“Would you mind if I succeeded in letting this house and went into the country with Robin to wait for your coming back?”
“Letting it furnished, do you mean?”
“Yes.”
“But won’t you be dull in the country, away from mother, and Beattie, and godfather, and all our friends?”
“I could never be dull with Robin and nature, never, and I wouldn’t go very far from London. I thought of something near Welsley.”
“So that you could go in to Cathedral service when ‘The Wilderness’ was sung!”
He had smiled as he had said it, but his own reference to Rosamund’s once-spoken-of love of the wilderness had, in a flash, brought the hill of Drouva before him, and he had faced man’s tragedy—remembered joys of the past in a shadowed present.
“Go into the country, Rose. I only want you to be happy, but”—he had hesitated, and then had added, almost in spite of himself—“but not too happy.”
Not too happy! That really was the great fear at his heart now that he was voyaging towards South Africa, that Rosamund would be too happy without him. He no longer deceived himself. This drastic change in his life had either taught him to face realities, or simply prevented him from being able to do anything else. He told himself the truth, and it was this, that Rosamund did not love him at all as he loved her. She was fond of him, she trusted him, she got on excellently with him, she believed in him, she even admired him for having been able to live as he had lived before their marriage, but she did not passionately love him. He might have been tempted to think that, with all her fine, even splendid, qualities, she was deprived of the power of loving intensely if he had not seen her with Robin, if he had not once spoken with her about her mother.
If he were killed in South Africa would Rosamund be angry at his death? That was her greatest tribute, anger, directed surely not against any human being, but against the God Whom she loved and Who, so she believed, ruled the world and directed the ways of men. Once Rosamund had said that she knew it was possible for human beings to hurt God. She had doubtless spoken out of the depths of her personal experience. She had felt sure that by her anger at the death of her mother she had hurt God. Such a conviction showed how she thought of God, in what a closeness of relation with God she felt herself to be. Dion knew now that she had loved her mother, that she loved Robin, as she did not love him. If he were to die she would be very sorry, but she would not be very angry. No, she would be able to breathe out a “farewell!” simply, with a resignation comparable to that of the Greeks on those tombs which she loved, and then—she would concentrate on Robin.