“If you will tell me when you are coming again.”
“Francis, don’t. You mustn’t spoil things.”
And she knew she could be silent for ever. Restraint and a love of danger lived together in her nature and these two qualities were fed by the position in which she found herself, nor would she have had the position changed. It supplied her with the emotion she had wanted. She had the privilege of feeling deeply and dangerously and yet of preserving her pride.
There was irony in the fact that Christabel, hinting at suspicions for which, in Rose’s mind, there was at first no cause, had at last actually brought about what she feared, and if Rose had looked for justification, she might have found it there. But she did not look for it any more than Reginald would have done; she was like him there, but where she differed was in loyalty to an idea. She saw love as something noble and inspiring, worthy of sacrifice and, more concretely, she was determined not to increase the disaster which had befallen Christabel. Sooner or later, in normal conditions, her marriage must have been recognized as a failure, but in these abnormal ones it had to be sustained as a success, and it seemed to Rose that civilized beings could love, and live in the knowledge of their love, without injuring some one already cruelly unfortunate.
But, as the months went by, she found she had to reckon with two difficult people, or rather with two people, ordinary in themselves, cast by fate into a difficult situation. There was Christabel, with her countless idle hours in which to formulate theories, to lay traps, to realize that the devotion of Francis became less obvious; and there was Francis, breaking the spirit of their contract with his looks, and sometimes the letter, with his complaints and pleadings.
He could not go on like this for ever, he said. He saw her once a week for a few minutes, if he was lucky: how could she expect him to be satisfied with that? It was little enough, she owned, but more than it might have been. She could never make him admit, perhaps because he did not feel, how greatly they were blessed; but she saw herself as the guardian of a temple: she stood in the doorway forbidding him to enter less the place should be defiled, yet forbidding him in such a way that he should not love her less. Yet constantly saying “No,” constantly shaking the head and smiling propitiatingly the while is not to appease; and those short hours of companionship in which they had once managed to be happy became times of strain, of disappointment, of barely kept control.