“You’re not going yet? You’ve only been here a few minutes.”
Tears came into Christabel’s eyes. “And Francis is out. If he doesn’t see you he’ll be angry, he’ll ask me why.”
“But,” the tone changed, “perhaps you’ll see him on your way home.”
The tears overflowed, she was helplessly angry, she sobbed.
“Be quiet,” Rose said sternly. “I shall tell him nothing. You know that. You are quite safe, whatever you choose to say to me. Perfectly safe.”
“I know. I can’t help it. I lie here and think. What would you do in my place?”
“Yes, I’m going. You can tell Francis I was obliged to get home early.”
“But you’re always riding over here, aren’t you?”
“Oh, then—” The words lingered meaningly until Rose reached the door and then Christabel said, “I wish you’d ask your sisters to come and see me. They would tell me all the news.”
Rose went downstairs laughing at Christabel’s capacity for mingling tragedy with the commonplace and sordid accusations with social desires, but though she laughed she was strangely tired and, stretching before her, she saw more weariness, more struggling, more effort without result.
She stood in the masculine, matted hall, with the usual worn pair of slippers in the corner, a stick lying across a chair, a collection of coats and hats on the pegs, and she felt she would be glad if she were never to see all this again, and for the first time she thought seriously of desertion. She wished she could go to some unfamiliar country where the people would all have new faces, where the language would be strange, the sights different, the smells unlike those which were wafted through the open door. She wanted a fresh body and a new world, but she knew that she would not get them, for leaving Francis would be like leaving a child. So she told herself, but at the back of her mind was the certainty that if she went he would soon attach himself to another’s strength—or weakness: yes, to another’s weakness, and she found she could not contemplate that event, less because she clung to him than because her pride could not tolerate a substitution which would be an admission of her likeness to other women. Yet in that very lack of toleration her pride was lowered, and if she was not clinging to him for her own sake, she was holding on to her place, her uniqueness, refusing the possibility that another woman could serve him, as she had served him with pain, with suffering. She was like a queen who does not love her throne supremely but will not abdicate, who would rather fail in her appointed place than see another succeed in it.