She returned to her room, the only place unassociated with him. But although it was a refuge in a sense, she found little comfort in it, for the very atmosphere was thick with her long hours of misery. She sat down and made a deliberate attempt to banish her depression, that manifest of Nature’s resentment at even the temporary balking of her desires.
“The ancient instinct!” she thought bitterly. “We are all the same fools when it comes to a man—the man—when the race is trying to struggle on through its victims.” She looked back upon the past eight years as upon a period of transcendent happiness. More than ever she was convinced that the only unmitigated happiness lay in self-completion, in independence of the sex in man. Love was a splendid disease induced by Nature to further her one end; accompanied by moments of hallucination called happiness, but which in the last analysis were but the prelude to a lifetime of every variety of sorrow and disillusion. On the other hand, the women that steered safely clear of this smiling island with a thousand jagged teeth beneath the rippling waters, and elected to stand alone, were free to accept the other great gifts of life, to attain to a form of serenity and content, beside which love and its delusions were the earthly hell. In the last four years she had never cast a thought to love, the future had loomed as perfect as the present. And she had weakly slid down into chaos!
The immortal women! Oh, lord! Oh, lord!
She reviewed her life from the time when, the wife of an abhorred husband, she had begun, unconsciously at first, to build up that strength, which, when the crucial tests came, enabled her to control, in a measure, the present, to exult in the knowledge that she had proved herself stronger than life; instead of losing her mind, or becoming the plaything of men. She had even dismissed Nigel Herbert when he came with freedom and something like happiness in his hand; proud of her strength to work out her destiny unaided.
Strength! Her mind flew from this vision of past solidarity to her years at the feet of the wise men of Benares. It was not pleasant to dwell upon the compliments of Hadji Sadrä, but she recalled his initiations and suggestions, and those of Swani Dambaba; they had given her a power over herself and others seldom possessed by Occidentals. But she could hardly formulate them; they were enveloped in a haze, as elusive and remote as dreams. Had she been but cunningly equipped to play her part in the great battle; and, the part played, was she perchance set free to follow the commoner destiny of woman? There was some satisfaction in the thought, but her ego felt slapped in the face. She had fancied her destiny mightily, and this anticlimax was no part of the program of the immortal women. Still, why not? Her inner vision, sharpened though it might have been by her masters, could not pierce the future, nor her judgment, while captive in the gray matter of the mortal brain, presume to determine exactly what destinies those immortal women had mapped out for themselves on earth. For all she knew Tay might have been composed to save his country, and hers the glorious part to help him.
But at this point she sat down on the floor once more and finished the packing of her trunk. None knew better than she the distinguished powers of the human mind for self-deception. With her own personal gift for subtle reasoning, to say nothing of her imagination, she could persuade herself in another fifteen minutes that it was her duty to take the first steamer for New York and await Tay in the facile state of Nevada. She should reason no more, but be guided by events. Meanwhile let love devour her, burn her up, torment her with fears, exalt her with visions of the perfect union. But not in Partenkirchen. She should amuse herself in Berlin until Tay’s final telegram set her free to go to Nevis. “The dog to its kennel,” she thought grimly. “That’s the place for me. I’ll find my balance there if anywhere.”
XVI
On the evening of Julia’s departure for Nevis, Ishbel entered her husband’s study and perched herself on the arm of his chair.
“Eric,” she said, “when you have made a promise you can’t break, is it wrong to get round it, if it is for the good of some one you are very fond of?”
“What are you driving at? Nothing more interesting than the workings of the female conscience under fire.”