“Why?”
“I wanted to earn his respect; show that I could stand by myself, be free of him and the world and everybody—except Nature. I’m a Pagan.”
“But, my dear child,—no, don’t cry!—Pagans don’t run boarding-houses.”
“It’s a private hotel.”
“Well, even private hotels. Not usually.”
But Aureole felt she had been censured sufficiently by this young man, who had taken such a vivid interest in her wayward personality, when, in London, he had urged her to Norfolk, by a vision of her swaying form: ‘always among reeds’.... And then again had urged her away from Norfolk by much adroit talk on the subject of Ibsen, and pampered souls, and earthquakes. So that from him she had hoped for more sympathetic understanding of her movements and motives:
“I wish you had let us alone. People shouldn’t interfere between a husband and wife. Oliver and I were in perfect harmony before you meddled and sent him to America. And, anyway, what I do now is no business of yours. I’m surrounded by adventurers and harpies, and losing hundreds of pounds a week, if you want to know. And when Oliver arrives, you can tell him of my ruin and misery, and how you gibed at it all; you, whom he thought a staunch and faithful friend!” After which passionate denunciation, which scorched the tears in her eyes to brown points of flame, she walked swiftly away from him, in the direction of the adventurers and harpies awaiting her upon the jetty.
“I believe she’s right,” murmured Stuart. Perhaps he ought not to have tampered with matrimony as he had done. But he was so truly convinced that every married couple ought to be well stirred up at least once a year, to prevent them from setting into a mould. And what is the good of conscientious convictions unless you conscientiously induce others to act up to them?
And anyway, he was hardly to be blamed if Nigger so absurdly misread a cryptic allusion to the land of freedom!
It was the after-dinner hour at the Boscombe Hotel; and Sebastian Levi, pacing up and down the thickly carpeted lounge, listening to the tinkle and silken swish all about him, watching the waiters move to and fro with the coffee-services, threading a deft way between the visitors in evening-dress, felt impatiently that this was all an unreal stage set, as: ‘Curtain rises on hotel lounge, luxuriously furnished; guests grouped about, with natural appearance of animated talk.’ Felt that the only realities lay with a solitary figure, black and wiry against the pale shadow-land of his chosen retreat; Stuart Heron, probably at that moment pacing the ghostly wind-blown shores of the Haven, even as he, Sebastian, now paced in the hot artificial glare of his prison-house—so he termed it!—and wished, in a tumult of divine discontent, that he were now beside Stuart, re-living in talk one of their strenuous battling hours at sea, when every nerve was strained taut to catch the racing tide into harbour.