"You needn't trouble to see me to my hotel. I'll go back in the taxi."
It was a night of very troubled thought for all three. To Rivière, with his complex, many-layered nature, especially so. The one inevitable, clean-cut solution to all this tangle of circumstance seemed farther off than ever.
If Rivière had been a man of Larssen's temperament, difficulties would have been smoothed away like hills under the drive of a high-powered car. Lars Larssen would have said to himself: "Which woman do I want?" and having settled that point, would have jammed on the levers and shot his car straight forward without the slightest regard for any other vehicle or pedestrian on his road. Were any obstacle in his path, so much the worse for the obstacle.
If Larssen under similar circumstances had wanted Elaine he would have taken her then and there and left Olive to do whatever she pleased. If he had wanted Olive, he would have thrown Elaine in the discard without a moment's remorse. Decisions are easy for such a man as Larssen, because the burden of scruples has been pitched aside.
Rivière, on the other hand, was cursed with scruples—as Olive had phrased it, "a pretty mixed set of scruples." He felt he had to do the square thing by his wife, by Elaine, and by the public who were being called upon to invest their savings under the guarantee of his name. He had to smash the shipowner's scheme, and he had to get back to his own scientific work in peace and quietude.
For Olive, as for Larssen, decisions were far simpler. Her objective was her own gratification; the only point in doubt was the most prudent way to attain it. Her present dominant wish was to revenge herself on Elaine, and to do that she was ready to make any sacrifice of other desires. Even her infatuation for Larssen paled against the white-hot light of this new passion.
Elaine, exhausted by the tension of her interview with Olive, slept that night in a succession of heavy-dreamed dozes punctuated by violent starts of waking, like a train creeping into a London terminus through an irregular detonation of fog-signals. Why had Rivière sent no answer to her message? What had Olive said to him? Had she done the best possible thing to free Rivière? That was the never-ceasing anxiety. In her great love for him, the one thing she most desired was to give.
CHAPTER XXIX
THE PARTING
At the breakfast-table the next morning, Rivière found a letter with an official seal awaiting him. It was a call to Nîmes to give evidence in the coming trial of the peasant Crau. He was asked to be there on a date a few days later.