She would have given all the exquisite happiness of the last two years—happiness the greater and the more intense because it was so largely bred of her imagination—to blot out the week she and Lingard had spent together in London. It was during those days she had learnt to love him in the simple human way which now made the thought of parting agony.
Unwittingly Lingard had done her a terrible mischief during those enchanted days. She felt as if he had stolen her from herself, rifling all the hidden chambers of her heart. She had given everything in exchange for what she had believed to be the great, the sacred, treasure of his love. And now he was scattering the treasure which she had thought hers at the feet of another woman who, she believed, had not sought it and to whom it was dross.
She had heard of such enthralments—a blunderer had so tried to excuse, to explain to her, her brother Jack Oglander's crime. Yes, Jack had been mad about that woman he had killed; that had been the word used—mad.
Mad? Jane Oglander, walking to the Small Farm, repeated the word—yes, Lingard had been made mad by Athena in much the same way as Jack had been made mad. When Lingard had implored her to marry him at once, during that hour on The Hanger, he had really been beseeching her to help him to escape. She saw that now—and perhaps, had she loved him less, she would have yielded.
But there are moments when love, though the most dissembling of the passions, cannot lie. Jane Oglander, when in her lover's arms, could not accept as gold the baser metal he, perhaps unknowingly, pressed upon her.
One thing remained to her. Nothing could take away from her the two years which had gone before. She had not yet destroyed, she did not feel that she need be called upon to destroy—until Lingard married some other woman—the letters he had written to her in those two years. She told herself that they had not been love letters, although to her simple heart they had seemed strangely like it.
Any day during the past two years she might have opened a paper containing the news of Lingard's death. But if that of which she had had so sick a dread had happened, she would have had something dear, something intimately secret and sacred, to bear about with her, locked in the inner shrine of her heart, for the rest of her life.
The present and the immediate future must be considered, and, as she had now told Athena of her decision, they must be considered to-day.
She remembered the many broken engagements of which she had heard—Jane wondered if those other women had suffered as she was suffering now.
The one thing she felt she could not do would be to go back to that little house in London, which to her would ever be filled with Hew Lingard—not Lingard as he was now, gloomy, preoccupied, avoiding her presence and yet painfully eager to obey her slightest wish—but Lingard the happy, the masterful lover who yet had been so tender, so patient with her.