"Yes," interjected Sibyl, "and lose my complexion and be old before my time, riding after you through the jungle, or living stupidly like a grass widow at home...."
Yet as he jerked out his tirade rather theatrically she noted him with an approving eye. His anger and extravagance brought out a certain boyishness and, made him, with the freedom of the jungle about him, still additionally attractive physically.... He certainly was good-looking and in the prime of manhood ... she sighed ... the remembrance of Lord Silchester's pale, somewhat flabby face, his slightly pedantic manner, his carefulness about his health.... He rode--yes--they had already had decorous rides together, but she imagined before the ride his cob had had some of the freshness taken out of him by the groom....
Sibyl tried by broken phrases, and half-uttered hints, to convey the idea that Lord Silchester being nearly sixty--at any rate close on fifty-six--and not of robust health, might not live for ever; though really she wouldn't mind if _she_ died first, men were so perfectly hateful, and so was your family--if you were a woman. You were expected to do all you could for your family, and abused into the bargain by others who held you bound by foolish promises made when you were a mere girl without any knowledge of the world. Still, there was a possibility--just a possibility--for weren't we all mortal?--that she might find herself a widow, a lonely widow some day. Roger by then would have made a great career, become a sort of Sir Samuel Baker; he'd have discovered and named lakes after royalty; then they might meet again; and who could say? Certainly, if it came to _love_, she wouldn't deny she had never felt _quite_ the same towards any one as she had towards Roger....
But Roger checked such philosophizings rudely, saying they were positively indecent: at which she expressed herself as very angry. Then leading out the horses in eye-flashing silence, Roger helped her to mount and swung himself into the saddle. He escorted her silently to Aldermaston main street, raised his hat, and rode off up the Mortimer road with a set face and angry eyes on the way back to Basingstoke.
He paused however at Tadley to give his father's cob--borrowed for the day--a feed and a rest. His ride lay through one of the loveliest parts of England in those days, before "Dora" had commandeered timber from the woods--to find afterwards she did not want it--before farmers had changed tiles or thatch on barns to corrugated iron, and chars-a-bancs, motor cycles and side-cars with golden-haired flappers, school treats and bean feasts had made the country-side noisy, dangerous and paper-strewn.
Insensibly his mood softened as he rode. It was more than four years since he had been home. Though he had spent all of his youth in this country, save for school and military college, his eyes seemed never before to have taken in the charm of English landscapes. Here was England at its best in the early part of July: poppies blazing in the green corn and whitish green oats, hay still lingering--grey on green--in the fields, ox-eyed daisies fully out, wild roses still in bloom in the hedge-rows, blue crane's bill, blue vetch, and purple-blue campanulas in the copse borders. The plump and placid cows, with swinging udders, so different from the gaunt African cattle with a scarcely visible milk-supply, the splendid cart-horses, the sheep--neat and tidy after shearing--the cock pheasants running across the sun-and-shadow-flecked roads, the cawing rooks, and the cooing woodpigeons, the geese and donkeys on the commons. Here and there, off the main road, park gates of finely wrought iron with a trim geranium-decked lodge and a vista of some charming avenue towards an invisible great house; side turnings, half-overgrown with turf, leading to villages quaintly entitled. Some of the details his eye and ear and nose took in--such as the braying of barrel organs on the fringe of an unseen fair, on a rather burnt and blackened gipsy-befouled common; or the smell of pig-sties in a hamlet, or placards in big print pasted round an ancient stump or on an old oak paling--it was irrational to call beautiful. But together they made up England at its best, with old churches packed with the history of England, the little towns so prosperous, the straggling villages, beautiful if insanitary, the signposts with their agreeable Anglo-Saxon and Norman names, so pleasing to the eye after years of untracked wilderness; the postman trudging his round in red-and-black, the gamekeeper in velveteen, the hearty labourers in corduroy, blue-shirted, bare-armed and hairy chested. All this was England. "Was there a jollier country in the world?" (There was not, in 1886.)
And as to Sibyl.... How differently he saw her now, after four years! As pretty as paint, though rather overheated after a short ride; but _how_ artificial! What a delusion to suppose such a woman would have cared for a rough life in Africa. Why she even spoke slightingly of India, a country of romance far exceeding Africa. Indeed, he had only turned to Africa and African problems because all the great careers to be made in India were seemingly over.... There was nothing to be done in India without powerful backing....
Backing? It was perhaps silly to have flouted the suggestion of Lord Silchester's influence.... It was difficult unless you were related to permanent officials or members of Parliament to get a Consular commission in East Africa. Why not gradually--gradually of course--it wouldn't do to forgive her too quickly--become reconciled to Sibyl's marriage and pursue instead his second desire, a great African career?...
So it was a comparatively happy Roger Brentham who cantered up the road to the vicarage at Farleigh Wallop in the late afternoon of that day and sat with his sister Maud in the arbour enjoying a sound English tea. Maud, a pleasant-faced young woman of thirty, the only sister of three stalwart brothers, one a soldier, another a sailor and the third intending to be a barrister; housekeeper to her father, an absent-minded archaeologist; could not be called pretty, because she was too much like a young man of twenty-five with almost a young man's flat figure, but she was in every way satisfactory as a sister. Her father was out on some archaeological ramble and she was glad of it because she thought Roger might have come to her with a heart to mend. No doubt he felt heart-broken over Sibyl's defection. She looked at him inquiringly while she poured out tea, but would not of course broach the subject.
"You've been out a long time with the cob. I hope you haven't over-ridden him? Where did you go?"
"To Silchester and back; but I baited him at Tadley and gave him an hour's rest in Basingstoke; and another hour at Silchester. I've jogged along very quietly, looking up old haunts--and--and I've seen Sibyl Grayburn. She told me all about her engagement."
"Sibyl? Then--you don't mind so much? I hardly knew how to break it to you...."
"_Mind_? Oh, well, there _was_ a boy-and-girl engagement, a flirtation between us before I went away, as you knew. But Africa drove all that out of my mind. Besides, how can I marry on five hundred a year? I dare say Sibyl has done well for herself, and she's getting on. Girls can't afford to wait and look about them like a man can. By the bye, old girl, why doesn't some one come along and marry _you_? I don't know a better sort of wife than _you'd_ make...."
_Maud_: "Thank you, Roger, I'm sure you mean it. But I don't suppose I shall ever marry. My line is to look after father for the rest of his life, and then become everybody's aunt. I'm really his curate, you know. And his clerk and his congregation, very often. Oh, I'm quite happy; don't pity me; I couldn't have nicer brothers ... or perhaps a nicer life. I love Farleigh----"
_Roger_ (not noticing, man-like, the tiny, tiny sigh that accompanied this renunciation of marriage): "Jove! How jolly all this is: you're right. If I wasn't a man I should think like you. What could one have better than this?" And he looked away from the arbour and the prettily furnished tea-table to the well-kept lawn with long shadows from the herbaceous border. Beyond that the wooded slopes of Farleigh Down and the distant meadows of the lowland, and then the sun-gilt roofs of Basingstoke's northern suburb, and the distant trains, three, four, five miles away with their trails of cotton-wool smoke indicating a busy world beyond the quietude of the vicarage garden. He could see the slight trace of a straight Roman road athwart the northern landscape, Winchester to Silchester; the downs of Hannington and Sydmonton and the far-off woods of Sherborne. When he was queer with sun-fever in Somaliland he would sometimes be tantalized by this view, like a mirage, instead of the brown-grey sun-scorched plains ringed by low ridges of table-topped mountains and dotted with scrubby acacias, whitened by the drought ... and would pull himself together, sit upright in the saddle and wonder if he would ever see home again. And here he was.... Hang Sibyl!...