The gale of the night was blowing itself out, but the wind still sang against the spars that swung to and fro through a wider arc of the sky than most of the guests on board found compatible with an appearance at breakfast.
Woolly flocks of white cloud came up from the Atlantic, raced through the clear blue overhead, and huddled down together behind the land.
It was a day boisterous with the joy of life, but Caragh's face showed no appreciation of its quality. His chair slid forward and back with the rolling deck, but his eyes were fixed gloomily upon the green hills, and he paid no heed to his own movement.
His sombre absorption gave him the appearance of being affected by the floundering seas; but he never suffered from sea-sickness and was grateful to the gale for having cleared the deck of the ship's jovial company.
He wished to be by himself, and yet it was himself that he was most anxious to evade; it was from self-sickness that he was suffering.
He had spoken the truth in telling Laura Marton that the faith in Lettice Nevern's eyes was his one hope of deliverance. He believed, if he could respond to that, even with the honest dishonesty which alone was possible—if he could, as he told her, "make a good girl's dreams come true"—that he might in time build up for himself an artificial constancy, and so regain his self-esteem.
That hope seemed not too high, face to face with the woman who was doing her best to shatter it. It sustained him while he was fighting her fascination—successfully, as he told himself; while he was dragging his weakness in a wounded sort of triumph, out of her reach; while he was hurrying his things on board the day after.
But there, unluckily, his victory ended. Seated apathetically in a deck-chair on the Candia, watching the long coast slip by from Thanet to the Lizard, the leaden turmoil of the Channel, and then the clouded purples of the Kerry Hills, he learnt how superficial was his advantage, how deeply he was in bondage.
He had, indeed, got out from England, but he had brought so little of himself away that it seemed an impertinence to offer it to any woman in marriage. His heart—or at least what in such affairs is called the heart—and all those cravings of the body which go with the heart were, and would remain, in Laura Marten's keeping.
She was right in every boast of her dominion over him. She was the woman for whom he had not waited, of whom long ago he had despaired. The woman who could have satisfied him body and soul, absorbing his desires, inspiring his dreams.