“My eldest boy is like me rather than his father, and I am quite sorry! It is dreadful to have to look out for your own little failings, and recognise them. They seem such much more nasty little things in some one else; and yet I always know that they are just mine.”
“You must hate leaving the children!” said Mrs. Lewin slowly—just as Blanche had meant her to do.
“Yes!” she responded. “But I would rather have them, though on the other side of the world. Just as I would rather have my sailor, even though I cannot always follow his ship.”
“Captain Lewin has a great objection to having children while he is on foreign service—particularly in a hot climate,” said Leoline quietly. She was looking down, her long lashes a brown shadow on her unflushed cheeks, and her manner was too composed for resignation. Suddenly she raised her eyes with a flash that seemed to come all across the room to Mrs. Ritchie.
“I was so awfully disappointed!” she said, almost in a whisper. “At first I longed for one——”
Her voice trailed into silence. Mrs. Ritchie held her breath. The hint of being contented with things as they were now frightened her.
“You will not always be abroad—at least in such places as this,” she said hurriedly.
“No. One begins to see though, that there are more selfish advantages to be gained from married life without a nursery. It isn’t that Ally doesn’t want children—he will some day. But then—I mightn’t, you see.”
“You will,” said Mrs. Ritchie consolingly. “Let alone the feeling you will have that you ought to (I wish we didn’t have these feelings, but women keep the conscience of the household, always!), you will want to because it is natural. You needn’t be afraid.” She waited a minute, meeting those shining eyes steadily, and reiterated, “You needn’t be afraid.”
Leoline turned her face to the window, and looked across the garden, with its hot, dusty roses, to the latched gate through which Ally had gone to, and come from, Government House. At the gate a shadow stood, and a voice said, under breath, “I never came this way—before!” She thought of the child denied her because of Ally’s selfish fear of discomfort, and the safeguard of its presence in her arms now; for she might be called in this a good woman, that had she been a mother, she would not have been afraid, not even of that dangerous proximity. As it was, in spite of Blanche Stern’s presence throughout the day, there was a horribly lonely feeling about the bungalow, and after the rush of her departure had died away, the empty rooms seemed as if they listened for a step. The fear of being alone and of listening also made Leoline Lewin insist on riding down to the harbour again to see her off, and for the second time in twenty-four hours she found herself loitering about on the wharf among the walls of coal, waiting with that horrible sense of departure for the boat to start. There is nothing more trying to those left behind than one of these lingering “send-offs”—the going on board and forced little conversations with one ear always attentive for the bell and “Any more for the shore?”—the interminable time of standing about on the quay while the mails are got in, and the boat turns so very slowly from the shore—the waving of handkerchiefs, and hollow cheering, and then the going home with a blank feeling that life is just the same in its dull grooves, and all the chance of movement and adventure has gone out with the ship beyond the horizon line. It is a particularly depressing ceremony in Key Island, whose inhabitants feel it a prison at the best of times, but it seems to possess a kind of hideous fascination to the residents, who never let a boat depart without thronging on the quay and wishing vainly that they were going with her.