The Alaric Lewins took their married life as a huge joke, a point of view which speedily communicated itself to Key Island, who proceeded to laugh with them over the situation. They had been brought up together, Mrs. Lewin’s father having been Alaric’s guardian, and an admiration of Ally had been amongst the rudiments of Chum’s education. At intervals Alaric had disappeared out of her life to Harrow, and Sandhurst, and India, always to reappear a good deal handsomer and better mannered and more travelled. His view of life was necessarily larger than her own by forced experience; but the girl, left at home, knew more deeply by theory than the man by practice. At twenty-six a woman who thinks is in a very dangerous position if she has had no actual experience to reduce her ideas of life to the level of reality. But Leoline looked innocent enough of anything out of the common, when seen against the background of her home. Captain Lewin was much influenced by surroundings; he saw a solid position in the county, irreproachable frocks, popularity with men and women alike, and a coveted possession by others of his kind, while the unimportant item of a girl’s individuality, which was the centrepiece of all this, he took for granted. Leoline, the victim of her own theories, found the relations between them hardly altered after the clergyman of the parish, who had hitherto behaved like a gentleman, said very rude things to her from the altar rails, for which he had scriptural authority. She congratulated herself that she was still Ally’s “Chum,” and made their interests one with a touch of comradeship in the wifehood. Her knowledge of the man she had married consisted in the fact that he was nearly six feet in height and well built, that he had a well-shaped dark head, and a handsome face, that he had always had good manners and appearance, and that they were excellent companions. Marriage, to Chum, meant a certain amount of mutual toleration and avoidance of friction, whereby she called it a success. It seemed to her that she and Ally had done the same thing from their nursery days; they must certainly have learned all of each other that there was to learn by now. But in an indefinite future she believed that he was to do great things, because she could not imagine herself the wife of a man who was a failure.
A week in Key Island revealed the inner workings of its life, as Halton had said it would, but the Lewins still knew different sides of it. Alaric’s duties tied him to Government House as he had predicted, but he escaped to play tennis and to ride and bathe after the manner of his kind. There was an heroic effort at a polo ground too, but things being on an eternal slant in the island, the game had to be played on a gentle slope. Gentlemen of the home clubs, who swear at a daisy tuft, think of the pathos of this, and see how exiled brothers can follow the sport abroad! Leoline, by the grace of Hafez and Abdallah, was free early in the day, but squandered her liberty in reducing her house to order. She did not care to ride out to tennis much before the hour when her husband could arrive there also, and it even sometimes happened that she would for preference go for a gallop through the cocoanuts up and down Mitsinjovy Straight, so that he had got home and changed, and was at their mutual destination before her. This happened one day about a week after their arrival; Mrs. Lewin had ordered her pony for four o’clock, but the day clouded over, and the sky over Maitso was so threatening that she gave up her gallop and half hesitated about going to the further garrison. As, however, tennis was on at Mrs. Churton’s this afternoon, and as Ally liked Mrs. Churton, she decided to ride up to Maitso, anyhow, and cantered soberly away, past the gates of Government House, and, leaving Port Victoria to the right, began to climb the hill.
It was a steep climb, and the pony sobered at once to a walk. No Key’land pony can trot—either he walks or he canters, and even that he does in a manner peculiarly his own, using three of his legs to the distinct saving of the fourth. As Liscarton dug his toes into the dust and hitched his lean quarters upwards, Mrs. Lewin turned in the saddle and looked down at the view, which was gaining an indefinite fascination for her—the town, the harbour, and the gates. The two cone-shaped rocks had a threatening appearance to-day, with the low loose clouds nearly touching their crests, and there was a sullen light upon everything. Even the sun-soaked green of the hills cuddled round Port Victoria were draped with passing veils of rain that were being blown over them and down towards the town. It was not as yet wet at Maitso, though it had been threatening all day, and the Lewins’ bungalow, being on a level with Government House, had also escaped with an angry shower.
“Shall we have a storm, boy?” said Chum, as she rode into the Churtons’ yard and delivered her pony to a loafing servant. The groom nodded, and murmured an assent in Arabic or Malagasy—she had not yet learned to know which—but with so obvious a disbelief in the weather that she hastened her steps into the house in consequence. He was right, for the first large drops splashed on to the roof of the stoep, even as the butler bowed her into the drawing-room through one of its many doors; and the clouds darkened the day so that the carefully shaded room was really dusky after the outside world.
Mrs. Churton happened to be crossing the room, and greeted Mrs. Lewin on the way. She was of a type that wears the regimental badge as a waist-buckle, and seems proud of a weather-beaten skin as proof that she has followed the drum through many climates. Chum glanced at the hair that Ally had said was “All right,” and saw that Diana Churton had tightened a coiffeur in the Queen into a form entirely unbecoming to her face. Her instinct could not approve, but her judgment meekly followed Ally’s.
There were many people crowded into the little room who would have spread themselves out comfortably upon the tennis courts, but thus condensed seemed to Chum too complicated to be greeted in detail. So she remained where she had drifted, near an open window, and watched the storm. It had begun to rain, as it always does there, with half-a-dozen great drops, like the first tears of a breaking grief, and then as if a window opened in heaven and an angry God threatened to drown the earth a second time. For some minutes it was impossible to hear anything but the shouting of the rain as it drove past; but after a few minutes it softened to a steady hissing whisper, and the conversation in the room behind her caught Mrs. Lewin’s idle attention. She wondered what was absorbing the party, and turned to hear. Mrs. Churton had had a large volume in her hands when she spoke to her latest guest, which she promptly deposited upon Ally’s knee—Chum had recognised his flat shoulders and oval dark head, though his back was towards her—and a minute later she gained the key to the mystery.
“My husband always takes about two hundred pounds worth with him for exchange,” Mrs. Churton was saying. “There’s the variation, Captain Lewin—see the difference between DIE I and II?”
“Oh, I’ve got this,” Ally’s voice chimed in. “DIE II has a clean engraved cut under the eye, hasn’t it? But you’ve beaten me in shades.”
“I can get ten pounds for that one penny on five shilling dull rose Barbadoes of mine!” broke in another voice.
“You’re a specialist, aren’t you, Mr. Lysle?”