He paused. The lady’s square face slowly assumed an expression of dignified satisfaction.
“So long as those poor children are rescued from those women,” said Lady Charlotte, “my task is done. I do not grudge any exertion, any sacrifice I have made, so long as that end is secured. I do not look for thanks. Much less repayment. Perhaps some day these children may come to understand—”
Unwin made a sound like the responses in church.
“I would go through it all again,” said Lady Charlotte—“willingly.... Now that my nephew has returned I have no more anxiety.” She made an elegant early-Georgian movement with the smelling-salts. “I am completely justified. I have been slighted, tricked, threatened, insulted, made ill ... but I am justified.”
She resorted again to the salts.
CHAPTER THE NINTH
OSWALD TAKES CONTROL
§ 1
While Mr. Sycamore was regaling himself with the discomfiture of Lady Charlotte, Oswald Sydenham was already walking about the West End of London.
He had come upon a fresh crisis in his life. He was doing his best to accept some thoroughly disagreeable limitations. His London specialist had but confirmed his own conviction. It was no longer possible for him to continue in Africa. He had reached the maximum of blackwater fever permitted to normal men. The next bout—if there was a next bout—would kill him. In addition to this very valid reason for a return, certain small fragments of that Egyptian shell long dormant in his arm had awakened to mischief, and had to be removed under the more favourable conditions to be found in England. He had come back therefore to a land where he had now no close friends and no special occupations, and once more he had to begin life afresh.
He had returned with extreme reluctance. He could not see anything ahead of him in England that gripped his imagination at all. He was strongly tempted to have his arm patched up, and return to Africa for a last spell of work and a last conclusive dose of the fever germ. But in England he might be of use for a longer period, and a kind of godless conscience in him insisted that there must be no deliberate waste in his disposal of his life.