In the revulsion of the shock she stood very upright herself, as if to prove her own power—a grave, white figure overlooking the relaxed body in its tumbled dress-clothes which lay at her bare feet. Through the appalling silence sounded the man’s heavy snoring breath, and the thrum of the hard-back which had followed her into the dressing-room, and was hitting itself against the beams of the ceiling.
Suddenly the woman remembered where and who she was, and what had happened. The little harassing details of the tragedy came back to her and woke her to shuddering action. She had been standing there for some minutes, and half-a-dozen dangers might have occurred to clench the position. The servants might hear and come to ask what was wrong, or some one might have followed Ally to see him safely home, though a quick glance at the probabilities reassured her that this—this prostrate helpless body, was a last stage that had not betrayed itself before. She sprang at the door and closed it swiftly, slipping the bolt; then she dragged the mattress off the couch and pushed it as near that helpless thing, that seemed no longer her husband, as was possible; and then, with her strong, young arms, she took it under the shoulders and dragged it on to the improvised bed, spreading a covering sheet over the betraying clothes. The exertion brought beads of moisture on to her fair soft body, and she stood up again panting a little, and trying to realise it all.
She must begin and love all over again, if she were to love so low at all. This degraded Ally, helpless on her mercy, was no longer the stalwart husband round whom she had built up her theoretical married life. A dozen little things that had been but pinpricks of annoyance started up in her mind suddenly, to intensify the final blow, and she saw him as a weak man, without the strenuous love of fighting and winning which she had tried to coax into him, self-contented, the mere tool of her own ambition whenever he had been forced into action. The bitterness of her thwarted instincts was uppermost as she turned away. That was the mate of her own ripe womanhood, the force round which her eager life was to centre—that poor weak nature which would resist one temptation as little as another, for in the cruelty of this revelation she acknowledged what she had been so pitifully denying to herself,—that Alaric Lewin was no master of life, but the sport of his own idle inclinations.
She was moving back to her own room with dragging feet, when a new terror seemed to spring up and startle her back into action again. Some one was coming up the garden path with a heavy tramp that came straight on towards the stoep and the house. It was no barefooted Arab, but the impatient tread of a white man who was his own messenger, and with a horrible premonition she knew it from any more probable one that it might have been. It was the Administrator, and he had some purpose in thus coming to his Secretary at one o’clock in the morning. The sing-song snarl outside the stores and in the gutters, during the Miroro, came back to her mind ominously.
With some idea of stopping him before he could rouse the servants to get into the house, she hastily left the dressing-room, and closing the door behind her, as if it held an ugly secret, she sped across the large bare dining-room and slipped back the bolt of the rough wooden door. But she need not have troubled herself for the household. Evelyn Gregory had almost brushed against the sleeping Arabs in his rapid transit from the garden gate to the house, but as he passed along the stoep he coolly stepped over the slumbering tangle at his feet with the briefest passing scorn for men and women. It meant nothing to him in his absorption, and indeed he hardly knew that the humanity he spurned with his foot was there. He did not expect any of the servants to answer his knock, but he meant to rouse Captain Lewin, and with this grim intent he swung his heavy riding-whip round and brought the weighted end rattling down on the slight panels of the door. The whip was his constant companion, and served not for his ponies, but as a weapon of defence or of punishment in an emergency. Its weight was consequently no slight one, but before he could shake the door again it was quietly opened, leaving him with the upraised whip in his hand, the long lash coiled round his wrist, and his whole attitude unintentionally threatening.
In the doorway stood a marvellous fair woman in her nightdress, the open neck showing her so warm and white, that with a little instant thrill he guessed at the delicious shoulder under the lace. She had come so swiftly that she had not even drawn the white silk wrapper closely round her, and one little slipper had fallen from her; he saw it lying in the waste of floor behind her, where it had slipped from her running foot, and he thought of another white satin morsel that he had held between his own. The coil of her hair was tossed sideways over her shoulder, and brushed away from her forehead, leaving her unusually girlish without its customary mature dressing, but in her large eyes he saw that there was not the least thought of him. She was as unconscious of her sweet bare foot as of his cognizance of it, nor did she know that her careless whiteness was a seduction in itself. All her conscious life centred round the terror of the last few minutes, so that she saw only the situation she had to face.
“Come in, Mr. Gregory,” she said under her breath, drawing aside for him to pass in. “What is it? What is it? Something is wrong!”
She had turned on the light as she came, and it shone in their two faces, the man still struggling with his personal thought, the woman strained by her private dread of discovery. But the light mechanically influenced her, so that she put up a slight hand and tugged at the silk wrapper vaguely to veil her laces and frills. He watched her as if fascinated, without will-power to turn away, and when he spoke it was in short clipped phrases, as though it were an effort.
“There is a threatening of a rising. The police are out. I want the troops ready. Will you call your husband?”
There was a blank of silence, while it beat into her brain that somebody was required to ride to Maitso and take the alarm. She thought of a dull figure lying heavily on the floor, breathing stentoriously....