Harris unhitched his horse and mounted, but not sooner than McKeith was he in the saddle. Then McKeith looked at last towards the veranda where Bridget stood, white, defiant, with Maule at the French window of the dining-room just behind her.
McKeith took off his hat, made her a sweeping bow, which might have included his guest, turned his horse's head and rode in the direction of the sliprails, Harris and the sulky Organiser slightly at his rear.
Bridget never forgot that impression of him—the dogged slouch of his broad shoulders—the grim set of his head, the square, unyielding look of his figure, as he sat his horse with the easy poise of a bushman who is one with the animal under him—in this case, a powerfully made, nasty tempered roan, one of Colin's best saddle-horses—which seemed as dogged tempered as its master.
Maule showed tact in tacitly assuming the unexpected necessity for McKeith's abrupt departure—also that he had already bidden good-bye to his wife.
Lady Bridget made no comment upon her husband's scant courtesy to his guest when she rejoined Maule after an hour or two spent in housewifely business. They strolled about the garden, smoked cigarettes in the veranda, she played and sang to him, and he brought out his cornet, which he had carried in his valise, being something of a performer on that instrument.
A demon of reckless gaiety seemed to have entered into Lady Bridget. Watching McKeith disappear behind the gum trees, she had said to herself:—'I can be determined, too. I have as strong a will as he has. He did not choose to say one regretful word. He was too stubborn to own himself in the wrong. He left me in what—if he believed his suspicion to be true—must be a dangerous position for a woman—only it shall not be dangerous to ME. I know exactly how far I am going—exactly the amount of excitement I shall get out of it all. Neither Willoughby nor he deserve an iota of consideration. I shall amuse myself. So! No more.... But he can't know that. He has never thought about ME. He has thought of nothing but his own cross-grained pride and selfish egoism. No man of ordinary breeding or SAVOIR-FAIRE would have gone off like that!'
She forgot in her condemnation of Colin to make allowance for the primal nature of the man; for a certain kinship in him with the loftier type of savage, whose woman must be his wholly, or else deliberately relinquished to the successful rival, and into whose calculation the subtleties of social jurisprudence would not naturally enter.
Nor did she remember at the moment that Maule had been described by her own relatives as a person of neither birth nor breeding—a fortune-hunter—not by any means a modern Bayard. He at least was a man of the world, she thought, and would appreciate the situation. He had lost that touch of unaccustomedness—she hardly knew how to describe it—which had often irritated her in their former relation. In their talk that day he seemed much more at home than she was in the world she had once belonged to. He spoke of 'personages' with the ease of familiar acquaintance. Apparently, he had got into quite the right set—a rather political set, she gathered. He told her that he had been pressed to stand for a well-nursed Liberal Constituency, and implied that but for the catastrophe of his wife's death he would now be seated in Parliament, with a fair prospect in the future of place and distinction. Of course, it was the money which had done it, she told herself, though he had undoubted cleverness, she knew, and, as he pointed out, his experience in a particular South American republic—very much to the fore just now in European diplomacy—stood to his advantage. His marriage had given him opportunity. He alluded without bad taste to his dead wife's generosity. She had left him her entire fortune unfettered. He was now a rich man. He explained that she had had none but very distant relations and that, otherwise, charitable institutions would have benefited. She had been a very good woman, he said—a woman with whom nine hundred out of a thousand decent men would have been perfectly happy. He let it be inferred that he was the thousandth man. His eyes, not his lips told her the reason why.
Their talk skimmed the surface of vital things—the new awakening in England; the threatenings of a socialistic upheaval; his individual aims and ideas—she recognised her own inspirations. He spoke of his political ambitions. Suddenly she said:
'I wonder why you made the break of coming out to Australia—why you did not stay in England and follow on your career?'