imitative, among the tepid emotions of aimless, emulationless, dreadless surrounding lives, till the hints of her unwary childhood were forgotten or negatived by the restraints and repressions of later years. Saved from sourness or malignity of temper by a nature which would have been buoyant, joyous, adventurous, in more normal circumstances, her thoughts were yet darkened by the bitter knowledge of her mother’s murder, and by a mental aloofness, half hatred and half contempt, towards the civilization which she had entered through no legal door.
Of all the millions who were united in passive recognition of the fact that their uncoloured lives had drifted into a calm that was worse than wreck, she may have been the only woman whose heart beat hard at times with a rebellion she dared not show. She assented at once to the Colpeck project, not as thinking it a gesture by which the Creator must take rebuke, but rather as one which He would accept with the same willingness as herself, and with entire approval of the self-judgment by which the human race had saved Him the trouble of staging their appropriate end.
When Wyndham Smith had proposed his second objection to the resolution, her heart had leaped to a sudden hope, which might, in a different environment, have given birth to incautious words. But she was saved from that by the custom which discouraged unpondered speech, and by the repressions of two decades.
The quick hope had died as she had silently recognized the absence of response among those around her, and then—at last had leaped again to the flame of wild audacity of which she saw that she must not give the faintest sign. Inwardly she congratulated herself on the wisdom of her earlier silence, for it was clear that the resolution would only have been accepted in the form in which it was finally passed with the certain confidence that one man alone would elect to live—even if he would do so after considering the solitude which would be before him, with the discomforts which his isolation would inevitably involve.
She did not dare to look up the table to Wyndham Smith, lest their eyes should meet and her glance betray to others the emotions she must not show. She sat passive, with downcast eyes, striving to isolate herself in her own thoughts, and as she reflected thus there came a doubt, and a quietening fear.
Welcome as the proposal had been, gladly as she would have accepted the adventure of living in the old dangerous, doubtful ways, she did not like the direction from which it came. She had a special aversion, not to this Colpeck alone, but to the whole Colpeck clan. It was a Colpeck who had been active in the investigation which had exposed her mother’s escapade, and another Colpeck who had proposed the verdict by which she died. It was peculiarly the Colpeck policies, the Colpeck attitude, which had brought her race to this point from which it sought escape by the road of death. Passion towards an individual, either of hate or love, she had been taught to regard as a vulgar criminality such as had long ceased to degrade her kind. But she knew herself to have many criminal impulses which she dared not show. Her existence was an impropriety in itself. She had the lawless mind, the unnatural emotions of a sixth child: she had the blood of one who had played the outlaw among her kind.
Now she thought to make secret approach to the one man who refused the wisdom of all his race, and, in doing this, to flout their will, even as her mother had done before, and as he had no purpose to do. What he did—whether he should stand out, or cease to oppose that which he could not stay—would be done with the permission of all. What she would propose to him would be to make derision of the gesture of refusal which they had planned to make in the face of God, so that it might rouse no more than derisive laughter in the Heaven which they defied.
Like her mother, she would declare lonely war upon the will and wisdom of all her kind, but now in a larger way, by which she might defeat the settled purpose of all. Was it to this great end that she was born, and that her mother had sinned? But—what would a Colpeck say? Might he not decline the offer with horror or contempt? She felt that this was what the Colpeck who was fourth in the intellectual order—the Colpeck of yesterday—would be likely to do. He was not one to condone anything of a lawless kind. And she felt that he disliked and distrusted in his tepid way, as she disliked him with the pulse of a freer blood. She wished it had been almost any but he. But—the Colpeck of yesterday? He had seemed somewhat different in the last hour. And then she remembered—and it was then that she was aware of a sharp fear—where the difference lay, she knew that the hours of sleep of the coming night were to see the reversal of the operation of the night before. The ego of the primitive man which now ruled over the Colpeck brain would be restored to the savage from whom it came, and he would be returned to his own time, with no more than the vexation of a dream that he could not clearly recall. The restored Colpeck ego would be able to review the memory of what he had thought and said today, but would he approve and adopt? It was doubtful—or it might be said that it was less likely than that. It was an improbable thing. Vinetta went to her own room with sombre and thoughtful eyes.
CHAPTER FIVE
Wyndham Smith—or let us say the body that had been his when he walked in another world—paced with a restless impotence the limits of that confining room, which it seemed that those who would visit him could enter or leave at will, but which met him at every point with smooth, impenetrable walls, through which he could find no breach.
He knew—for he had been told, and he half believed—that he was no more than the one-day occupant of a body that was not his; that this strange-seeming environment was his familiar home; and the memories, that seemed so natural and so near, were no more than those of an alien ego, which himself had never experienced, and which tomorrow would be outside his knowledge or recollection, when he should have resumed control of his native body and brain.
He half believed—indeed, more than half—for his memory revealed that which had been spoken in this same room on the previous night, when it had been Wyndham Smith himself who had listened and made response. And, beyond that, he was conscious of some discords of feeling and judgment, some reluctances of his own ego to accept the explosive standards of life and conduct which were approved by the brain which he now controlled. Without knowledge or memory of the life of the world which was round him now, he felt, though he was debarred from its actual contact or sight, that he would control the body of Wyndham Smith to somewhat different purposes than those which had produced the accumulated experiences of which he was conscious now. He was roused from these thoughts by a woman’s voice.
“I suppose,” it said, “you do not know who I am?”
He turned to see a girl’s form, with a face the beauty of which was saddened by a shadow of self-restraint, even of self-repression, but was yet serene, as being assured of its own efficiency to meet the challenge of life in whatever form. The shadow was not one that would have been seen except by one who looked with the eyes of another world. “No,” he said, with a slow deliberation, “I do not know you at all.”
“So,” she said, speaking as slowly as he had done, though from a different cause, for she was using language which was strange to her, and she saw that the error of but one word might be fatal to all she hoped—“so I supposed it would be. Yet you know enough to guess that you may have seen me with other eyes.”
“Yes, I can guess that.”
“Yet” she went on, “it is as strangers that we must meet now. Do you think me one who would be likely to lie?”
He weighed the slow gravity of her speech with such wits as he had, and in the light of the experiences of Wyndham Smith in another world. He looked into eyes of a very clear grey, under darker brows, which it would be easier to love than to disbelieve.
“No,” he said, “I do not think you would lie.”
“Then I can say that which would give life to me, and, it may be, also to you. Do you wish to die, either in your own body, or in that which you now wear?”
“No,” he
