Chance

He probably looked sane enough for all the practical purposes of

commercial life. But I am not so certain that he really was quite sane

at that time.

However, he jumped at the offer. Providence itself was offering him this

opportunity to accustom the girl to sea-life by a comparatively short

trip. This was the time when everything that happened, everything he

heard, casual words, unrelated phrases, seemed a provocation or an

encouragement, confirmed him in his resolution. And indeed to be busy

with material affairs is the best preservative against reflection, fears,

doubts--all these things which stand in the way of achievement. I

suppose a fellow proposing to cut his throat would experience a sort of

relief while occupied in stropping his razor carefully.

And Anthony was extremely careful in preparing for himself and for the

luckless Flora, an impossible existence. He went about it with no more

tremors than if he had been stuffed with rags or made of iron instead of

flesh and blood. An existence, mind you, which, on shore, in the thick

of mankind, of varied interests, of distractions, of infinite

opportunities to preserve your distance from each other, is hardly

conceivable; but on board ship, at sea, en tete-a-tete for days and

weeks and months together, could mean nothing but mental torture, an

exquisite absurdity of torment. He was a simple soul. His hopelessly

masculine ingenuousness is displayed in a touching way by his care to

procure some woman to attend on Flora. The condition of guaranteed

perfect respectability gave him moments of anxious thought. When he

remembered suddenly his steward's wife he must have exclaimed eureka

with particular exultation. One does not like to call Anthony an ass.

But really to put any woman within scenting distance of such a secret and

suppose that she would not track it out!

No woman, however simple, could be as ingenuous as that. I don't know

how Flora de Barral qualified him in her thoughts when he told her of

having done this amongst other things intended to make her comfortable. I

should think that, for all her simplicity, she must have been appalled.

He stood before her on the appointed day outwardly calmer than she had

ever seen him before. And this very calmness, that scrupulous attitude

which he felt bound in honour to assume then and for ever, unless she

would condescend to make a sign at some future time, added to the

heaviness of her heart innocent of the most pardonable guile.

The night before she had slept better than she had done for the past ten

nights. Both youth and weariness will assert themselves in the end

against the tyranny of nerve-racking stress. She had slept but she woke

up with her eyes full of tears. There were no traces of them when she

met him in the shabby little parlour downstairs. She had swallowed them

up. She was not going to let him see. She felt bound in honour to

accept the situation for ever and ever unless . . . Ah, unless . . . She

dissembled all her sentiments but it was not duplicity on her part. All

she wanted was to get at the truth; to see what would come of it.