Athena realised that Lingard now regarded his violent, unreasoning attraction to herself as a thing of which to be mortally ashamed. But she was convinced that, once his engagement to Jane Oglander was at an end, he would "let himself go," especially if he was convinced that she, Athena, had been blameless.
And her instinct served her truly. Lingard, in spite of, or perhaps because of, the long day spent away from Rede Place, was in no mood for a renewal of the sentimental dalliance to which Athena had accustomed him.
What had happened—the quick exchange of words, his echo of Mrs. Maule's longing for freedom from a tie which she had led him to believe had ever lacked reality, had brought him, and roughly, to his bearings.
The evening which had followed, spent in company with the two women—the woman to whom he owed allegiance, and whom he had held but a few hours before in his arms, and that other woman who had provoked the unreal words of which he was now ashamed, had contained some of the most odious moments of his life.
He had hailed with intense relief the engagement which took him away for a whole day; and on his return he had gone straight to the sitting-room set apart for his use, his supposed work, and where, after the first two days of his stay under Richard Maule's roof, he had spent so little of his time.
The rather elaborate apparatus connected with the book he was engaged in writing, filled him with contempt for himself. There were the maps, the books, the reports of his staff, his own rough notes, and—in a locked despatch-box—the long diary-letters he had written to Jane Oglander during the course of the Expedition.
The man who is all man, whose nature lacks, that is, any admixture of femininity, is almost always without the dangerous gift of self-analysis. Such a man was Hew Lingard.
All through his life he had always known exactly what he wanted, and when denied he had suffered as suffers a child, with a dumb and hopeless anger. It was this want of knowledge of himself that had ever made him ready to embark blindly in those perilous adventures of the soul in which the body plays so great a sub-conscious part.
Now, for the first time in his life, Lingard did not know what he wanted, and the state in which he found himself induced a terrible and humiliating disquietude.
His was the miserable state of mind of a man who finds himself on the point of becoming unfaithful to a wife who is still loved. Jane Oglander, even now, seemed in a most intimate sense part of himself. When he had seen her the first time—it had been in summer, in a garden—he had experienced the strange sensation that he had at last found the woman for whom he had been always seeking, and whom he had always known to be somewhere waiting, could he but find her.