“For getting us down safely—all three,” Crespin corrected her, with a significant emphasis on the last two words.
Lucilla Crespin took the gauntlet up then. “It was Dr. Traherne’s nerve that did that,” she told him, looking him full in the face. He had been watching her narrowly, hungrily too, all the time, but she had not given him a glance till now. “If he hadn’t kept his head—”
“We should have crashed. I wish to God we had. One or other of us would probably have broken his neck; and, if Providence had played up, it might have been the right one.”
His wife swung round to him at that, as they sat, “What do you mean?” she demanded.
“It might have been me,” he told her in a harsh, smoldering voice. “Then you’d have thanked God right enough!”
The woman caught the insinuation and held it squarely. But the pain and the prayer she did not hear—or, if she heard, she scorned to heed. There is no other mercilessness so hard and cold as that of one ultra type of good woman. Lucilla Crespin was of that type—now. Her days of forgiveness and bending had passed—at least for him. Ancestry had so predisposed her, and the last bad years had frozen it in. Should her boy live to sin as his father had sinned, probably the flood-gates of understanding and pity would open again, and grief and womanliness sweeten her soul again—but never again for the man beside her. Had her heart stirred to him now, far as he’d gone, she might have saved and remanned him. But her heart was dead to him, as hard and unresponsive as the flint on which they sat.
That they quarreled here—for it was quarrel bitter and violent, for all the yearning in him, for all her high-bred self-control—that they could quarrel here, after such an adventure and mishap as they had just shared, in the thick of such unfathomed peril as they were sharing, showed what the breach between them meant to them both—despair and soul-damnation to the man, love and comradeship quite dead to the woman. It was hopeless—the life-split and abyss, or else the hours they’d just come through, the peril they’d escaped, the less-known, and for that the more unnerving peril that menaced them now as they sat side by side on the stone, must have reunited and reconciled them.
Lucilla Crespin faced her husband squarely, more in unveiled contempt than in courage or in injured pride. “Why,” she complained impatiently, “will you talk like this, Antony? If I hadn’t sent Dr. Traherne away just now, you’d have been saying these things in his hearing.”
“Well, why not?” Crespin retorted hotly. “Don’t tell me he doesn’t know all about the ‘state of our relations,’ as they say in the divorce court.”
“If he does, it’s not from me,” the wife said coldly, then added sourly: “No doubt he knows what the whole station knows.”