TELLS OF AN ERRING WOMAN.
While the captain and Comethup were trudging steadily homeward through
the rain, the man in the dull upstairs room sat within his circle of
light, trying to fix his mind upon the work before him. He held his
broad forehead between his palms, and set his lips, and bent his eyes
steadily upon the printed page, tapping out a little impatient measure
with his foot, in anger with himself that he could not concentrate his
attention. Finally, he got up impatiently, kicking the books out of
his path, and began to stride up and down that end of the room, having
something again of the appearance of a hunted, animal trotting to and
fro within the measure of its cage.
"Am I such a brute?" he asked at last; "are there no days behind
these--far away in the background--when things were better and fairer,
and when I dreamed a dream, as other men have dreamed, of something
greater even than books? It was all lies, lies, lies! The man who hugs
a woman to his breast can only hold her safely if he pays the price,
and knits her to him with chains of gold, forged tightly. His fleshly
arms are never strong enough; she will slip out of them; all the tales
of woman's constancy and woman's virtue have no word of truth in
them; the women were virtuous because their lack of virtue was never
discovered."
He began to pace up and down again, locking his hands behind him, and
alternately clasping them behind his head.
"Why should I care?" he began again, restlessly. "There is a fate in
all these things, and if the fate means that this child shall grow up,
and live, and cheat another man, why, then the fate must do its work,
and nothing that I can say will change it. I have had it in my mind
sometimes to pray--if any prayers could avail--that the child might
die; that's one of the mysteries of this strange creation of ours, that
so fair and sweet a thing should grow up, to foul men's ways, and spoil
their work. I wonder if I----"
He was interrupted by the abrupt entry of Mrs. Blissett. That worthy
woman appeared altogether demoralized, shaken to her prosaic depths;
she came in panting, with one hand pressed to her ample bosom. The man
stopped in his walk and turned savagely upon her, although without
speaking.
"Please, sir, there's a lady, sir, as do be come to see ye; and she----"
Dr. Vernier, with an angry exclamation, took a stride toward her, but
stopped suddenly. There was a shadow behind the woman--the shadow of
some one else, creeping into the room with a hand against the wall as
though groping blindly. The man had seen it, and stood, like one turned
to stone, watching it. Mrs. Blissett, following the direction of his
eyes, turned swiftly, and backed away from it. The figure, still with
a hand against the wall, came slowly along the side of the room, with
her eyes fixed only on him. He seemed to recover himself at last with a
start, drew a deep breath, and waved Mrs. Blissett from the room with
an impatient arm. "You need not stay--you need not stay. I will see the
lady."
Mrs. Blissett evidently had a vague idea that this was a night when
anything might happen; she had performed her small duties about the
place for many months, and had never seen a living creature come to the
house, and on this night the place had already been twice invaded. She
backed out of the room with a sigh of resignation and closed the door.
The stranger had put an arm across her eyes, as though to shield
herself from the doctor's gaze, and was leaning against the wall; she
seemed, from the shaking of her slight body, to be weeping. There was
silence between them for some moments--a silence which the man broke;
his voice sounded strained and unnatural.
"Where have you come from?"
"A long way--a very long way," replied the woman without uncovering her
face.
"Why have you come back here?" His voice was dull and level and hard,
and his face might have been cut out of stone, for any changing
expression it wore. "You chose your own path; why have you abandoned
it?"
She was weeping so bitterly that for a time she could not answer his
question. At last she turned her face fully to him, a young and rather
pretty face, but haggard and wild with weeping and with sorrow; he
looked at it unmoved.
"I have been seeking for you a long time," she said at last, in a voice
scarcely above a whisper. "There has been a hunger here"--she struck
herself relentlessly on the breast--"greater than I could bear. I could
not sleep; I have even prayed to die. I want to see--to see the child!"
The man raised his arm fiercely, as though to ward off her approach,
and took a step backward. "No!" he cried, almost in a shout.
"I ask nothing else," she pleaded. "If anything could have held me
true to the old life--if anything could have bent me to your will, and
starved the soul out of me, it would have been the child. I tell you
something has gone out of me here"--she struck herself again--"and I
shall die if I can not hold her in my arms again. You are a man; you do
not understand. You can find it in your heart to laugh at me, because I
was able to leave her; but she is flesh of my flesh, and I can not tear
her from me. Let me see her; let me know that she is well; let me see
her smile into my eyes again; let me kiss her! Man, hear the rain and
the wind; I have come through them these many weary miles, and I will
go through them again. Let me see her, if only for a few minutes, and I
swear to you, by the God that gave her to me, that I will go away, and
trouble you no more! Only let me ease my hunger." She was down on her
knees at his feet, stretching out her hands to clasp them; he backed
away to avoid her.
"You did not think of all this before," he said, slowly. "Where is the
man?"
"Dead!" she said, in a low voice.
"Ah! I thought so; I should scarcely have seen you here again had he
been alive. And what do you think is to become of you now?" He asked
the question with the bitter savagery of one who sees something that
has wronged him in the dust at his feet, helpless, and is gladdened by
the sight.
"I do not care," she said. "It does not matter; can't you understand
that nothing matters? But my child, my baby; that has been the bitter
thing through all. Do you think that I would plead to you as I do now
for anything else? Do you think that I would kneel at your feet in any
other cause?"
The man began to pace up and down the room again, grasping his strong,
square chin by one hand, and bending his brows in thought. The woman
drew herself slowly to her feet and watched him intently. After a
moment the man faced about, leaned his back against the wall, folded
his arms, and looked down at her.
"Hysterics, or appeals, or tears are useless in a matter of this kind,"
he said; "let us look at it clearly and dispassionately, as though it
lay outside ourselves. You have no right here; your part in my life and
in the child's is played out and done with--do you understand that?
You cut yourself off from it all long ago; I have set myself to forget
your very name, and I do not suppose that the child can remember you.
From the standpoint of justice and morality, you have simply ceased
to exist; you're outside the pale--a lost, abandoned woman. Do you
understand _that_?"
The woman did not answer; she stood rocking herself to and fro, like a
creature in pain, with her hands pressed tightly to her eyes.
"When I married you," the man went on, "I gave you everything that a
woman could desire--money, culture, a home. No thinking woman wants
more than that. You chose to tell me that the life you led was dull
and spiritless; that I was always with my books; that my friends did
not interest you, and that you found their conversation tedious. I
think once--it's an old forgotten thing, and I'm not quite sure about
it--but I think once you told me that you had hoped for something else;
I believe you said some foolish schoolgirl nonsense about love. Well, I
gave you all I had to offer, and I fail to see how any reasonable woman
could ask for more."
"No, you never would understand that," she murmured behind her hands.
"Then you made the acquaintance of this other man, a ne'er-do-weel,
a child laughing in the sunshine, with no purpose in his life and
no character in his face. But," he went on, sneeringly, "he was the
pretty, empty-headed fool you wanted; he could quote rhymes to you, and
fill your ears with things that had no substance in them--things such
as every man has whispered to the woman he craves since the world first
began. Well, you believed him; you caught at the shadow, and lost the
substance. Now he's dead, you think you can come back here, as though
nothing had happened."
"I do not; I only want to see my baby. Give me but an hour with her;
let me assure myself that she is well; let me see her only in her sleep
if you will. I must see her; this hunger at my heart will drive me mad."
"It has not driven you mad before," he said, with a laugh.
"No, I tried to forget; _he_ made me forget. Oh, don't you understand
that a woman may be righteous even in her sin; that she may cling to a
man sinfully sometimes, just because she has promised? It is too late
in the day now for us to blame each other, or for me to attempt to
justify myself. Only believe that I have left all that old unhappiness
behind. John, you will let me see her?"
"How did you find out where I was?" asked the man, after a pause.
"I went to the old home and found that you had left. I made fruitless
inquiries for a long time, and at last, quite by accident, happened
upon some one who had seen you in this town. I came here yesterday and
got a quiet lodging, and set about to look for you. Indeed"--as the
man made an impatient gesture--"indeed, I have not come to trouble you
again; I will go away, and you shall not see me any more."
The man appeared to be thinking deeply. After a long pause, during
which she looked at him appealingly, with her hands tightly clasped, he
spoke, going first to the door, and assuring himself that it was shut.
"When I left the home you dishonoured and abandoned," he began, "I
dismissed the servants and brought the child with me, and came here
secretly. I had some pride, more perhaps than you imagined, and I
did not want the stupid story bandied about on every one's lips. I
determined to set aside that mistake and begin over again. So I chose
this old house, in a town where no one knew me; I got a woman to come
in, day by day, to do what little work there was to be done, and to
look after the child. It's a dreary place," he said, looking round the
darkened room with a sigh, "but the child has to suffer, I suppose, for
the sins of the mother; that's an inevitable law. It's an inevitable
law also that punishment follows sin--not in the next world only, if
there be one, but here. I should be wanting in something, failing to
carry out what I have so often preached and written, if I did not
recognise that punishment must follow your sin, and that you--poor
frail mortal that you are--have inevitably and unconsciously rushed
upon your own punishment. It shall be a fine and a bitter one, I
promise you. Listen to me."
She looked up at him tremblingly, striving to read in his inscrutable
face the meaning of his words.
"You shall not only see the child for an hour; you shall live here, in
the same house with it, as long as you like." Then, as she would have
cried out, he put up one hand to stop her, and laughed, and went on
mercilessly: "But on one condition. I have told you that no one here
knows anything of my story; they believe, I think, that the mother of
the child is dead. Let them still think so. The condition I impose is
that you shall remain in this house, under the name by which I first
knew you; that you shall occupy the position of housekeeper; that you
shall see the child, and attend to her wants in every way, and at any
time you like. I have discovered to-night that she has been somewhat
neglected by the person I paid to look after her; you will have a
deeper interest in her than that, and may be trusted, I think, to look
after her well." He laughed again, then suddenly stepped across to
her and took her fiercely by the arms and looked into her eyes. "But
understand this: She is to know nothing of the relationship that exists
between you; she will know you only as a paid dependent. The instant
that, from any endearment you give her, or any word you let slip, she
learns that you are her mother, you leave this place, and see her no
more! Do you understand that?"
She shrank away from him and covered her face with her hands. "Oh, I
can not, I can not!" she cried.
He pointed to the door. "Go as you came; you have no right here; I have
been a fool to permit you to stay even so long as this. Go at once, or
I will have you turned from the doors!"
"No, no, stop!" she cried. "If there is no other way, I accept your
condition."
"Good. But you must clearly understand that you have absolutely no
interest in the child's life; she goes or comes as I bid or as I
permit; you have no voice in anything which concerns her. But you may
see her, provided always that you respect that condition, and that she
does not learn of the relationship between you. The instant I discover
that she even guesses what it is, you leave this house, and you never
return. Is that clear?"
"Yes, yes, I accept. Indeed, if there is no other way--and I know I
deserve not even so much as this--if there is no other way, then I am
grateful."
"You have need to be. For the future you take your old name, and we
will prefix something respectable to it, for propriety's sake and
for the child's. You will be known as Mrs. Dawson, and there is no
necessity for you to tell anything concerning yourself that you do not
care to have known."
"I understand; I understand perfectly. May I--may I see the child--now?"
"She is asleep, I suspect," replied the man, coldly.
"Indeed--indeed I will not wake her," cried the eager woman.
"Very well. You will find her room at the top of the house, the door on
the left." Then, as she was moving rapidly across the room, he called
to her. "You will find a spare bed in that room; it was used by the
woman Blissett, who attends on her, when 'Linda was very ill some time
since. You may sleep there to-night; I will have another room prepared
for you to-morrow."
She reached the door, and then turned to look back at him, with some
words of thanks on her lips. But he was at his desk, with his head
buried among his books and papers; and she stole quietly out and closed
the door. Then, with a light and rapid step she flew up the stairs,
calling softly as she went, in a whisper, "'Linda, 'Linda, my baby!"