'I wish the rains would come,' said Norah at the end of a silence. 'I feel as if I were breathing hot fluff.'
But with the weight on her heart she would hardly have noticed the stifling heat, had she not dreaded the working of that suffocation on the men's nerves. As she glanced away from Archie's pale face she tried to forget the tales of violence, murder, suicide committed often on almost frivolous grounds in the exasperation of the heat that heralds the rains.
Here at lake level, close to the equator, the dagger of jealousy and despair hilt-deep in his brain, might not Archie find suicide or murder the only solution?
It was agony to be so impotent to avert the doom that hung over the two men she had loved and crucified. She felt, or imagined, their hot, angry eyes on her, and dared not look up lest she loosed the lightning. She alone could lay the passions she had so heedlessly aroused; and any word, any gesture almost, might precipitate the latent madness.
She was aware that the strain of the intolerable position could not endure; unless she lessened it something would snap. And the life of one or both of the men would pay. When death from starvation had threatened, she had pictured herself in a short dark corridor of days. In front stretched an iron-grey screen like a fireproof curtain. Behind it lay ... what? Now danger of death had lifted, and still the screen was there. Her mind was pinned to the emergency of the moment, but even had that urgent menace receded, she would not have dared to lift the curtain. What lay in store for her, she made no attempt to divine. Life with Dick, life with Archie, life alone? The future was too dreadful to contemplate, the ruin she had wrought too radical. And if—what she dreaded—took place, she would be making plans for men who would be dead at their fruition.
For the moment she anchored her conduct to the only course that she felt could not do harm. By a manner resolutely matter of fact, she might create a conventional atmosphere, might maintain the dangerous equilibrium of the moment until the impulse to violence died.
Archie, it seemed, when the vulture that tore at his entrails would let him, had resolved on the same conduct.
'What about resting here a bit?' he asked.
'I don't believe it's much good. It's as hot sitting as walking. What wouldn't I give for a breeze!'
'It may be days before it breaks,' said Archie. 'But if you're not tired the sooner we get down and start work the better.'