Back on her mind flashed the damning certainty that the one man who should have been ignorant had found out. She had felt his knowledge through the horrible pause after her stammering excuse, through his courteous sparing of her, and quick substitution of himself as a messenger, through the kindly fall of his hand on her shoulder.
“Don’t worry; go to bed yourself, and be quite easy. I will make it all right. I am so sorry to have roused you.”
She had his promise then to make it all right. Yes, he could gloss it over too,—he would take the onus of the situation on himself, and thrust his own known energy and personal supervision in the face of comment. At least her success with him had brought her that—enough interest in herself to make him spare her husband, for she acknowledged boldly to herself that it was her own handling of this man during the past few weeks which had saved the situation to-night. Yesterday she might have daintily skirted the truth, but it seemed a small thing beside the bitter failure of her most intimate life. Gregory would spare Ally for his wife’s sake, but—the Administrator having to ride to Maitso in place of his own A.D.C.! She almost laughed aloud with a sudden hysterical sense of humour.
“Oh, I shall go mad—mad!” she said desperately, as the keenness of the humiliation stung her afresh. “It is all spoilt—all that I planned and worked to do. There is nothing but the Man left to me.”
But with the word the bitterness passed as swiftly as it had come. The Man was left her, to guard and cherish if no longer to love, honour, and obey, for the positions were reversed. Her eyes filled with lovely tears, and all that was best and most maternal flooded the soreness from her heart. She could begin and love all over again—love as one loves a child, without looking for adequate return, less selfishly than a wife her husband; she could be strong for him, and putting her own craving for protection on one side, thrust her strength between his weakness and what life had to offer. Her very first trial would begin to-morrow, when she cringed to think of the shame awaiting his returning consciousness. She must help him through that first, and then arm him for the result of his folly with the world at large.
Leoline Lewin turned from the window, and quietly throwing off her wrapper, lay down on the bed and went as fast to sleep as if nothing had disturbed her rest. Part of her theory of life had been torn from her, and the sting of keen experience had wounded her into quicker life. But she was turning her face bravely to meet it, and stood up under the new stress of life to prove her womanhood.
CHAPTER VIII
“Le temps, l’innocence, la confiance, la foi, l’estime—perdez les—vous ne les recouvrerez plus.”—French Proverb.
A cého head is the best incentive to temporary canonisation that can well be experienced, and when, according to the old couplet, “The Devil was sick,” and “A saint would be,” he had probably been indulging on the preceding night in Key Island, whose temperature suggests that it is nearer to his dominion than the rest of the globe. Captain Lewin woke up on his improvised bed about half-past four next morning, and wondered if the swelled weight on the pillow were really his head or a leaden imitation fastened to his shoulders. To sleep in evening dress, too, in Key Island is hardly a profitable experiment, and what with the sheet spread over him and the liqueur he had swallowed, Ally’s state was one of satisfactory discomfort.
He kicked off the sheet, and arose cursing. Then events began to come back to him, and as he staggered into an upright position—for he was very shaky—he looked at the mattress on the floor, and wondered who had mercifully arranged it for him last night. His memory declined to serve him beyond an uneasy recollection of a dark corner of the stoep at the Churtons’ quarters, and Diana’s stirrup cup. How he had got home he could not tell, but the state of his mouth informed him ruefully that he had been very drunk indeed. Cého has a singular effect upon the glands of the throat, if taken in large quantities, so that a regular drinker gets a strange and unclassified disease after many years’ tippling, which the doctors call “Drawn threads” for lack of a better name.