The letter to my husband produced an immediate result. Within
twenty-four hours, the telephone was at work with inquiries about trains
and berths on steamers; and within a week we were on our way to
Marseilles to join the ship that was to take us to Port Said.
Our state-rooms were on the promenade deck of the steamer with a
passage-way between them. This admitted of entirely separate existences,
which was well, for knowing or guessing my share in our altered
arrangements, my husband had become even more morose than before, and no
conversation could be sustained between us.
He spent the greater part of his time in his state-room, grumbling at
the steward, abusing his valet, beating his bad-tempered terrier and
cursing the luck that had brought him on this senseless voyage.
More than ever now I felt the gulf that divided us. I could not pass one
single hour with him in comfort. My life was becoming as cold as an
empty house, and I was beginning to regret the eagerness with which I
had removed my husband from a scene in which he had at least lived the
life of a rational creature, when an unexpected event brought me a
thrill of passing pleasure.
Our seats in the saloon were at the top of the doctor's table, and the
doctor himself was a young Irishman of three or four-and-twenty, as
bright and breezy as a March morning and as racy of the soil as new-cut
peat.
Hearing that I was from Ellan he started me by asking if by chance I
knew Martin Conrad.
"Martin Conrad?" I repeated, feeling (I hardly knew why) as if a rosy
veil were falling over my face and neck.
"Yes, Mart Conrad, as we call him. The young man who has gone out as
doctor with Lieutenant ----'s expedition to the South Pole?"
A wave of tender feeling from my childhood came surging up to my throat
and I said:
"He was the first of my boy friends--in fact the only one."
The young doctor's eyes sparkled and he looked as if he wanted to throw
down his soup-spoon, jump up, and grasp me by both hands.
"God bless me, is that so?" he said.
It turned out that Martin and he had been friends at Dublin University.
They had worked together, "roomed" together, and taken their degrees at
the same time.
"So you know Mart? Lord alive, the way things come out!"
It was easy to see that Martin was not only his friend but his hero. He
talked of him with a passionate love and admiration with which men,
whatever they feel, rarely speak of each other.
Martin was the salt of the earth. He was the finest fellow and the
staunchest friend and the bravest-hearted chap that walked under the
stars of God.
"The greatest chum I have in the world, too, and by the holy Immaculate
Mother I'm destroyed at being away from him."
It was like music to hear him speak. A flood of joy went sweeping
through me at every word of praise he gave to Martin. And yet--I cannot
explain why, unless it was the woman in me, the Irish-woman, or
something like it--but I began to depreciate Martin, in order to "hoosh"
him on, so that he might say more on the same subject.
"Then he _did_ take his degree," I said. "He was never very clever at
his lessons, I remember, and I heard that he was only just able to
scrape through his examinations."
The young doctor fell to my bait like a darling. With a flaming face and
a nervous rush of racy words which made me think that if I closed my
eyes I should be back on the steps of the church in Rome talking to
Martin himself, he told me I was mistaken if I thought his friend was a
numskull, for he had had "the biggest brain-pan in College Green," and
the way he could learn things when he wanted to was wonderful.
He might be a bit shaky in his spelling, and perhaps he couldn't lick
the world in Latin, but his heart was always in exploring, and the way
he knew geography, especially the part of it they call the "Unknown,"
the Arctic, and the Antarctic, and what Charcot had done there, and
Biscoe and Bellamy and D'Urville and Greely and Nansen and Shackleton
and Peary, was enough to make the provost and professors look like fools
of the earth by the side of him.
"Why, what do you think?" said the doctor. "When he went to London to
apply for his billet, the Lieutenant said to him: 'You must have been
down there before, young man.' 'No such luck,' said Martin. 'But you
know as much about the Antarctic already as the whole boiling of us put
together,' said the Lieutenant. Yes, by St. Patrick and St. Thomas, he's
a geographer any way."
I admitted that much, and to encourage the doctor to go on I told him
where I had seen Martin last, and what he had said of his expedition.
"In Rome you say?" said the doctor, with a note of jealousy. "You beat
me there then. I saw him off from London, though. A few of us Dublin
boys, being in town at the time, went down to Tilbury to see him sail,
and when they were lifting anchor and the tug was hitching on, we stood
on the pier--sixteen strong--and set up some of our college songs. 'Stop
your noising, boys,' said he, 'the Lieutenant will be hearing you.' But
not a bit of it. We sang away as long as we could see him going out with
the tide, and then we went back in the train, smoking our pipes like so
many Vauxhall chimneys, and narra a word out of the one of us. . . .
Yes, yes, there are some men like that. They come like the stars of
night and go like the light of heaven. Same as there are some women who
walk the world like the sun, and leave the grass growing green wherever
their feet have trod."
It was very ridiculous, I did not then understand why it should be so,
but the tears came gushing into my eyes while the doctor spoke, and it
was as much as I could do to preserve my composure.
What interpretation my husband put upon my emotion I do not know, but I
saw that his face darkened, and when the doctor turned to him to ask if
he also knew Martin he answered curtly and brusquely,
"Not I. No loss either, I should say."
"No loss?" said the doctor. "Show me the man under the stars of God
that's fit to hold a candle to Martin Conrad, and by the angel Gabriel
I'll go fifty miles out of my way to put a sight on him."
More than ever after this talk about Martin Conrad I was feeling
defenceless, and at the mercy of my husband's wishes and whims, when
something happened which seemed to change his character altogether.
The third day out, on a bright and quiet morning, we called at Malta,
and while my husband went ashore to visit some friends in the garrison,
I sat on deck watching the life of the little port and looking at the
big warships anchored in the bay.
A Maltese woman came on board to sell souvenirs of the island, and
picking out of her tray a tiny twisted thing in coral, I asked what it
was.
"That's a charm, my lady," said the woman.
"A charm for what?"
"To make my lady's husband love her."
I felt my face becoming crimson, but my heart was sore, so in my
simplicity I bought the charm and was smuggling it into my bag when I
became aware that one of my fellow-passengers, a lady, was looking down
at me.
She was a tall, singularly handsome woman, fashionably and (although on
shipboard) almost sumptuously dressed. A look in her face was haunting
me with a memory I could not fix when she stooped and said:
"Aren't you Mary O'Neill?"
The voice completed the identification, and I knew who it was. It was
Alma Lier.
She was now about seven-and-twenty and in the prime of her young
womanhood. Her beautiful auburn hair lay low over her broad forehead,
almost descending to her long sable-coloured eyebrows. Her cheeks were
very white, (rather beyond the whiteness of nature, I thought), and her
lips were more than commonly red, with the upper one a little thin and
the lower slightly set forward. But her eyes were still her
distinguishing feature, being larger and blacker than before and having
that vivid gaze that looked through and through you and made you feel
that few women and no man in the world would have the power to resist
her.
Her movements were almost noiseless, and as she sank into the chair by
my side there was a certain over-sweetness in the soft succulent tones
of the voice with which she began to tell me what had happened to her
since I had seen her last.
It was a rather painful story. After two or three years in a girls'
college in her own country she had set out with her mother for a long
tour of the European capitals. In Berlin, at what was falsely called a
Charity Ball, she had met a young Russian Count who was understood to be
rich and related to one of the Grand Ducal families. Against the
protests of her father (a shrewd American banker), she had married the
Count, and they had returned to New York, where her mother had social
ambitions.
There they had suffered a serious shock. It turned out that her husband
had deceived them, and that he was really a poor and quite nameless
person, only remotely related to the family he claimed to belong to.
Nevertheless Alma had "won out" at last. By digging deep into her
father's treasury she got rid of her treacherous husband, and going "way
out west," she had been able, in due time, to divorce him.
Since then she had resumed her family name, being known as Madame Lier,
and now she was on her way to Egypt to spend the season at Cairo.
"And you?" she said. "You stayed long at the convent--yes?"
I answered that I had, and then in my fluttering voice (for some of the
old spell of her presence had come sweeping back upon me) I replied one
by one to the questions she asked about the Reverend Mother, the
"Reverend Mother Mildred," Sister Angela and Father Giovanni, not to
speak of myself, whom she had always thought of as "Margaret Mary"
because I had looked so innocent and nun-like.
"And now you are married!" she said. "Married so splendidly, too! We
heard all about it. Mother was so interested. What a lucky girl you are!
Everybody says your husband is so handsome and charming. He is, isn't
he?"
I was doing my utmost to put the best face upon my condition without
betraying the facts or simulating sentiments which I could not feel,
when a boat from the shore pulled up at the ship's side, and my husband
stepped on to the deck.
In his usual morose manner he was about to pass without speaking on his
way to his state-room, when his eyes fell on Alma sitting beside me.
Then he stopped and looked at us, and, stepping up, he said, in a tone I
had never heard from him before:
"Mary, my dear, will you not present me to your friend?"
I hesitated, and then with a quivering of the lips I did so. But
something told me as I introduced my husband to Alma, and Alma to my
husband, and they stood looking into each other's eyes and holding each
other's hands (for Alma had risen and I was sitting between them), that
this was the most momentous incident of my life thus far--that for good
or ill my hour had struck and I could almost hear the bell.