Yet we are friends, and only friends, my lost love Leoline.”
“I always think it is a little high-flown for every day,” said Mrs. Lewin, with a view to the salutary effect of being matter-of-fact. A big, white moon was shining down the valley and silvering the sweep of cane, and the fireflies and intoxicating scents made sentiment a little excusable.
“I shouldn’t call you Leoline,” said Rennie, with a conscious sense of his own cleverness in distinction. “I should shorten it for every day, as you say. I like Leo better. No one calls you Leo.”
She rose abruptly, with a movement of protest beyond the power of control, and walked to the further end of the stoep, remarking, “I am sorry that I do not feel inclined to accord the privilege.”
Just a boy’s light words! Yet she remembered with a rush of pain how, long since, Mrs. Churton had asked leave to call her Chum, and she had said yes, and Mrs. Gilderoy had apologised for using her husband’s name for her. She had not cared—“Every one calls me Chum!” she had said lightly, and the name had grown, as Rennie said, common. Yet the sound of that natural contraction of Leoline on other lips than Gregory’s had aroused all the tigress in her to defend a sacred right. It was Gregory’s name for her—one, curiously enough, that no one else had ever used, even in her home-life before her marriage. As Rennie said, “No one calls you Leo”—no one, that is, before a prying public. In the sanctity of their closer love it had been the dearest of sounds to her, the little tender name that his suppressed voice had made a mere whisper for her ears alone.
She leaned there, at the end of the stoep, looking out into the blaze of the moonlight which greyed the wooded mountains, and made the cane a magic harvest for fairies to reap. She longed at this moment for some one to confide her doubts to, and the tumult in her mind, and curiously enough her thoughts turned to Mrs. Ritchie Stern, the comparative stranger with the sea winds haunting her blue eyes—the wife who loved her husband, and had spoken of children to a childless woman.... Some pulse seemed to beat and burn in Leoline’s bosom. Her heart turned to water in her, and all her life demanded the man she had been schooling herself to renounce—demanded not only him, but to be completed in him, bound by the strong tie of the flesh that earth at least can give, be the communion of saints what it may in Heaven.
The most pitiful and natural outcry ever put into a woman’s mouth, was that despairing “I loved him—and I did not bear his child!” It is very indecent, because no woman who is not indemnified by law and the Church has any right to feel the life quicken in her veins for any man, no matter how much her mate by instinct and suitability. She may, however, ask God’s blessing on a loveless union, and know that she lies through every vow she makes, and then—the joys of the flesh are no more lust! Without a legal right love itself is a sin, but the woman who is so forgetful of convention that she can yearn for the natural outcome of childbirth is pilloried in every moral market-place of the world. It seems a pity that, since we have accepted the decalogue, nature must always be immoral; but looked at in one sense even the marriage service is only sanctifying a breach of divine commandment. Leoline Lewin was traditional enough to feel her modesty damaged by her own unruly pulses. There was an accusation in every memory of Gregory’s clasp, and yet she could not conscientiously confess herself repentant, or say in truth that she would undo one moment of that too-keen pleasure. She looked up blankly at the inscrutable heavens, serenely blue and out of reach of question.
“How can one repent for being perfectly happy?” she said.
CHAPTER XVIII
“He who will not have peace, God sends him war.”—English Proverb.