“I am sorry. Mama thinks it a naughty amusement at best, and when there is also the additional naughtiness of battle on Sunday! Well, they will be properly stung with remorse or hornet-fangs, or a combination. The wounded will be pardoned, I fancy. Hey, Rose?”
“Like enough.”
Mrs. Maybrook’s vivid account of Susan Colkett’s talk with Joe had made on Lyndsay at first a strong impression of disgust and annoyance. He saw in it, after cooler reflection, only one of the numberless beginnings of tragic crime which are refused the prosperity of opportunity. We have no proverbial wisdom as to what place bad intentions go to pave; but those who see much of the darker ways of man are well aware that there is much intended evil, as well as intended good, which never gets beyond the egg of theory. The crime which Susan Colkett was nursing with the devil-milk of base use of a man’s honest love grew less momentous to Lyndsay as he considered it. Once suspected, it became to him almost childlike in its foolishness. Crime-seed, like the grain of the parable, falls everywhere. There is a human climate in which, above all others, it finds swift maturity of growth.
Susan Colkett was by nature inclined to evil. She had base animal cravings, liking high colors and coarse meats. A want was with her at once a fierce hunger of desire, and made temptation dangerous to one who had in its crude fullness brute courage, and that dreadful alliance of the sensual with the destructive instincts which is more rare in woman than in man. But of Susan Colkett’s personality Lyndsay knew almost nothing. He was, however, by no means indifferent as to the matter, but had simply put off speaking of it to Carington for want of an easy chance.
As they came opposite the Island Camp, Lyndsay said abruptly:
“Run her up onto the beach, Pierre.”
“Are you going to stop? I wish you wouldn’t stop, papa. We have a very short time to-day.”
“I shall be back in a moment. I have been putting off a little matter of—of business with Carington. I shall not be long.” Meanwhile Anne Lyndsay’s canoe also came to shore.
Rose said no more. She saw her father disappear into the tent, come out with Carington, and begin to walk to and fro on the upper slope. Very soon she began to be curious, as she saw them pause and turn and go on again.
“What are they talking about, Aunt Anne?”