(Roger mutters: "I've five hundred a year and...")
Sibyl: "Yes, but what could we do on that? Poor papa could afford to give me nothing more than my trousseau.... Even on seven hundred a year, if you get a Consulate, we couldn't manage two households, and I'm perfectly certain I couldn't stand the African climate long, and I should have to come home. I don't like roughing it, I should dislike hot countries; and I hate black people.... No, Roger ... dear ... be sensible... If you want to carve out a great career in Africa or India you don't want to be hampered with a wife for several years to come; and then ... I'll—I'll find some really nice girl to marry you, somebody with a little money. And Silchester might help you enormously. They'll probably take him into the new Government—aren't you glad that horrid old Gladstone's gone?—He'll be at the Colonial Office or somewhere like that and I know he'd do anything I asked him, once we were married. If you still want to go back to Africa he shall get you made a Consul or a Governor or whatever it is you want...." But Roger was not going to listen to anything so cold-blooded, even though all the time an undercurrent of thought was glancing at the advantages that might accrue from Sibyl's mariage de convenance. He'd be hanged if he'd take anything from Lord Silchester.... He was entitled to some such appointment, anyway, after all he had done. But there, he had lost all interest in life and if he went to the bad, Sibyl would be to blame. All his interest in an African career had been bound up with Sibyl's sharing it. With her at his side he felt equal to anything. He would conquer all Equatorial Africa, strike at the Mahdi from the south, find Emin Pasha, lay all Equatoria at the feet of Queen Victoria, and in no time Sibyl would be Lady Brentham——
"Yes," interjected Sibyl, "and lose my complexion and be old before my time, riding after you through the jungle, or living stupidly like a grass widow at home...."
Yet as he jerked out his tirade rather theatrically she noted him with an approving eye. His anger and extravagance brought out a certain boyishness and, made him, with the freedom of the jungle about him, still additionally attractive physically.... He certainly was good-looking and in the prime of manhood ... she sighed ... the remembrance of Lord Silchester's pale, somewhat flabby face, his slightly pedantic manner, his carefulness about his health.... He rode—yes—they had already had decorous rides together, but she imagined before the ride his cob had had some of the freshness taken out of him by the groom....
Sibyl tried by broken phrases, and half-uttered hints, to convey the idea that Lord Silchester being nearly sixty—at any rate close on fifty-six—and not of robust health, might not live for ever; though really she wouldn't mind if she died first, men were so perfectly hateful, and so was your family—if you were a woman. You were expected to do all you could for your family, and abused into the bargain by others who held you bound by foolish promises made when you were a mere girl without any knowledge of the world. Still, there was a possibility—just a possibility—for weren't we all mortal?—that she might find herself a widow, a lonely widow some day. Roger by then would have made a great career, become a sort of Sir Samuel Baker; he'd have discovered and named lakes after royalty; then they might meet again; and who could say? Certainly, if it came to love, she wouldn't deny she had never felt quite the same towards any one as she had towards Roger....
But Roger checked such philosophizings rudely, saying they were positively indecent: at which she expressed herself as very angry. Then leading out the horses in eye-flashing silence, Roger helped her to mount and swung himself into the saddle. He escorted her silently to Aldermaston main street, raised his hat, and rode off up the Mortimer road with a set face and angry eyes on the way back to Basingstoke.
He paused however at Tadley to give his father's cob—borrowed for the day—a feed and a rest. His ride lay through one of the loveliest parts of England in those days, before "Dora" had commandeered timber from the woods—to find afterwards she did not want it—before farmers had changed tiles or thatch on barns to corrugated iron, and chars-à-bancs, motor cycles and side-cars with golden-haired flappers, school treats and bean feasts had made the country-side noisy, dangerous and paper-strewn.
Insensibly his mood softened as he rode. It was more than four years since he had been home. Though he had spent all of his youth in this country, save for school and military college, his eyes seemed never before to have taken in the charm of English landscapes. Here was England at its best in the early part of July: poppies blazing in the green corn and whitish green oats, hay still lingering—grey on green—in the fields, ox-eyed daisies fully out, wild roses still in bloom in the hedge-rows, blue crane's bill, blue vetch, and purple-blue campanulas in the copse borders. The plump and placid cows, with swinging udders, so different from the gaunt African cattle with a scarcely visible milk-supply, the splendid cart-horses, the sheep—neat and tidy after shearing—the cock pheasants running across the sun-and-shadow-flecked roads, the cawing rooks, and the cooing woodpigeons, the geese and donkeys on the commons. Here and there, off the main road, park gates of finely wrought iron with a trim geranium-decked lodge and a vista of some charming avenue towards an invisible great house; side turnings, half-overgrown with turf, leading to villages quaintly entitled. Some of the details his eye and ear and nose took in—such as the braying of barrel organs on the fringe of an unseen fair, on a rather burnt and blackened gipsy-befouled common; or the smell of pig-sties in a hamlet, or placards in big print pasted round an ancient stump or on an old oak paling—it was irrational to call beautiful. But together they made up England at its best, with old churches packed with the history of England, the little towns so prosperous, the straggling villages, beautiful if insanitary, the signposts with their agreeable Anglo-Saxon and Norman names, so pleasing to the eye after years of untracked wilderness; the postman trudging his round in red-and-black, the gamekeeper in velveteen, the hearty labourers in corduroy, blue-shirted, bare-armed and hairy chested. All this was England. "Was there a jollier country in the world?" (There was not, in 1886.)
And as to Sibyl.... How differently he saw her now, after four years! As pretty as paint, though rather overheated after a short ride; but how artificial! What a delusion to suppose such a woman would have cared for a rough life in Africa. Why she even spoke slightingly of India, a country of romance far exceeding Africa. Indeed, he had only turned to Africa and African problems because all the great careers to be made in India were seemingly over.... There was nothing to be done in India without powerful backing....
Backing? It was perhaps silly to have flouted the suggestion of Lord Silchester's influence.... It was difficult unless you were related to permanent officials or members of Parliament to get a Consular commission in East Africa. Why not gradually—gradually of course—it wouldn't do to forgive her too quickly—become reconciled to Sibyl's marriage and pursue instead his second desire, a great African career?...