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.