There came over him another aspect of Marion. He looked awkward and contemptuous, as she had done when she had told Ellen how in Richard's infancy she had been obliged to be nice to people whom she did not like for the sake of a placid social atmosphere. He muttered, "I'll go to the kitchen ... tell the servants that Roger's fallen asleep ... they're not to disturb him.... That'll ... give us time...."
At the door he turned.
"You're not afraid?" He pointed to the dead man.
She shook her head and he went on his errand. With a sense of leisure, as if she had strayed into a cul-de-sac of time, and since there is no going backwards must stay there for ever, she sat down and looked about her. Roger did not frighten her at all. If his spirit was in the room it was sickly and innocuous, like the smell of a peardrop. But the horror of all that had happened to her, and its refusal to be anything but horror, viewed from whatever aspect, had begun to be agony when there broke on her that which is the reward of tragedy. She perceived the miraculous beauty of the common lot. Men and women taking children home in trams ... people on summer afternoons going into the country in brakes ... that wedding-party she and her mother had seen long ago dancing by the River Almond, led by a bride and bridegroom middle-aged but gravely glad.... Ah, that wedding-party.... She wept, she wept.
He had returned to the room, and was holding open the French window.
"Come," he said. "Come."
CHAPTER XI
Surely, surely he was asking too much of her?...
Yet he had felt no doubt that she would comply. There had been indeed no tinge of supplication in his bearing when he had halted with her on the seaward slope of the sea-wall and pointed to the other wall on the further side of the creek, and he had told her that on the island it confined there was a hut which the cattlemen used when the herds pastured there; where there would be a store of furze with which they could build a fire; where they could be safe until the people came to take him. Rather had he spoken triumphantly, as if he had found a hidden staircase leading out of destiny. And when he left her to see if they could bribe the fishermen who were painting the keel of a boat on the grass two hundred yards away to hand over their waders, so that he and she might walk across dryshod to the island, he did not look over his shoulder, but walked straight ahead, utterly confident that she would be there when he returned.