"Because I can't, I can't, I can't, I can't!" she repeated passionately,
with her altered, distorted face.
"Damnation!" murmured the young man. He seized her hand, drew it into
his arm, forcing her to walk with him along the road.
That afternoon Olive Chancellor came out of her house and wandered for a
long time upon the shore. She looked up and down the bay, at the sails
that gleamed on the blue water, shifting in the breeze and the light;
they were a source of interest to her that they had never been before.
It was a day she was destined never to forget; she felt it to be the
saddest, the most wounding of her life. Unrest and haunting fear had not
possession of her now, as they had held her in New York when Basil
Ransom carried off Verena, to mark her for his own, in the park. But an
immeasurable load of misery seemed to sit upon her soul; she ached with
the bitterness of her melancholy, she was dumb and cold with despair.
She had spent the violence of her terror, the eagerness of her grief,
and now she was too weary to struggle with fate. She appeared to herself
almost to have accepted it, as she wandered forth in the beautiful
afternoon with the knowledge that the "ten minutes" which Verena had
told her she meant to devote to Mr. Ransom that morning had developed
suddenly into an embarkation for the day. They had gone out in a boat
together; one of the village worthies, from whom small craft were to be
hired, had, at Verena's request, sent his little son to Miss
Chancellor's cottage with that information. She had not understood
whether they had taken the boatman with them. Even when the information
came (and it came at a moment of considerable reassurance), Olive's
nerves were not ploughed up by it as they had been, for instance, by the
other expedition, in New York; and she could measure the distance she
had traversed since then. It had not driven her away on the instant to
pace the shore in frenzy, to challenge every boat that passed, and beg
that the young lady who was sailing somewhere in the bay with a dark
gentleman with long hair should be entreated immediately to return. On
the contrary, after the first quiver of pain inflicted by the news she
had been able to occupy herself, to look after her house, to write her
morning's letters, to go into her accounts, which she had had some time
on her mind. She had wanted to put off thinking, for she knew to what
hideous recognitions that would bring her round again. These were summed
up in the fact that Verena was now not to be trusted for an hour. She
had sworn to her the night before, with a face like a lacerated angel's,
that her choice was made, that their union and their work were more to
her than any other life could ever be, and that she deeply believed that
should she forswear these holy things she would simply waste away, in
the end, with remorse and shame. She would see Mr. Ransom just once
more, for ten minutes, to utter one or two supreme truths to him, and
then they would take up their old, happy, active, fruitful days again,
would throw themselves more than ever into their splendid effort. Olive
had seen how Verena was moved by Miss Birdseye's death, how at the sight
of that unique woman's majestically simple withdrawal from a scene in
which she had held every vulgar aspiration, every worldly standard and
lure, so cheap, the girl had been touched again with the spirit of their
most confident hours, had flamed up with the faith that no narrow
personal joy could compare in sweetness with the idea of doing something
for those who had always suffered and who waited still. This helped
Olive to believe that she might begin to count upon her again, conscious
as she was at the same time that Verena had been strangely weakened and
strained by her odious ordeal. Oh, Olive knew that she loved him--knew
what the passion was with which the wretched girl had to struggle; and
she did her the justice to believe that her professions were sincere,
her effort was real. Harassed and embittered as she was, Olive
Chancellor still proposed to herself to be rigidly just, and that is why
she pitied Verena now with an unspeakable pity, regarded her as the
victim of an atrocious spell, and reserved all her execration and
contempt for the author of their common misery. If Verena had stepped
into a boat with him half an hour after declaring that she would give
him his dismissal in twenty words, that was because he had ways, known
to himself and other men, of creating situations without an issue, of
forcing her to do things she could do only with sharp repugnance, under
the menace of pain that would be sharper still. But all the same, what
actually stared her in the face was that Verena was not to be trusted,
even after rallying again as passionately as she had done during the
days that followed Miss Birdseye's death. Olive would have liked to know
the pang of penance that _she_ would have been afraid, in her place, to
incur; to see the locked door which _she_ would not have managed to
force open!
This inexpressibly mournful sense that, after all, Verena, in her
exquisite delicacy and generosity, was appointed only to show how women
had from the beginning of time been the sport of men's selfishness and
avidity, this dismal conviction accompanied Olive on her walk, which
lasted all the afternoon, and in which she found a kind of tragic
relief. She went very far, keeping in the lonely places, unveiling her
face to the splendid light, which seemed to make a mock of the darkness
and bitterness of her spirit. There were little sandy coves, where the
rocks were clean, where she made long stations, sinking down in them as
if she hoped she should never rise again. It was the first time she had
been out since Miss Birdseye's death, except the hour when, with the
dozen sympathisers who came from Boston, she stood by the tired old
woman's grave. Since then, for three days, she had been writing letters,
narrating, describing to those who hadn't come; there were some, she
thought, who might have managed to do so, instead of despatching her
pages of diffuse reminiscence and asking her for all particulars in
return. Selah Tarrant and his wife had come, obtrusively, as she
thought, for they never had had very much intercourse with Miss
Birdseye; and if it was for Verena's sake, Verena was there to pay every
tribute herself. Mrs. Tarrant had evidently hoped Miss Chancellor would
ask her to stay on at Marmion, but Olive felt how little she was in a
state for such heroics of hospitality. It was precisely in order that
she should not have to do that sort of thing that she had given Selah
such considerable sums, on two occasions, at a year's interval. If the
Tarrants wanted a change of air they could travel all over the
country--their present means permitted it; they could go to Saratoga or
Newport if they liked. Their appearance showed that they could put their
hands into their pockets (or into hers); at least Mrs. Tarrant's did.
Selah still sported (on a hot day in August) his immemorial waterproof;
but his wife rustled over the low tombstones at Marmion in garments of
which (little as she was versed in such inquiries) Olive could see that
the cost had been large. Besides, after Doctor Prance had gone (when all
was over), she felt what a relief it was that Verena and she could be
just together--together with the monstrous wedge of a question that had
come up between them. That was company enough, great heaven! and she had
not got rid of such an inmate as Doctor Prance only to put Mrs. Tarrant
in her place.
Did Verena's strange aberration, on this particular day, suggest to
Olive that it was no use striving, that the world was all a great trap
or trick, of which women were ever the punctual dupes, so that it was
the worst of the curse that rested upon them that they must most
humiliate those who had most their cause at heart? Did she say to
herself that their weakness was not only lamentable but hideous--hideous
their predestined subjection to man's larger and grosser insistence? Did
she ask herself why she should give up her life to save a sex which,
after all, didn't wish to be saved, and which rejected the truth even
after it had bathed them with its auroral light and they had pretended
to be fed and fortified? These are mysteries into which I shall not
attempt to enter, speculations with which I have no concern; it is
sufficient for us to know that all human effort had never seemed to her
so barren and thankless as on that fatal afternoon. Her eyes rested on
the boats she saw in the distance, and she wondered if in one of them
Verena were floating to her fate; but so far from straining forward to
beckon her home she almost wished that she might glide away for ever,
that _she_ might never see her again, never undergo the horrible details
of a more deliberate separation. Olive lived over, in her miserable
musings, her life for the last two years; she knew, again, how noble and
beautiful her scheme had been, but how it had all rested on an illusion
of which the very thought made her feel faint and sick. What was before
her now was the reality, with the beautiful, indifferent sky pouring
down its complacent rays upon it. The reality was simply that Verena had
been more to her than she ever was to Verena, and that, with her
exquisite natural art, the girl had cared for their cause only because,
for the time, no interest, no fascination, was greater. Her talent, the
talent which was to achieve such wonders, was nothing to her; it was too
easy, she could leave it alone, as she might close her piano, for
months; it was only to Olive that it was everything. Verena had
submitted, she had responded, she had lent herself to Olive's incitement
and exhortation, because she was sympathetic and young and abundant and
fanciful; but it had been a kind of hothouse loyalty, the mere contagion
of example, and a sentiment springing up from within had easily breathed
a chill upon it. Did Olive ask herself whether, for so many months, her
companion had been only the most unconscious and most successful of
humbugs? Here again I must plead a certain incompetence to give an
answer. Positive it is that she spared herself none of the inductions of
a reverie that seemed to dry up the mists and ambiguities of life. These
hours of backward clearness come to all men and women, once at least,
when they read the past in the light of the present, with the reasons of
things, like unobserved finger-posts, protruding where they never saw
them before. The journey behind them is mapped out and figured, with its
false steps, its wrong observations, all its infatuated, deluded
geography. They understand as Olive understood, but it is probable that
they rarely suffer as she suffered. The sense of regret for her baffled
calculations burned within her like a fire, and the splendour of the
vision over which the curtain of mourning now was dropped brought to her
eyes slow, still tears, tears that came one by one, neither easing her
nerves nor lightening her load of pain. She thought of her innumerable
talks with Verena, of the pledges they had exchanged, of their earnest
studies, their faithful work, their certain reward, the winter nights
under the lamp, when they thrilled with previsions as just and a passion
as high as had ever found shelter in a pair of human hearts. The pity of
it, the misery of such a fall after such a flight, could express itself
only, as the poor girl prolonged the vague pauses of her unnoticed
ramble, in a low, inarticulate murmur of anguish.
The afternoon waned, bringing with it the slight chill which, at the
summer's end, begins to mark the shortening days. She turned her face
homeward, and by this time became conscious that if Verena's companion
had not yet brought her back there might be ground for uneasiness as to
what had happened to them. It seemed to her that no sail-boat could have
put into the town without passing more or less before her eyes and
showing her whom it carried; she had seen a dozen, freighted only with
the figures of men. An accident was perfectly possible (what could
Ransom, with his plantation habits, know about the management of a
sail?), and once that danger loomed before her--the signal loveliness of
the weather had prevented its striking her before--Olive's imagination
hurried, with a bound, to the worst. She saw the boat overturned and
drifting out to sea, and (after a week of nameless horror) the body of
an unknown young woman, defaced beyond recognition, but with long auburn
hair and in a white dress, washed up in some far-away cove. An hour
before, her mind had rested with a sort of relief on the idea that
Verena should sink for ever beneath the horizon, so that their
tremendous trouble might never be; but now, with the lateness of the
hour, a sharp, immediate anxiety took the place of that intended
resignation; and she quickened her step, with a heart that galloped too
as she went. Then it was, above all, that she felt how _she_ had
understood friendship, and how never again to see the face of the
creature she had taken to her soul would be for her as the stroke of
blindness. The twilight had become thick by the time she reached Marmion
and paused for an instant in front of her house, over which the elms
that stood on the grassy wayside appeared to her to hang a blacker
curtain than ever before.
There was no candle in any window, and when she pushed in and stood in
the hall, listening a moment, her step awakened no answering sound. Her
heart failed her; Verena's staying out in a boat from ten o'clock in the
morning till nightfall was too unnatural, and she gave a cry, as she
rushed into the low, dim parlour (darkened on one side, at that hour, by
the wide-armed foliage, and on the other by the veranda and trellis),
which expressed only a wild personal passion, a desire to take her
friend in her arms again on any terms, even the most cruel to herself.
The next moment she started back, with another and a different
exclamation, for Verena was in the room, motionless, in a corner--the
first place in which she had seated herself on re-entering the
house--looking at her with a silent face which seemed strange,
unnatural, in the dusk. Olive stopped short, and for a minute the two
women remained as they were, gazing at each other in the dimness. After
that, too, Olive still said nothing; she only went to Verena and sat
down beside her. She didn't know what to make of her manner; she had
never been like that before. She was unwilling to speak; she seemed
crushed and humbled. This was almost the worst--if anything could be
worse than what had gone before; and Olive took her hand with an
irresistible impulse of compassion and assurance. From the way it lay in
her own she guessed her whole feeling--saw it was a kind of shame, shame
for her weakness, her swift surrender, her insane gyration, in the
morning. Verena expressed it by no protest and no explanation; she
appeared not even to wish to hear the sound of her own voice. Her
silence itself was an appeal--an appeal to Olive to ask no questions
(she could trust her to inflict no spoken reproach); only to wait till
she could lift up her head again. Olive understood, or thought she
understood, and the woefulness of it all only seemed the deeper. She
would just sit there and hold her hand; that was all she could do; they
were beyond each other's help in any other way now. Verena leaned her
head back and closed her eyes, and for an hour, as nightfall settled in
the room, neither of the young women spoke. Distinctly, it was a kind of
shame. After a while the parlour-maid, very casual, in the manner of the
servants at Marmion, appeared on the threshold with a lamp; but Olive
motioned her frantically away. She wished to keep the darkness. It was a
kind of shame.
The next morning Basil Ransom rapped loudly with his walking-stick on
the lintel of Miss Chancellor's house-door, which, as usual on fine
days, stood open. There was no need he should wait till the servant had
answered his summons; for Olive, who had reason to believe he would
come, and who had been lurking in the sitting-room for a purpose of her
own, stepped forth into the little hall.
"I am sorry to disturb you; I had the hope that--for a moment--I might
see Miss Tarrant." That was the speech with which (and a measured
salutation) he greeted his advancing kinswoman. She faced him an
instant, and her strange green eyes caught the light.
"It's impossible. You may believe that when I say it."
"Why is it impossible?" he asked, smiling in spite of an inward
displeasure. And as Olive gave him no answer, only gazing at him with a
cold audacity which he had not hitherto observed in her, he added a
little explanation. "It is simply to have seen her before I go--to have
said five words to her. I want her to know that I have made up my
mind--since yesterday--to leave this place; I shall take the train at
noon."
It was not to gratify Olive Chancellor that he had determined to go
away, or even that he told her this; yet he was surprised that his words
brought no expression of pleasure to her face. "I don't think it is of
much importance whether you go away or not. Miss Tarrant herself has
gone away."
"Miss Tarrant--gone away?" This announcement was so much at variance
with Verena's apparent intentions the night before that his ejaculation
expressed chagrin as well as surprise, and in doing so it gave Olive a
momentary advantage. It was the only one she had ever had, and the poor
girl may be excused for having enjoyed it--so far as enjoyment was
possible to her. Basil Ransom's visible discomfiture was more agreeable
to her than anything had been for a long time.
"I went with her myself to the early train; and I saw it leave the
station." And Olive kept her eyes unaverted, for the satisfaction of
seeing how he took it.
It must be confessed that he took it rather ill. He had decided it was
best he should retire, but Verena's retiring was another matter. "And
where is she gone?" he asked, with a frown.
"I don't think I am obliged to tell you."
"Of course not! Excuse my asking. It is much better that I should find
it out for myself, because if I owed the information to you I should
perhaps feel a certain delicacy as regards profiting by it."
"Gracious heaven!" cried Miss Chancellor, at the idea of Ransom's
delicacy. Then she added more deliberately: "You will not find out for
yourself."
"You think not?"
"I am sure of it!" And her enjoyment of the situation becoming acute,
there broke from her lips a shrill, unfamiliar, troubled sound, which
performed the office of a laugh, a laugh of triumph, but which, at a
distance, might have passed almost as well for a wail of despair. It
rang in Ransom's ears as he quickly turned away.