It had seemed immaterial whether she did so or not, considering that, in Rangoon, one could safely assume nobody had heard of her existence, and he and the Colonel were not contemplating a long stay anywhere.
Peter at present, she knew, made a remorselessly logical Catholic with no time for visions unsanctioned by the Pope. Order and discipline everywhere, if you please, for Peter, once as thoroughly lawless as he now showed himself law-ridden. But Peter was an extremist in everything. He had really little use for the non-fanatic who hesitates to sacrifice, at any rate, his neighbour's Life and Limb, for his opinions. But, while he had made his submission to Rome in calm, wholehearted conviction, which might or might not, in another ten years, be followed by as calm and wholehearted a recantation, annulled in its turn by a general clear-up of his whole life and a death-bed repentance—"for, though it may be a darned uncomfortable religion to live in, it's the only tidy one to die in," had ever, like Charles Stuart, maintained Peter—Ferlie had crept through the gate as a battered ship creeps gratefully into an unexpectedly discovered harbour, anchorless, after the storm.
She had found there warmth and healing and a kind of companionship among the angels that only very sensitive worshippers of abstract holiness know. The Unseen Hosts were to her lone spirit so really present at the altar steps that she could no longer consider the most deserted church empty. Doctrinally, she was unsound. Authority had recognized the bewildered pulsing of a heart too bruised for searching examination, and admitted her with far less circumspection than they accorded Peter of the minutely inquiring habit of mind.
The Peters are well known later to deny; not so the Ferlies.
By reason of that very loyal complex in her was Ferlie passively chained to the Force from which she had once drawn strength, since there could be no severing of her fetters without a severance also from those who had comforted her in affliction. How mean to accept the sweets and deny the obligations incurred! To question only the rules which affected her personal desires!
That Force had stood by her in her darkness: therefore she must stand by it now that she walked in sunshine.
Yet, Cyprian was wondering whether she would outthrow superstition when happiness set in, and she was sure that, if so, he would soon persuade himself, for her sake, that, though divorce in itself might be an evil thing, in their case it became a necessary good. Clifford could be trusted to make things easy; he to whom all women were merely, Woman.
The doors would swing wide on very little pressure (... Et ne nos inducas in tentationem).
Since, white-faced and petrified, she had undertaken to deceive Cyprian, and steal by secret ways and unworthy evasions into Digby Maur's garden, yielding him the triumph of another picture in return for his promised silence, she had conversed with him only in monosyllables and, since he earnestly desired to complete the commission which might set him on the road to future recognition, he had borne her self-absorbed misery without making any attempt to counteract it or effect a reconcilation. His feelings towards her at that time were an irreconcilable mixture of angry desire and aching remorse.
The picture completed, it was his intention to make a final effort to re-arouse her forfeited pity. If she should throw up the sponge before he were ready he determined to stick at nothing which should force her and that canting Sterne to eat the dust of the same humiliation they had publicly heaped upon him.