieppe. Yet that was the office he had already begun to ask of it—of it and of the quiet busy life at Hampstead, where he lingered till a week stretched to two and to three, spending his days at work in the City, and his evenings, after his romp with the children, in earnest and eager talk and speculation. He regretted bitterly his going to Dieppe. He had done what he condemned; he had raised up a perpetual reproach and a possible danger. He was not a man who could dismiss such a thing with a laugh or a sneer, with a pang of penitence and a swift reaction to the low levels of morality, with a regret for imprudence and a prayer against consequences. His nature was too deep, and the influence he had met too strong, for any of these to be enough. Yet he had suffered the question of the railway to drag him away at a moment's notice; and he was persuaded that he must take his leaving as setting an end to all that had passed. All that must be put behind; forgetfulness in thought might be a relief impossible to attain, a relief that he would be ashamed of striving to attain; but forgetfulness in act seemed a duty to be done. In his undeviating reference of everything to his own work in life and his neglect of any other touchstone, he erected into an obligation what to another would have been a shameless matter of course; or, again, to yet another, a source of shame-faced relief. His sins were sin first against himself, in the second degree only against the participant in them; his preoccupation with their first quality went far to blind him to the second.
Yet he was very sorry for Maggie Dennison. Nay, those words were ludicrously feeble for the meaning he wanted from them. Acutely conscious of having done her a wrong, he was vaguely aware that he might underestimate the wrong, and remembered uneasily how she had told him that he did not understand, and despaired because he could not understand. He felt more for her now—much more, it seemed to him; but the consciousness of failure to put himself where she stood dogged him, making him afraid sometimes that he could not realise her sufferings, sometimes that he was imputing to her fictitious tortures and a sense of ignominy which was not her own. Searching light, he began to talk to Carlin in general terms, of course, and by way of chance discourse; and he ran up against a curious stratum of Puritanism imbedded amongst the man's elastic principles. The narrowest and harshest judgment of an erring woman accompanied the supple trader and witnessed the surviving barbarian in Mr. Carlin; an accidental distant allusion displayed an equally relentless attitude in his meek hard-working little wife. Willie Ruston drew in his feelers, and, aghast at the evil these opinions stamped as the product of his acts, declared for a moment that his life must be the only and insufficient atonement. The moment was a brief one. He dismissed the opinions with a curse, their authors with a smile, and did not scorn to take for comfort even Maggie Dennison's own enthusiasm for his work. That had drawn them together; that must rule and limit the connection which it had created. An end—a bound—a peremptory stop (there was still time to stop) was the thing. She would see that, as he saw it. God knew (he said to himself) what a wrench it was—for she meant more to him than he had ever conceived a woman could mean; but the wrench must be undergone. He would rather die than wreck his work; and she, he knew, rather die than prove a wrecking siren to him.
Suddenly, across the desponding stubbornness of his resolves, flashed, with a bright white light, the news of the Baron's legacy, accompanying, but, after a hasty regretful thought and a kindly regretful smile, obliterating the fact of the Baron's death. Half the steps upward, he felt, which he had set himself painfully and with impatient labour to cut, were hewn deep and smooth for his feet; he had now but to tread, and lift his foot and tread again. From a paid servant of his Company, powerful only by a secret influence unbased on any substantial foundation, he leapt to the position of a shareholder with a larger stake than any man besides; no intrigue could shake him now, no sudden gust of petulant impatience at the tardiness of results displace him. He had never thought of this motive behind the Baron's large purchases of Omofaga shares; as he thought of it, he had not been himself had he not smiled. And his smile was of the same quality as had burst on his face when first Maggie Dennison dropped the veil and owned his sway.
One day he did not go down to the city, but spent his time wandering on the heath, mapping out what he would do in the fast-approaching days in Omofaga. The prospects were clearing; he had had two interviews with Lord Detchmore, and the Minister had fallen back from his own objections on to the scruples of his colleagues. It was a promising sign, and Willie was pressing his advantage. The fall in the shares had been checked; Tom Loring wrote no more; and Mrs. Carlin had forgotten to mourn the extinct coal business. He came home, with a buoyant step, at four o'clock, to find Carlin awaiting him with dismayed face. There was the worst of news from Queen Street. Mr. Dennison had written announcing resignation of his place on the Board.
"It's a staggering blow," said Carlin, thrusting his hands into his pockets. "Can't you bring him round? Why is he doing it?"