He had offered to bind himself to her and she had refused. She had wished him to be free. Well then, how illogical, how absurd her attitude now, like that of a pettish child.
She closed the flap of the tent and sank down on the side of the bed and buried her face in her hands, lost in a sense of humiliation and self-condemnation.
Here Everest found her when he came in, and as she looked up and saw him enter, smiling and full of life, a sense of joy came to her that no mad act of hers had brought misery upon him and so upon them both. She rose as he approached her. She was very white, but she smiled up at him as she saw the look of concern come into his face.
"You look so pale. Do you feel ill? Is the heat too much for you?" he exclaimed anxiously.
"No; I am quite well. I always get dull and miss you when you are out, that is all," she answered. She would not speak to him of Sybil. She knew in matters of love coercion is useless, words are useless, everything is useless. Like a malady, like a sickness, desire drifts across the brain and runs its course. Sometimes the sufferer dies, but more often he recovers and asks: "Was I ever ill?"
She took up the pistol and put it back in its place and busied herself with making tea for him, and all the time her mind was recalling the exquisite lines of Sophocles on love: "Like the icicle lying in the hot hand of the wondering boy it diminishes and vanishes even while he gazes on it and the harder, the tighter, he clasps it, the more rapidly does it disappear."
Day after miserable day went by for Regina, while the hate, which was wholly alien to her nature, for Sybil grew within her, and like some horrible physical growth hurt and oppressed her in the growing and seemed to poison her whole organisation.
If she could only have known clearly what Everest's feelings were; but he would not speak on the subject. He had admitted that he desired the girl, and all his assurances that nothing could affect his love for Regina might be merely to comfort her. At the best he wanted something that, but for her presence, he could and would have obtained. And to Regina her own duty, her course of conduct was not clear. She had brought with her into camp a few books, and among them "Anna Lombard," which she read and reread, finding in the position of Gerald Ethridge some reflection of her own. But to her, her situation seemed more difficult, her duty more obscure than his, for in Gerald's case he felt convinced that Anna's love for the Pathan could not bring her happiness, and therefore he could believe himself justified in trying his utmost to turn her from it, but here the torturing thought would ever present itself to Regina that Sybil had every quality to fit her to be Everest's wife. She might well hold herself to be in the right and Regina in the wrong. She could bring to the man she married a large dower, noble rank, lands, old name. She was the bride picked out and selected for him by his own family and people, and now he himself desired her. In utter anguish of soul Regina asked herself again and again why was she standing between? The girl was beautiful too, and though, to Regina, the extreme disproportion of size between the cousins jarred and seemed unnatural, yet she had to admit that Nature worked that way, constantly making the male seek his opposite in his mate, so that the average of the type may be maintained.
She hated Sybil with the fierce natural hate of any human being for another who robs and despoils him of his dearest possessions, but logically she could not defend that hatred of her. In the eyes of the world she knew that Sybil and not herself would be given the better title to Everest.
If she could only have known what he thought, what he felt! If she could only have penetrated the mystery that had grown up round his feelings and relations to his cousin! But like all men he would not speak definitely or clearly to her about it. That silence of men! How much it has to account for! We have all heard of the crimes without number traced to and excused by the celebrated habit of "nagging" which belongs to women. No condemnation is too severe for it. No sympathy too excessive to be given to the male sufferers from it. But what of that dogged brutal silence of men that corrodes and eats into the sensitive, excitable brain of a woman? For how many murders and suicides has that not been accountable?