He was there to take her away from that, to drive it all into darkness, to reassure her against its return, and marriage with him would mean release, security, best of all freedom from her grandmother who knew, so well, that life in her and loved to play with that knowledge. Her colour rose and her eyes shone as she thought of what this so early escape from the Portland Place house would mean to her. Already, in her first season, to be free of it all—to be free of humbug and deception—Oh! for that would she not surrender everything in the world?
Roddy, as she pictured him, with his clean life, his love of nature, his kindliness, seemed, just then, the safest refuge that would ever be offered to her.
And at that, without reason, she saw before her her cousin Francis Breton. Several times she had met him since that first occasion at Lizzie Rand's. Once again at Lizzie's and twice in Regent's Park when she had been walking with May.
Yes—that was all. Thinking of it now the meetings appeared to her almost infinite. Between each actual encounter intimacy seemed to leap in its progress, and although, on at least two of them, he had only walked with her for the shortest period, yet, always with them, she was conscious of the number of things that, between them, did not need to be said—knowledge that they shared.
In all this there was, with her, a confusion of motives and sensations that, at present, refused to be disentangled. For one thing there was, in all of this, a furtiveness, a secrecy, that she loathed. Against that was the persuasion that it would be the finest thing in the world for her to bring him back into the Beaminster fold, not, of course, that he should remain there (he was far too strong and adventurous for that), but that, accepted there, he could use it as a springing-off board for success and fortune. Let her once, as the situation now was, say a word to Uncle John or the others, and that of course was the end....
She knew, quite definitely, that now she wished that she had never met him.
He had been, during these weeks, the only influence that had drawn that other Rachel to the light. It was always that other Rachel that met him—someone alarming, rebellious, conscious of unhappiness, and apprehensive, above everything, that in some hidden manner she was being untrue to her real self.
At such moments it was as though she had blinded some force within her, muffled it, stifled it, because her way through the world was easier with it so muffled, so stifled.
At some future time, what if there should leap out upon her that muffled figure, bursting its bonds, refusing any longer to be silenced, proclaiming the world no easy, comfortable place, but a battle, a fierce, unresting war?
When she thought of Breton it was as though she knew herself for a coward, as though he had threatened to expose her for one, and as though (and this was the worst of all) something in her was eager that he should—