But in the very intensity and ardour of his desire he had learnt more surely than ever the strange contradictions that made her character. His accident had increased his own age and so emphasized her youth; she was ever so young, ever so impulsive; her seriousness was the seriousness of some very youthful spirit, who, guessing at the terrific difficulty of life, feels that the only way to surmount it is to close eyes blindly and leap over the whole of it at once. This was what he knew in his heart—although he would never have put it into words—as her adorable priggishness.
She had found her solution and everything must fit into it, but, since she had finally resolved it, nothing would fit into it at all—and there was the whole of Rachel's young history!
To Roddy one thing manifest was that a very tiny blunder might shatter the bond that was forming between them, and it was eloquent of a great deal that, whereas before in the Nita Raseley episode, it had been Rachel who feared the one false step, it was now Roddy. What it came to was that, in spite of everything, he was still unable to prophesy about her. She was still unrealized, almost untouched by him, that was partly why he loved her so.
Roddy's brain had been alive last night and ready to grapple with anything; to-day he felt stupid and confused. "We're in for a jolly good row," he thought, "far as I can see. There's no avoidin' it. Anyway, some clearin' up will come out of all of it."
So intent was he upon Rachel that he scarcely considered the Duchess. He had not very much imagination about people and made the English mistake of believing that everyone else saw life as he did. He had, for that very reason, never believed very seriously in the Duchess's passion for himself; he liked her indeed for her hardness and resented any appearance of the gentler motions—"She'll like tellin' us all what she thinks of it"—placed her in the afternoon's battle. He might have taken it all, had he chosen, as the most curious circumstance, that he should be "arranging things"—eloquent of the changed order of his life and of the new man that he was becoming.
He lay there all the morning, nervous and restless—Rachel had looked in for a moment and had told him that she was going to see Christopher, that she might not return to luncheon. He had fancied that, in those few moments, he had divined in her some especial thrill—"We're all going to be tuned up this afternoon."
If he found—and this was the question that he asked himself most urgently—that Rachel really had, in the competent interpretation of the term, "deserted" him for Breton, what would be his sensations? Being an Englishman he would, of course, horsewhip the fellow, divorce Rachel and lead a misanthropic but sensual existence for the rest of his days. But here the wild strain in Roddy counted. That is exactly what Roddy would not do. What was law for the man must be law also for the woman.
He had, on an earlier day, told her that were he to present her with a thousand infidelities, yet he would love her best and most truly, and therefore she must forgive him. Well, that should be true too for her.... Any episode with Breton seemed only an incident in the pursuit of her that Roddy had commenced on that day that he had married her.
And yet was not this readiness on his part to forgive her sprung from his conviction that she would have told him had she had so much to confess to him? Let her relations with Breton remain uncertain and shifting, then she might have found justification for her silence; let them once have found so definite a climax and she must have spoken—Roddy had indeed advanced in his knowledge both of her and himself since two years ago.
By the early afternoon he was in a pitiable state. Should he send notes to the Duchess and Breton telling them both that he was too unwell, too cross, too sleepy, too "anything" to see them? Should he retire to bed and leave Peters to make his excuses? Should he disappear and tell Rachel to deal with them? What a scene there'd be between the three of them!