Some weeks ago she had received a letter from him and that letter was now lying in the desk of her writing-table.
She had thought that her marriage would have snapped her interest in her cousin because it would have broken that hostility with her grandmother upon which her relationship with her cousin so largely depended. But now when she saw that marriage had only intensified her hostility to the Duchess, so therefore it had intensified her perception of Breton. His letter had aroused in her, just as contact with him aroused in her, everything in her that now, for her own peace of mind, she should keep at bay. His letter had amounted to this:
"You are a rebel as I am a rebel. We have said very little, but you have recognized in me the things that I have recognized in you. You have escaped through marriage, but for me there is no escape, and if you would, for the sake of those things that we have in common, keep me from going utterly under, then you must help me—as only you can."
He did not say this nor anything at all like this. He only, very quietly, congratulated her on her marriage, hoped that she would be very happy, said that London was a little desolate and difficult, hoped that she would not think more harshly of him than she could help, and, at the very end, told her that meeting her made him feel that he was not entirely abandoned by everybody.
It was the letter of a weak man and she knew it, but it was the letter of a man who was weak exactly in the places where she also failed. And this, more than anything else, moved her.
They two alone, it seemed, were struggling to keep their feet in a world that did not need them. It had been, through these months, Rachel's sharpest unhappiness, the consciousness that Roddy and indeed everything at Seddon Court could get on so very well without her.
Nobody in London needed her—nobody here needed her. If you accepted the Beaminster doctrine, then no wife would demand more from a husband than Roddy gave Rachel—but was this not simply another proof that Rachel had made a Beaminster marriage?
Rachel had been flung straight from the schoolroom into marriage and the sensitive agonizing cry of a child to be loved by somebody—the cry that had always been so urgent in her—was urgent still.
It was exactly this comfortable sense of being a help that Roddy had not given her. Now this letter gave it to her.
But if this letter was an appeal, just as the mongrel Jacob, now at her feet, was an appeal, on the part of someone wounded and outcast, to her pity, so also was it an invitation to rebellion.