“We must live it down anyhow, Ally. If only it had not been last night! And the Churtons know.” She spoke in short, pausing sentences, thinking it out. “We don’t know the real extent of the mischief until we hear whether the rising were anything serious.”
A sudden passing gloom darkened his face again. “Gregory never forgives that kind of thing. Dear, this means ruin to any career for me!”
He rose impatiently, and began to stroll up and down the room, as though he could not sit still. After a minute she followed him, and put her arms round him, bringing him to a standstill. The warm, motherly look of love that had been in her eyes last night was there again as she lifted her head and looked at him.
“I don’t care, darling, as long as we are side by side, and can help each other!” she said. “Only let us stand or fall together!”
The silent, golden day was unbroken by any whisper, but the two kissed each other gently for promise, and looked into each other’s faces with a gravity too gentle for passion. While the best side of our nature is uppermost a vow seems almost superfluous. If reason will not bind us, a futile fear of our own oath is a poor alternative. Unfortunately, the best side of our nature so seldom remains in the ascendant, but has a disheartening tendency to give way before the baser instincts of the clay.
Alaric set off for Government House in a state of mind more angelic than comfortable. He felt as if the backbone had gone out of him with the wickedness, and his good resolutions were less easy to carry than his usual self-satisfaction. Nevertheless it was a beautiful mood, and as genuine as any other while it lasted. He found that the Administrator had slept out at China Town at the house of the Town Warden. This was disturbing, and the impenetrable reserve of Mr. Halton’s manner when they encountered each other for a few moments did not tend to soothe matters. Ally felt that to await he knew not what, and try to work, tended towards temporary insanity. At half-past eleven he ordered his pony, and rode down into Port Victoria.
There was no sign of disturbance there, but he felt that he could better have faced the town in ruins, and the coloured population howling and dancing the “Cannab Hari-kari,” which is a dance of death, than the solitary figure of Evelyn Gregory which haunted his imagination. Why had the Administrator slept out at China Town? What was going on?
He lounged into the club, the fret of his nerves making the click of the billiard balls a torture. Two men were listlessly playing in the ugly bare room, where the sun beat past the stoep and through the glassless window slits. Ally watched the game for a few minutes, and then his restlessness drove him across the landing into the reading-room where no one ever read. Last month’s papers still lay on the table, and a solitary member was writing at one of the neglected tables. Ally almost beat a retreat at sight of the square shoulders and dark head shot over with grey. No other man in Key Island wore and kept his collars as high and clean as the officer in command of the troops. With the temperature at 90° in the shade Major Churton was as coolly immaculate in glossy linen as if he were in Bond Street, and where lesser men succumbed to turned-down collars and porous shirts, his were triumphantly starched.
“Hulloa, Major!” Ally said, with an inward flinching from the encounter.
“Hulloa, Lewin!” The O.C.T. turned his hard brown face, and there was a twinkle in his bold eyes. “Got home all right last night, eh?”