When I awoke in the morning I took myself severely to task. Was this how
I was fulfilling the promise I had made to Martin's mother, or preparing
to carry out the counsel of Father Dan?
"I must be more careful," I told myself. "I must keep a stronger hold of
myself."
The church bells began to ring, and I determined to go to mass. I wanted
to go alone and much as I grudged every minute of Martin's company which
I lost, I was almost glad when, on going into the boudoir with my missal
in my hand, I found him at a table covered with papers and heard him
say:
"Helloa! See these letters and telegrams? Sunday as it is I've got to
answer them."
Our church was a little chapel-of-ease on the edge of my husband's
estate, opened, after centuries of neglect, by the bad Lord Raa, in his
regenerate days, for the benefit of the people of his own village. It
was very sweet to see their homely faces as they reverently bowed and
rose, and even to hear their creachy voices when they joined in the
singing of the Gloria.
Following the gospel there was a sermon on the words "Lead us not into
temptation but deliver us from evil." The preacher was a young curate,
the brother of my husband's coachman; and it occurred to me that he
could know very little of temptation for himself, but the instruction he
gave us was according to the doctrine of our Church, as I had received
it from the Reverend Mother and the Cardinals who used to hold retreats
at the convent.
"Beware of the temptations of the flesh, my children," said the priest.
"The Evil One is very subtle, and not only in our moments of pride and
prosperity, but also in our hours of sorrow and affliction, he is for
ever waiting and watching to betray us to our downfall and damnation."
In the rustling that followed the sermon a poor woman who sat next to
me, with a print handkerchief over her head, whispered in my ear that
she was sorry she had not brought her husband, for he had given way to
drink, poor fellow, since the island had had such good times and wages
had been so high.
But the message came closer home to me. Remembering the emotions of the
night before, I prayed fervently to be strengthened against all
temptation and preserved from all sin. And when the mass was resumed I
recalled some of the good words with which I had been taught to assist
at the Holy Sacrifice--praying at the _Credo_ that as I had become a
child in the bosom of the Church I might live and die in it.
When the service was over I felt more at ease and I emptied my purse, I
remember, partly into the plate and partly to the poor people at the
church door.
It was in this spirit that I returned home in the broad sunshine of
noonday. But half way up the drive I met Martin walking briskly down to
meet me. He was bareheaded and in flannels; and I could not help it if
he looked to me so good, so strong, and so well able to protect a woman
against every danger, that the instructions I had received in church,
and the resolutions I had formed there, seemed to run out of my heart as
rapidly as the dry sand of the sea-shore runs through one's fingers.
"Helloa!" he cried, as usual. "The way I've been wasting this wonderful
morning over letters and telegrams! But not another minute will I give
to anything under the stars of God but you."
If there was any woman in the world who could have resisted that
greeting I was not she, and though I was a little confused I was very
happy.
As we walked back to the house we talked of my father and his sudden
illness, then of his mother and my glimpse of her, and finally of
indifferent things, such as the weather, which had been a long drought
and might end in a deluge.
By a sort of mutual consent we never once spoke of the central subject
of our thoughts--my marriage and its fatal consequences--but I noticed
that Martin's voice was soft and caressing, that he was walking close to
my side, and that as often as I looked up at him he was looking down at
me and smiling.
It was the same after luncheon when we went out into the garden and sat
on a seat in the shrubbery almost immediately facing my windows, and he
spread a chart on a rustic table and pointing to a red line on it said:
"Look, this is the course of our new cruise, please God."
He talked for a long time, about his captain and crew; the scientific
experts who had volunteered to accompany him, his aeronautic outfit, his
sledges and his skis; but whatever he talked about--if it was only his
dogs and the food he had found for them--it was always in that soft,
caressing voice which made me feel as if (though he never said one word
of love) he were making love to me, and saying the sweetest things a man
could say to a woman.
After a time I found myself answering in the same tones, and even when
speaking on the most matter-of-fact subjects I felt as if I were saying
the sweetest things a woman could say to a man.
We sat a long time so, and every moment we were together seemed to make
our relation more perilous, until at length the sweet seductive twilight
of the shortening autumn day began to frighten me, and making excuse of
a headache I said I must go indoors.
He walked with me up the stone-stairway and into my boudoir, until we
got to the very door of my room, and then suddenly he took up both my
hands and kissed them passionately.
I felt the colour rushing to my cheeks and I had an almost irresistible
impulse to do something in return. But conquering it with a great
effort, I turned quickly into my bedroom, shut the door, pulled down the
blinds and then sat and covered my face and asked myself, with many
bitter pangs, if it could possibly be true (as I had been taught to
believe) that our nature was evil and our senses were always tempting us
to our destruction.
Several hours passed while I sat in the darkness with this warfare going
on between my love and my religion, and then Price came to dress me for
dinner, and she was full of cheerful gossip.
"Men are _such_ children," she said; "they can't help giving themselves
away, can they?"
It turned out that after I had left the lawn she had had some
conversation with Martin, and I could see that she was eager to tell me
what he had said about myself.
"The talk began about your health and altered looks, my lady. 'Don't
you think your mistress is looking ill?' said he. 'A little,' I said.
'But her body is not so ill as her heart, if you ask me,' said I."
"You never said that, Price?"
"Well, I could not help saying it if I thought so, could I?"
"And what did he say?"
"He didn't say anything then, my lady, but when I said, 'You see, sir,
my lady is tied to a husband she doesn't love,' he said, 'How can she,
poor thing? 'Worse than that,' I said, 'her husband loves another
woman.' 'The fool! Where does he keep his eyes?' said he. 'Worse still,'
said I, 'he flaunts his infidelities in her very face.' 'The brute!' he
said, and his face looked so fierce that you would have thought he
wanted to take his lordship by the throat and choke him. 'Why doesn't
she leave the man?' said he. 'That's what I say, sir, but I think it's
her religion,' I said. 'Then God help her, for there's no remedy for
that,' said he. And then seeing him so down I said, 'But we women are
always ruled by our hearts in the long run.' 'Do you think so?' said he.
'I'm sure of it,' said I, 'only we must have somebody to help us,' I
said. 'There's her father,' said he. 'A father is of no use in a case
like this,' I said, 'especially such a one as my lady's is, according to
all reports. No,' said I, 'it must be somebody else--somebody who cares
enough for a woman to risk everything for her, and just take her and
make her do what's best for herself whether she likes it or not. Now if
somebody like that were to come to my lady, and get her out of her
trouble,' I said. . . . 'Somebody will,' said he. 'Make your mind easy
about that. Somebody will,' he said, and then he went on walking to and
fro."
Price told this story as if she thought she was bringing me the gladdest
of glad tidings; but the idea that Martin had come back into my life to
master me, to take possession of me, to claim me as his own (just as he
did when I was a child) and thereby compel me to do what I had promised
his mother and Father Dan not to do--this was terrifying.
But there was a secret joy in it too, and every woman will know what I
mean if I say that my heart was beating high with the fierce delight of
belonging to somebody when I returned to the boudoir where Martin was
waiting to sit down to dinner.
Then came a great surprise.
Martin was standing with his back to the fire-place, and I saw in a
moment that the few hours which had intervened had changed him as much
as they had changed me.
"Helloa! Better, aren't we?" he cried, but he was now cold, almost
distant, and even his hearty voice seemed to have sunk to a kind of
nervous treble.
I could not at first understand this, but after a while I began to see
that we two had reached the point beyond which it was impossible to go
without encountering the most tremendous fact of our lives--my marriage
and all that was involved by it.
During dinner we spoke very little. He seemed intentionally not to look
at me. The warm glances of his sea-blue eyes, which all the afternoon
had been making the colour mount to my cheeks, had gone, and it sent a
cold chill to my heart to look across the table at his clouded face. But
sometimes when he thought my own face was down I was conscious that his
eyes were fixed on me with a questioning, almost an imploring gaze. His
nervousness communicated itself to me. It was almost as if we had begun
to be afraid of each other and were hovering on the brink of fatal
revelations.
When dinner was over, the table cleared and the servants gone, I could
bear the strain no longer, so making excuse of a letter I had to write
to the Reverend Mother I sat down at my desk, whereupon Martin lit a
cigar and said he would stroll over the headland.
I heard his footsteps going down the stone stairway from the balcony; I
heard their soft thud on the grass of the lawn; I heard their sharper
crackle on the gravel of the white path, and then they mingled with the
surge and wash of the flowing tide and died away in the distance.
I rose from the desk, and going over to the balcony door looked out into
the darkness. It was a beautiful, pathetic, heart-breaking night. No
moon, but a perfect canopy of stars in a deep blue sky. The fragrance of
unseen flowers--sweetbriar and rose as well as ripening fruit--came up
from the garden. There was no wind either, not even the rustle of a
leaf, and the last bird of evening was silent. All the great orchestra
of nature was still, save for the light churning of the water running in
the glen and the deep organ song of the everlasting sea.
"What can I do?" I asked myself.
Now that Martin was gone I had begun to understand him. His silence had
betrayed his heart to me even more than his speech could have done.
Towering above him like a frowning mountain was the fact that I was a
married woman and he was trying to stand erect in his honour as a man.
"He must be suffering too," I told myself.
That was a new thought to me and it cut me to the quick.
When it came to me first I wanted to run after him and throw myself into
his arms, and then I wanted to run away from him altogether.
I felt as if I were on the brink of two madnesses--the madness of
breaking my marriage vows and the madness of breaking the heart of the
man who loved me.
"Oh, what can I do?" I asked myself again.
I wanted him to go; I wanted him to stay; I did not know what I wanted.
At length I remembered that in ordinary course he would be going in two
days more, and I said to myself:
"Surely I can hold out that long."
But when I put this thought to my breast, thinking it would comfort me,
I found that it burnt like hot iron.
Only two days, and then he would be gone, lost to me perhaps for ever.
Did my renunciation require that? It was terrible!
There was a piano in the room, and to strengthen and console myself in
my trouble I sat down to it and played and sang. I sang "Ave Maria
Stella."
I was singing to myself, so I know I began softly--so softly that my
voice must have been a whisper scarcely audible outside the room--
"_Hail thou star of ocean,
Portal of the sky_."
But my heart was full and when I came to the verses which always moved
me most--
"_Virgin of all virgins,
To thy shelter take us_"--
my voice, without my knowing it, may have swelled out into the
breathless night until it reached Martin, where he walked on the dark
headland, and sounded to him like a cry that called him back.
I cannot say. I only know that when with a thickening throat I had come
to an end, and my forehead had fallen on to the key-board, and there was
no other sound in the air but the far-off surging of the sea. I heard
somebody calling me in a soft and tremulous whisper,
"Mary!"
It was he. I went out to the balcony and there he was on the lawn below.
The light of the room was on him and never before had I seen his strong
face so full of agitation.
"Come down," he said. "I have something to say to you."