Love -- Fiction; Man-woman relationships -- Fiction
Had she cried because she loved him or because he was killed? She had
not a doubt while she thought him dead, but the chance of his being
alive seemed to have altered everything. Last night she would have
disowned indignantly the idea that she did not love him. She had
accepted him as naturally in the order of needful things as food and
clothing. He was her husband and so had everything that husbands have,
did everything that husbands do. She had never thought about it as a
personal matter. One had a husband as one had a cold in the head; one
didn't always quite know why; but having him one accepted him for the
sort of thing he was.
Lewis had taken her from a life already wearily dull, and with every
prospect of becoming duller. He had come suddenly into her
existence--a quite unlooked-for excitement; and had transplanted her
into surroundings more exciting still; full of men, and dangers, and
pageants and great affairs. It was so full indeed, that in the press
of things to do he was a good deal crowded out. His work, his fresh
appointments--for he had been tremendously in demand--gave him rather
the air of continually arranging new scenes and effects in which she
played the leading lady.
She didn't in the least so consciously regard him; she had not even
noticed how much his work kept him out of the occasions which she most
enjoyed; he seemed just a part of the delightful movement, a sort of
dashing high-spirited hot-tempered ambitious concentration of it all.
He was the man who had made it all possible for her, being her husband.
That was how, gratefully, she most often thought of him.
His death wrenched her by its treacherous horror; but it had put no
awkward questions. The questions came with the doubt if he were dead.
How much did she care for him? Did she care for him at all? Had she
ever cared for him as a husband? Right on the heels of that, answering
it to her astounded perception, came a shrinking of disgust that she
had lived three years with a man as his wife without loving him;
without even discovering that she did not love him. It was that which
seared the tears in her eyes, and left her with a sense of shame and
self-disdain and loneliness indescribable.
It was that too in a curious reflected fashion which increased her
anger at Terrington's quiet indifference to the ways of Fate. She
could picture Lewis Chantry's raging vehemence under a like provocation.
As she watched the silent mass of men in the courtyard--the dull yellow
of the field-service kit lightened by the gay alkalaks of the Lancers,
the orange and white of their pennons, the glistening of the sun upon
lance-head and bayonet, the silence broken only by the clink of a
bridoon as some impatient horse flung up its head--there was a burst of
blue and red above the eastern tower and the Union Jack flew out above
the Fort.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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