Myra, therefore, had come and gone without his knowledge. Often he wished that he had met her and wrung some information from her unwilling lips. And now, with his purpose accomplished, his heart aching for change, his spirit craving to pour itself out in tumultuous words, and his soul crying for her that was lost, the thought that had haunted the back of his mind for the past year stood out grimly spectre-wise. What right had he to live? Olifant had spoken truly. What right had he to compel her to perpetual widowhood that was no widowhood? She was tied to him, a husband lost, as far as she was concerned, to human ken, never to cross her path again; tied to him as much as Myra was tied to the poor wretch in the madhouse. And as Myra had grown soured and hard, so might Olivia grow. Olivia so young now, with all the joy of life before her. He gone, she could marry again. There was Olifant, that model of men, whom he guessed to have supplanted. With him she could be happy until her life’s end. Once more she could be Lady Bountiful of “The Towers.” . . . The conception was an agony of the flesh, keeping him awake of nights on the hard little camp-bed in the loft. He grappled with the torture, resolved to triumph over it, as he had gritted his teeth and triumphed over physical pain in hospitals. The knife was essential, he told himself. It was for her sake. It was his duty to put himself out of the world.
And yet the days went on, and he felt the lust of life in his blood. The question tauntingly arose: Is it braver to die than to live? Is it more cowardly to live than to die? He couldn’t answer it.
In the meantime he went on mending broken-down motor-engines and driving gay tourists about the countryside, in his car of resurrection.
CHAPTER XXV
WHAT was bound to happen had happened. Olifant the Galahad, out for grails, as Triona, and indeed as Olivia had pictured him, had lost his head, poured out a flow of mad words, and flung his arm about her and kissed her passionately. She had been caught, had half-surrendered; released, she had put hands to a tumultuous bosom and staggered away from him. And there had followed a scene enacted for the twenty-billionth time on the world’s stage. She had grown weak and strong by turns. At last she had said: “If you love me, go now and let me think it over and all that it means.”
And he had gone, passion yielding to his courteous consideration of her, and she was left alone in the drawing-room, staring through the open French windows at the May garden.
Since her return from the South of France, she had felt the thing coming. In October, as soon as Myra had returned from her holiday, fear had driven her from Medlow. The hunger in the man’s eyes proclaimed an impossible situation. The guest and host position she had changed after the first few weeks. Brother and sister and herself kept house together—on the face of it a sensible and economical arrangement. Mr. Trivett and Mr. Fenmarch, once more financial advisers, commended it with enthusiasm. The summer had passed happily enough. The modus vivendi with the sections of Medlow society respectively symbolized by Landsdowne House and Blair Park had arranged itself automatically. She found conferred upon her the Freedom of each. The essential snobbery of English life is a myth kept alive by our enemies. It is true that the squire and the linen-draper do not ask each other and their families to dinner. Their social worlds are apart. They don’t want to ask each other to dinner. They would never dream of asking each other to dinner, one no more than the other; they respect each other too mightily. But a dweller in both worlds, such as Olivia, Trivett-ed and Gale-d though she was on the one side, yet on the other, the wife of the famous Alexis Triona and the friend of the Olifants, folks whose genealogy was lost somewhere in a Pictish bonfire of archives, can wander up and down the whole social gamut at her good pleasure. Besides she herself does not mix the incompatible. A mere question of the art of life, which Olivia, with her London experiences found easy of resolution. So, in the mild and mellow way on which Medlow prided itself, she had danced and tennis-ed and picnic-ed the summer through. On the Blair Park side—she wondered laughingly at their unsupercilious noses—Blaise Olifant and his sister accompanied her in the gentle festivities. Each day had brought its petty golden dust—the futile Church bazaar, the tennis tournament, the whist-drive of which old John Freke, the linen-draper father of Lydia, had made her a lady-patroness, the motor-run into quaint Shrewsbury, on shopping adventure in quest of crab or lobster unobtainable in Medlow—a thousand trivial activities—to the innocent choking of her soul, to use Matthew Arnold’s figure, and an inevitable forgetfullness. Everything had gone well until October. Then she had taken prudent flight with Myra to the France and Italy which she had never seen—and there she had stayed till the beginning of May.
It was Mrs. Woolcombe who insisted on her return to Medlow. Where else should she return after her wanderings but to her own home? At first everything was just as it used to be. Then, on a trivial cause—an insult offered her by an Italian in Venice which she had laughingly recounted—the passion of Blaise Olifant had suddenly flamed forth.
She was frightened, shaken. He had given her the thrill, which, in her early relations with him she had half contemptuously deemed impossible. She found herself free from sense of outrage. She bore him no resentment. Indeed she had responded to his kiss. She was not quite sure, within herself, whether she would not respond again. The communicated thrill completed her original conception of him as the very perfect gentle knight. For after all, knights without red-blood in their veins might be gentle, but scarcely perfect.
If she were free, she would marry him out of hand, without further question. He had always dwelt in a tender spot of her heart. Now he had slipped into one more warm, smouldering with strange fires. But she was not free. She stood at once at the parting of the roads. She must go back to a wandering or lonely life, or she must defy conventions.