Like many men, he had a curiously implicit faith in the principle of "letting things blow over." On occasion this may prove the wisest course to adopt, but very rarely in regard to a quarrel between a man and woman. Things don't "blow over" with a woman. They lie hidden in her heart, gradually permeating her thoughts until her whole attitude towards the man in question has hardened and the old footing between them become irrecoverable.
Nan felt that she had made her effort—and failed. Roger had missed the whole meaning of her attempt to bring about a mutual feeling of good comradeship, brushed it aside as of no importance. And instead, he had substituted his own imperious demands, rousing her, once the stress of the actual interview itself was past, to fierce and bitter revolt. No matter what happened in the future, she must get away now—snatch a brief respite from the daily strain of her life at the Hall.
But with an oddly persistent determination she put away from her all thought of breaking off her engagement. To most women similarly situated this would have been the obvious and simplest solution of the problem. But it seemed to Nan that her compact with Roger demanded a finer, more closely-knit interpretation of the word honour than would have been necessary in the case of an engagement entered into under different circumstances. The personal emergency which had driven her into giving Roger her promise weighed heavily upon her, and she felt that nothing less than his own consent would entitle her to break her pledge to him. When she gave it she had thought she was buying safety for herself and happiness for Penelope—cutting the tangled threads in which she found herself so inextricably involved—and now, as Lord St. John had reminded her, she could not honourably refuse to pay the price. She could not plead that she had mistaken her feelings towards him. She had pledged her word to him, open-eyed, and she was not free, as other women might be, to retract the promise she had given.
Added to this, Roger's sheer, dominant virility had imbued her with a fatalistic sense of her total inability to escape him. She had had a glimpse of the primitive man in him—of the man with the club. Even were she to violate her conscience sufficiently to end the engagement between them, she knew perfectly well that he would refuse to accept or acknowledge any such termination. Wherever she hid herself he would find out her hiding-place and come in search of her, and insist upon the fulfilment of her promise. And supposing that, in desperation, she married someone else, what was it he had said? "I swear to you if any man takes you from me I'll kill him first and you after!"
So, there was no escape for her. Roger would dog her footsteps round the world and back again sooner than let her go free of him. In a vaguely aloof and apathetic manner she felt as though it was her destiny to marry him. And no one can escape from destiny. Life had shown her many beautiful things—even that rarest thing of all, a beautiful and unselfish love. But it had shown them only to snatch them away again once she had learned to value them.
If only she had never met Peter, never known the secret wonder and glory, the swift, sudden strength, the exquisite mingling of passion and selflessness which go to the making of the highest in love, she might have been content to become Roger's wife and bear his children.
His big strength and virile, primitive possessiveness would appeal to many women, and Nan reflected that had she cared for him it would have been easy enough to tame him—with his tempestuous love, his savage temper, and his shamefaced "little boy" repentances! A woman who loved him in return might have led him by a thread of gossamer! It was the very fact that Nan did not love him, and that he knew it, which drove the brute in him uppermost in his dealings with her. He wanted to make her care, to bend her to his will, to force from her some response to his own over-mastering passion.
Wearily she faced the situation for the hundredth time and knew that in the long run she must abide by it. She had learned not to cry for the moon any longer. She wanted nothing now either in this world or the next except the love that was denied her.
Her thoughts went back to the day when she and Peter had first met and driven together through the twilit countryside to Abbencombe. She remembered the sudden sadness which had fallen upon him and how she had tried to cheer him by repeating the verses of a little song. It all seemed very long ago:
"But sometimes God on His great white Throne
Looks down from the Heaven above,
And lays in the hands that are empty
The tremulous Star of Love."