Ida Larpent nearly screamed. The pain of her jealousy was unbearable.
Beatrix fought herself free and stood panting against the rail. And as she stood there with heaving breasts and her hand on her mouth, that unforgivable sentence which had burned itself on her vanity seemed to stand out in letters of fire on the deck house. "If you and I were the only two living people on a desert island and there was not the faintest hope of our ever being taken back to the world, I would build you a hut at the farthest end of it and treat you as a man." This assault, this attack, was all the more nauseating because of its apparent cold-bloodedness, because it was made by the man who had dared to say those words to her. For a moment, with the blood in her head, she was overcome with a desire to cry out for servants and order them to kill that man. All that was imperious in her nature craved for instant punishment. Then, looking at the blaze in Franklin's eyes and mistaking it for the beast in him, she mastered herself and turned cold.
"Just now," she said, "I called you a Czar. I was wrong. You're a polished gun-man."
Franklin laughed. He was still drunk with the taste of her lips. "Can't a man kiss his wife on their honeymoon if he feels like it?"
Beatrix put out both hands to keep him away. She was as white as moonlight and her eyes shone like stars.
Ida Larpent almost left her place to catch every word.
"Wife! Thank God you will never be able to call me that."
Franklin went nearer,--within an inch of those two sentinel hands. "I didn't begin calling you that. You chose the word, not I." The way she had of putting him in the wrong always, of making him a brute who had tricked her into this impossible position was mighty difficult to bear.
Holding her breath, amazed and delighted at her sudden and unexpected insight into this marriage business which had always puzzled her, Ida Larpent watched these two young people as a cat watches mice,--the girl standing out against the dark background of sky in all the pride of youth, her bare shoulders outlined by the moonlight; the man, tall, wiry and amazingly vital, bending slightly forward, with his hands clenched; the silence hardly broken by the regular pulse of the engines, the humming of the breeze and the soft swish of the sea.