All the wrong against her husband that was credible to her was done to his name. That Alaric must suffer from the blow she saw, and knowing no injury that he had done her, it seemed an intolerable thing that she meditated in cutting the tie between them. She knew him for a weak man too; what would be the result, to a nature like his, of her desertion? If every fibre in her heart had not seemed to her to be rooted in the man beside her, she would never have permitted herself the choice; but for the time being her whole soul was in revolt, demanding its desire, crying out that its very life depended on the chance of happiness. She could not argue or reason just now; she felt the necessity of her own being a greater thing than the slighter nature’s pain. Was she always to be sacrificed to Alaric’s weakness? her heart cried out impatiently—Ally, who was as easily comforted as a child by a new toy for the one that had been broken! Within a week of her flight he would be playing tennis, and petted and consoled by other women for his unmerited misfortune. She saw him more harshly than ever before, and her velvet eyes grew sombre as she raised them to Gregory’s watchful face. There was no remorse or vacillation in him—there would be no repining word hereafter. What he did he had stood by all his life, and he neither excused nor forswore himself. He was a hard man at worst—a strong man at best. Some day she would know him for unscrupulous, but always and for ever she would love him, because his qualities were the essential for her, and also because love goes deeper than reason and outruns rule.
“I am not asking you to take such a step to-morrow or next day,” he urged in that under-breathed voice, “only it would be unfair not to set my ultimate goal before you.” Then his manner grew warmer, he half leaned against her lace-clad shoulder, and his arm stole around her waist. “Is it so hard to think of me as a husband, darling? I believe you are half afraid of me as a lover!”
She felt the masculine eyes above her dominating her, and her head drawn back against his shoulder. As he kissed her again and again, closing the velvet eyes and holding her lips with his own until she was breathless, his constraining clasp gradually bound her close to him. Through the thin linen suit she could feel every tightened muscle of his body, and for a moment was blinded by his caresses. She had not realised until then the feebleness of her own passions compared with his. It seemed as if he were built upon such a gigantic scale that lesser mortals dwindled beside him as beside one such as the old Greeks used to believe was endowed by a deity in parentage.
But when she slipped out of her gown that night she was conscious of a painful soreness, as though her soft elastic flesh had been badly bruised. There was no mark on the white skin, but she could not pass her hand down her side without feeling the hurt. It could not have been a blow, for a blow would have left a visible bruise. Yet her very muscles ached.
For a moment, as she rubbed her hand softly to and fro over the warm satin surface of her body, she could not understand the cause. Then her face flamed. She was half ashamed and half exultant. For she realised the strength of Gregory’s clasp, and felt as Danaë may have felt in the grip of her god.
CHAPTER XV
“La paix n’est que le sommeil de la guerre.”—French Proverb.
“There must be something wrong between the Churtons,” said Mrs. Gilderoy, taking off her hat and sitting down beside Mrs. Lewin to chat.
“What is the matter?” asked Leoline, in some surprise. “I haven’t seen Di for ever so long, though all the rest of you have been most good in cheering my solitude. Major Churton is away, isn’t he?”
“He has gone for a ride round the island. That is how I know something is wrong. It is our one resource for mental disturbance—if a man has been refused, or a woman found out, they arrange to ride round the island until things calm down again. You see, we can’t get out of it, so we begin to run round and round to ease our distress.”