“I hoped you might come up later, perhaps,” said Mrs. Lewin as they shook hands. It struck her as hopelessly indecent that she should stand here on the quay chatting after Key’land fashion, when she had only had news of her husband’s death about a week since. But the conventionalities of tradition seemed squeezed out by the narrow limits of life in the tiny Station. For a day or so she might shut herself out from public view behind drawn shutters, but the instant she appeared in the open air an encounter was unavoidable; and why should she turn her back upon friends because her husband was dead? she thought blankly. After all, life had to go on. She was dully surprised to find herself talking much the same as usual, of the narrow round of intimacy, of the people she knew, of monotonous, local interests. “Mrs. Gilderoy joins me on Thursday,” she found herself saying, as if it were an ordinary summer outing. “Won’t you come too?”
“Can’t, unfortunately. Bute came back this week.”
“He has been for quite a long shoot, hasn’t he? Ah, he rode round the island—I forgot.” Again Mrs. Gilderoy occurred to her mind, and a dull speculation crossed it as to whether she were right, and Diana’s face bore testimony to a domestic tragedy.
“Yes, he wanted a change,” Mrs. Churton said naturally, and in so composed a manner it dispelled the idea of anything being wrong. “He was awfully seedy before he went. This place doesn’t suit him. But it doesn’t suit any one long. How are you?”
“I don’t know,” said Leoline simply. “What does it matter? One just goes on living. Tell me the news of the place.”
“There is none. The Clayton woman has taken a religious craze, Rennie tells me. He can’t stand her any longer, so he’ll probably revert to Trixie Denver. There’s nothing else to amuse him until he gets transferred. You go home next mail, I suppose? How I envy you!” She drew a long rasping breath that seemed to hurt her.
“I would have been contented to stop here if I could have kept as I was,” said Mrs. Lewin bitterly, for the shock that her life had sustained had driven her back on a former mental attitude. She felt at the moment that if she could wipe out the horror of her suspicion about Gregory, she would be content to live out her life with Alaric Lewin and all his weakness and failure. She glanced down at her long slim figure in its new black, and Mrs. Churton’s eyes followed her own.
“Mourning is awfully hot,” she said simply. “You can wear white if you like at Vohitra—there will be no one to see. I don’t see that it matters—when one feels much, clothes seem so insignificant a proof, don’t they?” Her sharpened face took a strained hurt look that made it pathetic.
“Oh, what do I care!” said Chum, impatient of her own pain and remorse, missing all hint of the other’s. “One cannot lose one’s instincts of course, but I would wear sackcloth—with a cut,” she added honestly.
They parted there on the quay, unconscious of the bitterness in each other’s hearts, Diana to go back to the house that held a grim tragedy for her in her husband’s face—Leoline to take ship and flee from herself, if such a miracle had been permitted. She could not get away, any more than Bute Churton and his wife could get away from the degradation of that every-day life in which he had always a memory to shame him, she one that had driven the iron into her soul. She had never given him a chance to ask her pardon. It was the one revenge left her, for she knew that he could not rest in the sense of his own lost self-esteem. He was trying to speak of it, and she would not let him. Sometimes she watched the big man moving about uneasily, with hard brown eyes that hated him, and knew that his mind was troubled, until she would have liked to have mocked him. She grew cruel in those days, for the grinding intimacy of their narrow life prevented either of them gaining a long enough respite to think, and learn patience apart. Truly Key Island was a trap!