The Arbiter: A Novel

by Lady Florence Eveleen Eleanore Olliffe Bell

"I need not say that I should not." There was another silence.

"Should you like it very, very much?" she said.

"Like what?" said Rendel, coming back with an effort.

"Going to Africa."

There had been a moment when Rendel had told Lady Gore how glad he was that Rachel had no ambitions, as producing the ideal character. No doubt that lack has its advantages—but the world we live in is not, alas, exclusively a world of ideals.

"Yes, I should like it," he replied quietly. "If you went too, that is—I should not like it without you."

"Oh, Frank, it is a pity," she said, looking up at him wistfully. But there was evidently not in her mind the shadow of a possibility that the question could be decided other than in one way.

"Come, it is getting late," Rendel said. And they left the room with the outward air of having postponed the decision till the morning. But the decision was not postponed; that Rachel took for granted, and Rendel had made up his mind. This was, after all, not a new sacrifice he was called upon to make: it was part of the same, of that sacrifice which he had recognised that he was willing to make in order to marry Rachel, and which was so much less than that other great and impossible sacrifice of giving her up.

He came down early the next morning and wrote to Lord Belmont, meaning when Rachel came down to breakfast to show her the letter, in which he had most gratefully but quite decisively declined the honour that had been done him. He read the letter over feeling as if he were in a dream, and almost smiled to himself at the incredible thought that here was the first big opportunity of his life and that he was calmly putting it away from him. Perhaps when he came to talk it over with Rachel again she might see it differently. Might she? No. He knew in his heart that she would not. It was probable that Rendel's ambition, his determined purpose, would always be hampered by his old-fashioned, almost quixotic ideas of loyalty, his conception of the seemliness, the dignity of the relations between husband and wife. In a matter that he felt was a question of right or wrong he would probably without hesitation have used his authority and decided inflexibly that such and such a course was the one to pursue; but here he felt it was impossible. It would not be consistent with his dignity to use his authority to insist upon a course which, though it might be to his own advantage, was undeniably an infringement of the tacit compact that he had accepted when he married. With the letter in his hand he went slowly out of the study. Rachel was coming swiftly down the stairs into the hall, dressed for walking, looking perturbed and anxious.