She had written him in that fierce honesty which spoke in every penstroke
on the paper:--
... "Yes, I love you! I am proud when I say it over to myself, when I see
it written here. I want you to know just how it is with me and my
husband.... So our marriage was a mistake, one of the millions women make
out of the girlish guess. Ignorance, blind ignorance of self and life! And
my husband knows how it is between us. He knows that when the man comes to
me whom I can love, I shall love him.... The man has come.... When it is
time, I shall go to him and tell him honestly what has happened. I hate the
little, lying women,--those who are afraid. I am not afraid! But these last
hours I will have my heart's joy to myself,--we will draw a circle about
ourselves."...
"As I kiss you, I love you with that spirit you have given me," she said to
Falkner. "That is right, and this is right. You have given me life, and
thus I give it back to you."...
When they were alone beside the sea this last evening, Margaret said:
"Dearest, you must know as I know, that nothing which we have had together
is sin. I would not yield even to you where I felt the right. To my father
the Bishop, this would be Sin. To that dear old lady over there in
Bedmouth, who suffered all her life from a bullying husband and from a
selfish son,--and who is now too broken to think for herself,--it would be
Sin, anything not suffering would be Sin! But I know!" She raised her head
proudly from his arms. "I know within me that this is the rightest thing in
all my life. When it came, I was sure that I should take it, and that it
would save me from worse than death.... It came ... and we were strong
enough to take it, thank God!"
On the other side of the shingle rampart, which rose sheer behind them, the
slow swells of the sea fell at distant intervals with solemn resonance, the
only sound that broke the stillness of the night. This surge rising and
falling on the land from out the great body of the sea was like a deep
voice in the woman's soul, echoing her instinct of a reason beyond reasons
that compelled.
But the man, holding her close to him, his lips upon her lips, did not heed
her hot words of justification. His was the hunger which took what
satisfied it without debate.
"It makes little difference, the right and the wrong, after to-night," he
replied grimly, "in all the days to come.... We have lived and we have
loved, that is enough."
"No, no,--we are not weak, blind fools!" she spoke on swiftly. "I will not
have it so! I will not have you leave me to-night with the thought that
some day you will feel that of me. You must understand--you must always
remember through all the years of life--that I--the woman you love--am
sinless, am pure.... I can go with your kisses upon my lips to my children,
to little Ned, and hold them tight, and know that I am pure in the sight of
God! ...
"I give them my life, my all,--I am giving them this, too. A woman's heart
is not filled with the love of children. A woman's life is not closed at
thirty-two! ... I have a soul--a life to be satisfied,--ah, dearest, a soul
of my own to be filled, in order to give. Most men don't know that a woman
has a life of her own--apart from her children, from her husband, from all.
It's hers, hers, her very own!" she cried with a sob of joy and anguish.
In these words escaped the essence of that creed which had taken the place
of the Bishop's teaching,--the creed that is breathed insensibly in the
atmosphere of the age,--'I, the woman, have a soul that is mine which has
its rights, and what it bids me take, that I will take and hold!'
The man listened to the solemn rhythm of the sea pounding upon the rocky
coast, and it spoke to him of fatality, of the surge of life striking
blindly, carrying in its mighty grip the little human atoms. It had borne
him up to the stars, and in a few hours it would roll him back, down into
the gulf, from which no effort of his will could take him. With this
hunger, which was his human birthright, he must labor on, unappeased. It
was given him merely to know what would recreate living for him, what would
make of the days joy instead of pain, and it was not to be his, except for
this moment of time.
"I think," he said, "there is enough to suffer and endure. We will not
quibble about the law. In the face of the gulf, why argue?" and he took her
once more in his arms, where she rested content....
Lawlor's Point was a little neck of shingle, curving inwards from the open
sea, making a small harbor. On the landward side the still, salty marsh was
fringed by evergreens that rose dark in the night. Once it had been a farm,
its few acres swept by the full Atlantic winds, its shore pounded by the
rock drift of the coast. Within the shingle the waves had washed a sandy
beach.... Margaret knew the place years before, and they had found it
to-night in the dark. The abandoned farm-house, windowless, loomed above
them, desolate, forlorn, emitting an odor of the past from its damp rooms.
About the old walnut tree where they had been sitting there grew in the
long grass fleur-de-lys and myrtle.
"Let us go nearer to the water!" Margaret exclaimed. "I want to hear its
voice close to my ears. This place is musty with dead lives. Dead lives!"
She laughed softly. "I was like them once, only I walked and spoke, instead
of lying still in a grave. And then you found me, dearest, and touched me.
I shall never be dead like that again."
And when they had picked their way over the rough shingle to the water, she
said in another passionate outburst, as if nature dammed for a long time
were pouring itself forth in torrent:--
"Pain! Don't say the word. Do you think that we can count the pain--ever?
Now that we have lived? What is Pain against Being!"
"A man's thought, that!" he reflected, surprised by the piercing insight,
the triumphant answer of the spirit to the backward dragging surge of
circumstance. "A woman suffers--always more than a man."
Margaret, flinging up her head to the dark heaven, the deep guttural note
of the sea in her ears, chanted low, "Some pain is tonic.... Though
to-night we are together, one and undivided--for the last time, the last
time," she whispered, "yet I cannot feel the pain."
The man rebelled:--
"The last time? ... But we are not ready, Margaret,--not yet!"
"We should never be ready!"
"We have had so little."
"Yes! So little--oh, so little of all the splendid chance of living."
The same thought lay between them. They had come but to the edge of
experience, and beyond lay the vision of recreated life. Like souls that
touched the confines of a new existence and turned back, so must they turn
back to earth. So little! A few hours of meeting, a few spoken words, a few
caresses, a few moments like this of mute understanding, out of all
conscious time, and then nothing,--the blank!
There was something cowardly, thus to turn back at the edge of experience,
incomplete and wistfully desirous. Yet the man would not ask her to venture
on. What the woman would gladly give, he would not take as sacrifice. She
understood.
"Would it be easier?" she asked slowly, "if for a time we had all?"
"Yes!"
"If for a little while we left the world behind us and went away--to
know--all?"
"We should be happier then, always.... But I cannot ask it."
"It would be better so," she whispered dreamily. "I will go!"
Her hands clasped about him and her lips trembled.
"We will take our life!" She smiled as the vision of joy--food for a
lifetime--filled her heart. "For a few hours I will be yours, all yours."
Thus, there beside the grumbling sea, these two--full man and woman, having
weighed the issues of this life, the complex threads of soul and body,
obligation and right, willed that they would take to themselves out of all
eternity a few days, a few nights, a few mornings and a few
evenings,--entire hours to be theirs, from which must be born courage for
the future.
* * * * *
Old Mrs. Pole looked up at the sound of Margaret's step. The younger
woman's face was pale, but still radiant with a complete joy. She patted
the old lady's cheek and glanced down at the magazine in her lap. Between
these two there was a depth of unspoken sympathy.
"Found a good story, mother dear?" Margaret asked.
The old woman's lips trembled. Many times that evening she had resolved to
speak to Margaret of something her heart ached over. For she had seen far
these last days with those old eyes that had seen so much. She could divine
the dead waste in her daughter-in-law's heart, having lived with father and
son, and out of the wisdom of suffering years endured she wished to speak
to-night. But the deeper wisdom of age restrained her.
"Yes, my dear,--a very good story."
Each ache must find its own healing.