Too weary in spirit to mark the slow passing of the hours he fought his last fight. And gradually he grew calmer, calm enough to accept--if not to understand--the inscrutable rulings of Providence. He had arrogated to himself the disposal of his life, but it was made clear to him that a higher wisdom had decreed otherwise. He did not attempt to seek the purpose of his preservation, enough that for some unfathomable reason it was once more plainly indicated that there was to be no shirking. He had to live, and to do what was possible with the life left him. Gillian! the thought of her was torment. He had tried to free her, and she was still bound. It would be part of his punishment that, suffering, he would have to watch her suffer too. With a groan he flung his uninjured arm across his eyes and lay very still. The day wore on. He roused himself to take the food that Yoshio brought at regular intervals but feigned a drowsiness he did not feel to secure the solitude his mood demanded. And Yoshio, enjoying to the full his state of temporary authority, sat outside the door of the tent and kept away inquirers. Listlessly Craven watched the evening shadows deepen and darken. For hours he had thought, not of himself but of the woman he loved, until his bruised head ached intolerably. And all his deliberation had taken him no further than where he had begun. He was to take up anew the difficult life he had fled from--for that was what it amounted to. He had deserted her who had in all the world no one but him. It had an ugly sound and he flinched from the naked truth of it, but he had done with subterfuges and evasions. He had made her his wife and he had left her--nothing could alter the fact or mitigate the shame. Past experience had taught him nothing; once again he had left a woman in her need to fend for herself.
She was his wife, his to shield and to protect, doubly so in her equivocal position that subjected her to much that would not affect one happily married. During the few months they had lived at Craven Towers after their marriage she had shown by every means in her power her desire to be to him the comrade he had asked her to be. And he had repelled her. He had feared himself and the strength of his resolution. Now, as he thought of it with bitter self-reproach, he realised how much more he could have done to make her life easier, to smooth the difficulties of their relationship. Instead he had added to them, and under the strain he had broken down, not she. The egoism he had thought conquered had triumphed over him again to his undoing. Crushing shame filled him, but regrets were useless. The past was past--what of the future? He was going back to her. He was to have the torturing happiness of seeing her again--but what would his re-entry into her life mean to her? What had these two years of which he knew nothing done for her? There had been an accumulated mail waiting for him at Lagos. She had written regularly--but she had told him nothing. Her short letters had been filled with inquiries for the mission, references to Peters' occasional visits to Paris, trivialities of the weather--stilted laborious communications in which he read effort and constraint. How would she receive him--would she even receive him at all? It seemed incredible that she should. He knew her innate gentleness, the selflessness of her disposition, but he knew also that there was a limit to all things. Would she not see in his return the reappearance of a master, a jailer who would curb even that small measure of freedom that had been hers? For bound to him the freedom he had promised her was a mockery. And how was he to explain his prolonged absence? She could not have failed to see some mention of the return of the medical mission, to have wondered why he still lingered in Africa. The letter he had written and entrusted to Yoshio could never now be delivered. She must not learn what he had meant her to know only after his death. He could not explain, he must leave her to put whatever interpretation she would upon it. And what but the most obvious could she put? He writhed in sudden agony of mind, and the physical pain the abrupt movement caused was easier to bear than the thought of her scorn. It was all so hopeless, so complicated. He turned from it with a weary sigh and fell to dreaming of the woman herself.