My joy was short-lived. No sooner had I become aware that I loved Martin
Conrad, than my conscience told me I had no right to do so. I was
married, and to love another than my husband was sin.
It would be impossible to say with what terror this thought possessed
me. It took all the sunlight out of my sky, which a moment before had
seemed so bright. It came on me like a storm of thunder and lightning,
sweeping my happiness into the abyss.
All my religion, everything I had been taught about the sanctity of the
sacrament of marriage seemed to rise up and accuse me. It was not that I
was conscious of any sin against my husband. I was thinking only of my
sin against God.
The first effect was to make me realise that it was no longer possible
for me to speak to Martin about my husband and Alma. To do this now
that I knew I loved him would be deceitful, mean, almost treacherous.
The next effect was to make me see that all thought of a separation must
now be given up. How could I accuse my husband when I was myself in the
same position? If he loved another woman, I loved another man.
In my distress and fright I saw only one means of escape either from the
filthy burden to which I was bound or the consciousness of a sinful
heart, and that was to cure myself of my passion. I determined to do so.
I determined to fight against my love for Martin Conrad, to conquer it
and to crush it.
My first attempt to do this was feeble enough. It was an effort to keep
myself out of the reach of temptation by refusing to see Martin alone.
For three or four days I did my best to carry out this purpose, making
one poor excuse after another, when (as happened several times a day) he
came down to see me--that I was just going out or had just come in, or
was tired or unwell.
It was tearing my heart out to deny myself so, but I think I could have
borne the pain if I had not realised that I was causing pain to him
also.
My maid, whose head was always running on Martin, would come hack to my
room, after delivering one of my lying excuses, and say:
"You should have seen his face, when I told him you were ill. It was
just as if I'd driven a knife into him."
Everybody seemed to be in a conspiracy to push me into Martin's
arms--Alma above all others. Being a woman she read my secret, and I
could see from the first that she wished to justify her own conduct in
relation to my husband by putting me into the same position with Martin.
"Seen Mr. Conrad to-day?" she would ask.
"Not to-day," I would answer.
"Really? And you such old friends! And staying in the same hotel, too!"
When she saw that I was struggling hard she reminded my husband of his
intention of asking Martin to dinner, and thereupon a night was fixed
and a party invited.
Martin came, and I was only too happy to meet him in company, though the
pain and humiliation of the contrast between him and my husband and his
friends, and the difference of the atmosphere in which he lived from
that to which I thought I was doomed for ever, was almost more than I
could bear.
I think they must have felt it themselves, for though their usual
conversation was of horses and dogs and race-meetings, I noticed they
were silent while Martin in his rugged, racy poetic way (for all
explorers are poets) talked of the beauty of the great Polar night, the
cloudless Polar day, the midnight calm and the moonlight on the
glaciers, which was the loveliest, weirdest, most desolate, yet most
entrancing light the world could show.
"I wonder you don't think of going back to the Antarctic, if it's so
fascinating," said Alma.
"I do. Bet your life I do," said Martin, and then he told them what he
had told me on the launch, but more fully and even more rapturously--the
story of his great scheme for saving life and otherwise benefiting
humanity.
For hundreds of years man, prompted merely by the love of adventure, the
praise of achievement, and the desire to know the globe he lived on, had
been shouldering his way to the hitherto inviolable regions of the
Poles; but now the time had come to turn his knowledge to account.
"How?" said my husband.
"By putting himself into such a position," said Martin, "that he will be
able to predict, six, eight, ten days ahead, the weather of a vast part
of the navigable and habitable world--by establishing installations of
wireless telegraphy as near as possible to the long ice-barrier about
the Pole from which ice-floes and icebergs and blizzards come, so that
we can say in ten minutes from the side of Mount Erebus to half the
southern hemisphere, 'Look out. It's coming down,' and thus save
millions of lives from shipwreck, and hundreds of millions of money."
"Splendid, by Jove!" said Mr. Eastcliff.
"Yes, ripping, by jingo!" said Mr. Vivian.
"A ridiculous dream!" muttered my husband, but not until Martin had
gone, and then Alma, seeing that I was all aglow, said:
"What a lovely man! I wonder you don't see more of him, Mary, my love.
He'll be going to the ends of the earth soon, and then you'll be sorry
you missed the chance."
Her words hurt me like the sting of a wasp, but I could not resist them,
and when some days later Martin called to take me to the Geographical
Society, where his commander, Lieutenant ---- was to give an account of
their expedition, I could not find it in my heart to refuse to go.
Oh, the difference of this world from that in which I had been living
for the past six months! All that was best in England seemed to be
there, the men who were doing the work of the world, and the women who
were their wives and partners.
The theatre was like the inside of a dish, and I sat by Martin's side on
the bottom row of seats, just in front of the platform and face to face
with the commander.
His lecture, which was illustrated by many photographic lantern slides
of the exploring party, (including the one that had been shown to me on
the ship) was very interesting, but terribly pathetic; and when he
described the hardships they had gone through in a prolonged blizzard on
a high plateau, with food and fuel running low, and no certainty that
they would ever see home again, I found myself feeling for Martin's hand
to make sure that he was there.
Towards the end the commander spoke very modestly of himself, saying he
could never have reached the 87th parallel if he had not had a crew of
the finest comrades that ever sailed on a ship.
"And though they're all splendid fellows," he said, "there's one I can
specially mention without doing any wrong to the rest, and that's the
young doctor of our expedition--Martin Conrad. Martin has a scheme of
his own for going down to the Antarctic again to make a great experiment
in the interests of humanity, and if and when he goes I say, 'Good luck
to him and God bless him!'"
At these generous words there was much applause, during which Martin sat
blushing like a big boy when he is introduced to the girl friends of his
sister.
As for me I did not think any speech could have been so beautiful, and I
felt as if I could have cried for joy.
When I got back to the hotel I _did_ cry, but it was for another reason.
I was thinking of my father and wondering why he did not wait.
"Why, why, why?" I asked myself.