“Besides,” Crespin went on, torturing himself, which is the success that often crowns our efforts to torture others, “there’s no hurry. If you only have patience for a year or two, I’ll do the right thing for once, and drink myself to death.”
A year or two more of his cups! That would be hard and long to bear. Again and again she had felt that she had reached her tether’s taut-pulled length—and then again and again she had tried once more. Why was Traherne so long? She had asked him to look at the crashed aeroplane, not to build a new one. Or, was it possible, the wreck was less hopeless than he’d thought, and already he was seeing a way to patch and repair? When would some word or move be made from the great sullen castle-place, with its gray turrets and scalloped arches turning to silver and pink now as the Asian sun slipped down the sapphire sky? A year or two more! And the children, still babies of course, were growing so. What might not Ronny notice and understand in another two years? Two years more! She never had measured before in her mind the probable stretch of the bad time still before her—and only for one instant did the thought come to her now—and Antony himself had put it there. His death was the one way out she never had thought of. And she would not think of it now. And even she spoke a little more kindly than she had done for some time—at least when they had been alone—and she turned and looked at him with almost a friendly look in her eyes, as she said:
“You have only to keep yourself a little in hand to live to what they call ‘a good old age.’”
The friendliness in her eyes maddened him anew—it was not her friendship he wanted—but even so he was grateful for it, it was so much better than nothing to go on with—and he pressed his hurt and anger out of sight, and, leaning away from her the better to watch her face, said slowly:
“’Pon my soul, I’ve a mind to try to, though goodness knows, my life is not worth living,” for he had caught the distraction on her face; she was listening, but not most to him. “I was a fool to come on this crazy expedition——”
“Why, it was yourself that jumped at Dr. Traherne’s proposal,” his wife reminded him.
“I thought we’d get to the kiddies a week earlier. They’d be glad to see me, poor little things. They don’t despise their daddy.”
Something of what he felt, something of what he still was—in spite of whatever he’d done—reached Antony Crespin’s wife then. He had always loved his children—there was no doubt of that. It had not served him for strength enough, even as his love of her had not, but he always had loved them, invariably he had been tender to them. And Lucilla remembered it now.
“It shan’t be my fault, Antony,” she told him gently, “if they ever do.” And then she spoilt it, soured the grace she had shown, by adding with a weary sigh, “But you don’t make it easy to keep up appearances.” O curse of woman’s tongue!
Antony Crespin rose to his feet, and stood before her. He saw the natives clustered just over there, screening the projecting wing of the broken aeroplane; he saw Yazok watching, sentineling too, perhaps; he saw the great puissant fortified castle, he recalled where they were, he knew their peril—but for all that, for all that or more, he gave not one damn. . . . He stood there before her, alone in the world with his wife, all his imperfections on his back, and put up his plea.