"Well, naturally—I was thinking of the Regiment——"
"Damn the Regiment!" Desmond flashed out, and turning on his heel strode off toward a wooded headland, whose red rocks took an almost unearthly glow from the setting sun.
For several seconds Paul looked after him, scarcely able to believe his ears. If Theo had arrived at damning the Regiment, Frank's fear might not prove to be chimerical after all; and yet the flash of temper, the renewed energy of speech and movement were symptoms of the best.
Paul sat down on the bench, folded his arms, and proceeded to consider, in practical fashion, how they could secure the desired extension of leave. Theo might dub himself coward if he would. Paul knew better. He had long ago guessed that stronger forces were at work in his friend than mere sorrow for the loss of a wife, however dear—and he had guessed right. It was Desmond's sensitive conscience that had been his arch tormentor throughout those months of silence and strangeness that had brought him near to madness and Paul near to despair.
Tragedy on tragedy—loss of the Boy, dread of blindness, the shock of his own discovery of Evelyn's defection, and the awful fashion of her death—had so unsteadied and overwrought his strong brain that, even now, he could neither see nor think clearly in respect of those most terrible weeks of his life. Obsessed by an exaggerated sense of his own disloyalty to the wife who should never have been transplanted to such stony soil, he saw himself virtually her murderer, in the eyes of that God who was, for him, no vague abstraction but the most commanding reality of his consciousness.
Day after day, week after week, he had lived over and over again the events of that fateful month, from the moment of his return, to the last bewildering, unforgettable scene with his wife. Always he discovered fresh excuses for her. Always he lashed himself unsparingly for his own failings;—the initial folly of bringing her to the Frontier, his promise to Honor that had delayed his determination to exchange, and more than all, that final straight speaking—wrung from him by pain and shame—that had made fear of him outweigh even her childish terror of the dark. In the hidden depth of his heart he had been untrue to her, and his passionate attempt at reparation had come too late. There had even been fevered moments when he told himself that he, Theo Desmond, not the crazy fanatic in quest of sainthood—should by rights have been hanged and burned on the day of her death.
The whole tragical tangle, blurred and distorted by incessant repetition, had come at last to seem almost a separate entity; a horror, outside his own control, that now shrank to a pin-point and now loomed gigantic, oppressive, till all true sense of proportion was lost. The silence that he could not force himself to break, infallibly made matters worse. And now came Honor, re-awakening the great love he had wrestled with and trampled on to very small purpose; a love beside which his chivalrous tenderness for Evelyn showed like the flame of a candle in the blaze of noon.
Her sudden return, the perturbing sense of her nearness, had for the first time wrenched him away from the obsession of the past. But even now he dared not frankly face the future; dared not let his mind dwell on the colourless emptiness of life without her. Neither could he, as yet, face the only alternative—to tell her, of all women, that he had loved her before his wife's death. Besides, there was Paul, who obviously cared, in his own repressed fashion, and who must not be baulked of his chance.