“All right—please say I shall be very pleased, if she is so charitable as to forgive last night.”
“Oh, she will look on that with indulgence I have no doubt!” said Churton with some cynicism. “We are none of us total abstainers that we can accuse each other. Have a whiskey on the strength of that confession, Lewin!”
When Alaric rode up through the logwood screen, and pulled rein before the O.C.T.’s quarters, Mrs. Churton came forth to meet him with a friendly handshake, and no reference to the advance of last night. She was a skilful woman. The Major had come up before, so Diana had already heard of the supposed alarm, and guessed a good deal of Ally’s part in it. She drew the rest of the story from him, new-coloured with the self-defence that had been growing on him all day, and was loud in her scorn of Gregory’s eccentricities.
“He would like to turn the troops out now and then on a false scent, to prove their smartness,” she declared. “The men will mutiny next, if he sends any more such orders to Maitso, and then he will revel in a new row. He’s like that—Bute was stationed with him once before. There’s literally nothing in it but his usual fuss, and love of worrying a situation to rags. Gregory’s a Prairie dog, and Halton’s a cat—you can’t trust what either of them says or does.”
“It was unfortunate that he took a fit of it last night,” Ally admitted, but he felt comforted, and Mrs. Churton’s mental touch upon his nerves was more soothing, for the moment at any rate, than his wife’s. He lingered on and on through the afternoon, and though he shunned actual stimulant he took many mental whiskies and sodas to keep himself up. By the time he rode home again to dinner his repentance of the morning had changed into a state of injury that the Administrator should raise false alarms, and upset a peaceful community. No more was known of Mr. Gregory’s movements, save that he had returned to Government House, and still Port Victoria was quiet. It was obviously a false alarm and a fad of the man in power, and with a peculiar transposition of mind Captain Lewin no longer felt that he was the injurer in failing his chief at a crucial moment, but rather the injured party in that Mr. Gregory had chosen the one evening when he was—er—not up to the mark, to make demands upon him. The elasticity of his conscience was only equal to his capacity for avoiding unpleasant truth.
Poor Chum! she was writing her new creed on sand, and when she saw her teaching briefly reflected on the surface of his mind, she thought that it was permanent, and did not realise her own disaster.
CHAPTER IX
“Il n’y a que le premier pas qui coute.”—French Proverb.
The Commissioner, in company with Mrs. Arthur White and the Colonial Treasurer, was booked for England in the next steamer that called at Key Island. The mail came in once a month, but occasionally an alteration of route would bring lesser boats to the great coaling-station as well as the cruisers, and Mr. Halton plainly said that he would go in a tin kettle of a tramp rather than wait longer than was necessary. His work being finished, the Commissioner found no reason for lingering. There was indeed a sting in Mr. Halton’s secret consciousness that made Key Island the more distasteful. His rides and walks and dilettante attendances on Mrs. Lewin were no more, for he was superseded by a stronger personality and writhed to face the failure of his life in a new form. Something of the feline nature that Diana Churton had bluffly discerned was uppermost in him also, and he waited for a mental pounce since he was no longer purring under a soft hand. A small man is infinitely more dangerous to irritate than his brother of a larger nature, because he deals with details, and the trivialities that go to make up tragedies are his province. Halton was waiting, though not consciously, to avenge himself for the fact that he had allowed the Administrator to displace him with Mrs. Lewin, and act cavalier in an uncouth method of his own; and there was no weak spot in their armour that could have escaped him. But Chum, having nothing to conceal, was not a remunerative study, and the Commissioner fretted in vain until the rains came down and blotted out Port Victoria for a space during which he lost even the contemplation of his annoyance, for when the Heavens open the social life is paralysed.
September brought back the sunshine, and the Gilderoys gave a picnic. Being the herald of renewed amusement, it had an air of festivity that most like entertainments lacked in their deadly monotony. Every one went, from Maitso out to Mitsinjovy, and Mrs. Lewin put on her last new muslin gown and looked at herself in the glass with mingled satisfaction and regret. She had ridden and danced and picnicked through the remainder of her big trunks in the last six months, for muslin is perishable and silk goes rotten in those latitudes; and Key Island knew the very pattern of her laces save this last white wonder with its unutterable frills and the grace of fancy sleeves. Leoline was a woman whose figure gave one the idea of one lovely line swept off harmoniously from throat to heel. She might wear muslins made on anybody’s pattern, but they became her own muslins by immediate association, and followed the fall of her lissome body as though they loved her.