Part 20 (1/2)

But now everything was changed. Jane had denied him, and he felt an imperative need of the kind, comfortable words Athena would lavish on him. He was sick of lies--of the lies he had told himself. He hungered for Athena's presence. What an unmannerly brute she must have thought him, to have avoided her as he had done, all that day and all the day before!

Very gently she bade him sit down, and in some subtle fas.h.i.+on she ministered to Lingard in a way that restored to a certain extent his feeling of self-respect. And then at last, when secure that there would be no interruptions, for the dinner bell had rung some moments before, she leant forward and said slowly, ”Is something the matter? Is anything troubling you, Hew? Is it a matter in which I can help?”

She desired above all things that he should speak to her of Jane Oglander. But her wish was not to be gratified.

”Everything is troubling me,” he said sombrely. ”Everything!”

She moved a little nearer to him. Her hand lay close to his. Suddenly he took her hand and held it. ”I loathe myself,” he said in a low voice. ”I needn't tell you the reason why, Athena,--you know, you understand----”

”Ah! Yes--I understand,” there was a thrill in her voice. ”How often I have felt ashamed of my own longing--of my longing to be free!”

It was a bow at a venture. He looked at her with dazed eyes. That was not what he had meant. Then suddenly he caught fire from her thin flame.

”If you were free?” he repeated thickly. ”I wish to G.o.d, Athena, that you were free----”

She withdrew her hand from his, and got up. ”It's nearly eight o'clock,”

she said quietly. ”We must go up and dress now.”

CHAPTER XII

”There's not a crime But takes its proper change still out in crime If once rung on the counter of this world.”

All that night Athena lay awake. Her brain was extraordinarily alive.

She had not had so bad a bout of wakefulness for years.

If only she were free!

She lay wondering what Lingard had meant by those words--words which she had put into his mouth, and which he had uttered in the thick tones of a man who has lost control of himself, and who speaks scarce knowing what he says.

In the world in which Mrs. Maule lived when she was not at Rede Place, it was a firmly-established belief that those unhappily or unsuitably married could, by making a determined effort, strike off their fetters.

And in this connection it had been gradually borne in upon her that the good old proverb which declares that where there's a will there's a way is, in the England of to-day, peculiarly true of everything that pertains to the marital relations of men and women.

The question had never before touched her nearly, and Athena as a rule only concerned herself with what did touch her nearly.

However much she chafed against the bonds which bound her to Richard Maule, the thought that she, Mrs. Maule of Rede Place, should join the crowd of ambiguous women who are neither maids, nor wives, nor widows, was unthinkable. Her day, so she often secretly reasoned with herself, would come later--after Richard's death. At the time of their marriage he had made magnificent, absurdly magnificent settlements. He could do nothing to alter that fact; so much she had been at some pains to ascertain. Meanwhile, she made the best she could of life.

But now, with a dramatic suddenness which strongly appealed to her calculating and yet undisciplined nature--an unlooked for piece of good fortune had come her way. Were she free, or within reasonable sight of freedom, the kind of life for which she now longed pa.s.sionately was almost certainly within her grasp.

Lingard the man roused in Athena Maule none of that indescribable sensation, part physical, part mental, which she had at first thought, nay hoped, he would do. But that, so she told herself with unconscious cynicism, was a fortunate thing. She had now set her whole heart on being Lingard's wife,--only to secure that end would she be Lingard's lover. Her wild oats were sown. Never more would she allow herself to become the prey of pa.s.sion,--that ”creature of poignant thirst and exquisite hunger....”

She gave but a very fleeting thought to Lingard's engagement to Jane Oglander. Engagements are perpetually made and broken, and fortunately this particular engagement had not even been publicly announced.

No; what deeply troubled her, what stood in the way of the fruition of her desire was--Richard, the man who had so slight a hold on life, and yet who seemed so tenacious of that which had surely lost all savour.

In the darkness of the night, the pallid face of Athena's husband rose before her,--cruel, watchful, streaked, as it so often was when Richard looked her way, with contempt as well as hatred.

How amazingly Richard had altered in the ten years she had known him, and in nothing more than in the expression of his face, which she now visioned with such horrible vividness!