“God has come into fashion,” said Mrs. Lewin rather bitterly. “At one time we kept our knowledge of Him to ourselves, as if ashamed of it, except in church, but now it is quite chic to drag Him into daily life. One almost gives His name as a reference—with one’s banker’s!”
“Yes, and so even the name has become cheapened.”
“It is inconsistent of me perhaps,” Mrs. Lewin confessed, “but I would rather hear a man use it as an oath and blaspheme that Name, than a woman turn it to account and use it for effect, even though half unconsciously.”
“It is after all the worse blasphemy—and so common now-a-days. Sentimental people always fall back upon God as an excuse for their own self-indulgence.”
Mrs. Lewin thought of the one sin that shall not be forgiven—the sin against the Holy Ghost, which is the sin of the spirit and worse than the sin of the letter. But she did not say so, being possessed of the grace of silence.
“The result of Eva’s hypocrisy, however, has not been exactly satisfactory, from her point of view,” laughed Mrs. Gilderoy. “The Rennie boy has defected, and now wanders about looking for a new pitfall. He wants to come out and see us, by the way. Is it too soon? Would you mind?”
“I do not mind,” said Mrs. Lewin slowly, “in the sense of its being too soon after my husband’s death. There is no real sooner or later in these things—it is merely a decent custom of civilisation which makes us pull down the blinds, and pretend to the world that we are weeping. Every one knows in their own minds that one cannot weep for more than a few hours at most. Why should I mind seeing visitors? Particularly in such a community as this! But I wish, if any one must come out, that it had been Mr. Gurney. Simply because I should like to hear him sing.”
“Yes, he is always a voice with a man tacked on. Unfortunately he can’t realise it though,” said Mrs. Gilderoy drily. “If you asked him to come he would tell the whole Station. I think the Rennie boy is really safer, Chum.”
Mrs. Lewin assented absently, and Mr. Rennie arrived in due course, and became an unconscious factor in spinning the web of her fate. She had made an effort in raising no objection to his presence, partly on Mrs. Gilderoy’s account, for though that lady was good-natured enough to come out to Vohitra without the stimulant of a larger party, it must, as Leoline knew, be both dull and monotonous to her. The reward of her virtue was a new revelation in the diagnosis she was making of her own self, and the touchstone nothing but the light words of a boy.
Mr. Rennie stayed some days at Vohitra, sitting figuratively and sometimes literally at the feet of both ladies. He was shy of grief, and at first looked with distrust at Leoline’s black-gowned figure. But her composed manner reassured while it puzzled him. The women with whom he had been best acquainted had been of a type that hysterically wails its sorrows in the market-place, and is consolable the week after. But Mrs. Lewin was even capable of smiling at a small joke, though the flowerful softness of her face had a new gravity that seemed to have touched it with a shadow. Chum’s eyebrows were always a little suggestive of tragedy, from a curve belied by her smiling eyes; but Rennie saw, vaguely, that the face he admired had gained something—a greater womanhood perhaps, almost the strength of maternity. Not having the key he put it down to Alaric Lewin’s sudden death, but he did not think that she would be easily consoled. Lewin, poor fellow, had been of a type which Rennie could conscientiously admire. His good looks, coupled with a certain air of breeding about him, made him a model for younger men; and to play polo and tennis as Ally did by nature was attainment enough for military ambition. Ally, as a married man, almost made bachelorhood look puny, for the tie had never interfered with his attractiveness to the opposite sex. Rennie would have been a married man on such terms. No wonder that Mrs. Lewin’s grief for this hero went deeper than a pocket-handkerchief.