FREIGHTED
I shall remember while the light lives yet,
And in the darkness I shall not forget.
Seymour Michael was no coward where hard words and no hard knocks were to
be exchanged. His faith in his own keenness of intellect and
unscrupulousness of tongue was unbounded.
He smiled when he read Anna Agar's letter over a dainty breakfast at his
club the next morning. The cunning of it was obvious to his cunning
comprehension, and the fact of her suppressing her newly-acquired surname
only convinced him that she knew but little about himself.
That same evening at four o'clock he presented himself at the lordly
hall-door of Mr. Hethbridge. Since first he had raised his hand to this
knocker, fingering his letter of introduction to the East India director,
Seymour Michael had learnt many things, but the knowledge was not yet his
that indiscriminate untruths are apt to fly home to roost.
Anna Agar had easily managed to send her mother out of the house; her
husband spent his days as far from Clapham as circumstances would allow.
She was seated on a sofa at the far end of the room when Seymour Michael
was shown in, and the first thing that struck her was his diminutiveness.
After the hearty country gentlemen who habitually carried mud into the
Stagholme drawing-room, this small-limbed dapper soldier of fortune
looked almost puny. But there is a depth in every woman's heart which is
only to be reached by one man. Whatever betide them both, that one is
different from the rest all through life.
Neither of these two persons spoke until the servant had closed the door.
Then, as is usual in such cases, the more indifferent spoke first.
“Why did you never write to me?” said Seymour Michael, fixing his
mournful glance on her face.
“Because I thought you were dead.”
“You never got my letter contradicting the report?”
“No,” she answered, with so cheap a cunning that it deceived him.
“And,” he went on, with the heartlessness of a small man, for large men
respect woman with a deeper chivalry than every puny knight yet
compassed, “and you did not trouble to inquire. You did not even give me
six months' grace to cool in my grave.”
“How did you send your letter?” she asked, with a suppressed excitement
which he misread entirely.
“By the usual route. I wrote off at once.”
“Liar! liar! liar!” she shrieked.
She had risen, and stood pointing an accusatory finger at him. Then
suddenly the dramatic force of the situation seemed to fail, and she
burst out laughing. For some seconds it seemed as if her laughter was
getting beyond her control, but at last she checked it with a gurgle.
The complete success of the trap which she had laid for him almost
disappointed her. Few things are more disappointing than complete
success. She hated him, and yet for the sake of the one gleam of good
love that had flickered once in her essentially sordid heart, she had
nourished a vague hope that he would clear himself--that at all events he
would have the cleverness to see through her stratagem.
“Liar!” she repeated. “In this room last night--not twenty-four hours
ago--Mr. Wynderton told me all about it. He said that you told several
men in his presence that you did not love me, and that your death
reported in the papers was the best way of breaking off the engagement.”
Seymour Michael's eyes never wavered. For once they were still, with
that solemn depth of gaze which tells of the curse laid on a smitten,
miserable race. It was strange that before honest men and women his
glance wavered ever--he could never meet honest eyes; but looking at Anna
Agar they were as steady as those of a true man.
“Wynderton,” ho said, “the man whose promotion I stopped, by a report
against him for looting.”
When Nature makes a fool in the guise of a woman she turns out a finished
work. Mrs. Agar's eyes actually lighted up. Seymour Michael saw; but he
knew that he had no case. Nevertheless, in view of the Squire's advanced
age (a fact of which he had made sure), he attempted to carry through a
forlorn hope.
“And you believe this man before you believe me?” said Michael. It is
strange how often one hears the word “believe” on the lips of those whose
veracity is doubtful.
Now it happened that Mr. Hethbridge had spoken of Wynderton at breakfast
that morning in terms which left no doubt as to the untruth of the
statement just made in regard to him. But even this would have been
passed over by the woman who had a natural tendency towards falsehood
herself, had not Seymour Michael made a hideous mistake. A wiser man than
any of us has said that there is a time for all things. Most distinctly
defined is the time for making love. More men come to grief by making too
much love than too little. Seymour Michael, being heartless, deemed
erroneously that this was a propitious moment to essay the power which
had once been his over this woman.
He accompanied his reproachful speech with a tender glance, which in
olden times had never failed to call forth an answering look of love in
her eyes. Now, it suddenly aroused her to realise the extent of her
hatred. In some subtle way it humiliated her; for she looked back into
the past, and saw herself therein a dupe to this man.
“No!” she cried, and her raised voice had a sudden twang in
it--suggestive of the streets; of the People. “No--you needn't trouble to
make soft eyes at me. I know you now--I know that what that man said was
true. He called you a coward and a cad. You are worse! You are a Jew--a
mean, lying Jew.”
There are few greater trials to a man's dignity than vituperation from
the lips of a woman. She walked towards him, clumsily, menacingly and
raised her hand as if to strike him.
Seymour Michael's brown face turned yellow beneath her blazing anger.
“Sit down!” he commanded, “and don't make a fool of yourself.”
He was mean enough to pay her back in her own coin--the paltry,
loud-ringing coin which is all that a woman has.
“I do not mean to wrangle,” he said coolly; “but I may as well tell you
now that I never cared a jot for you. I was laughing at you in my sleeve
all the time. I did not want you but your money. I concluded that the
money would be too dear at the price, so I determined to throw you over.
The way I chose to do it was as good as any other, because it saved me
the trouble of writing to you.”
Anna Agar had obeyed him. She was sitting down in a stiff-backed
arm-chair, looking stupidly at the pattern of the carpet as if it were
something new to her. Between physical pain and mental excitement she
was beginning to wander. She was the sort of woman to lose control over
her mind with a temperature of one hundred and one.
Michael looked keenly at her. He had a racial terror of physical ailment.
He saw that something was wrong, but his knowledge went no further. He
had never seen a woman faint, so limited had been his experience of the
sex.
“Come,” he said consolingly, “it is all for the best. We made a mistake.
In a few years we shall look back to this, and thank Heaven for saving us
many years of unhappiness. We are not suited to each other, Anna. We
never should have been happy.”
It was characteristic of the man to be more afraid of a fainting fit than
of a broken heart.
He went to her side and stood, not daring to touch her, for fear of
arousing another of those fits of passion in her which neither of them
seemed to understand. At length she spoke in a singular monotonous tone
which an experienced doctor would have recognised at once as the speech
of a tongue unguided for the time being. She did not look up, but kept
her eyes fixed on the carpet as if reading there.
“Some day,” she said, “I will pay you back. Some day--some day. I do not
know how, but I feel that you will be sorry you ever did this.”
Twenty-five years afterwards these words came back to him in a flash.
They passed through his brain--conglomerate--in a flash, in a hundredth
part of the time required to speak them.
Even at the time of hearing them, spoken in that voice which did not seem
to belong to Anna Hethbridge at all, he turned pale. For all the hatred
that burnt within her like a fire smouldered in the deliberate tones of
her voice. Hatred and love can teach us more in a moment than the
experience of a lifetime; for through either of them we see ourselves
face to face. This hatred made Anna Agar in twenty-four hours, and the
woman thus created went through a lifetime unchanged.
Michael went towards the bell.
“I am going to ring,” he said, “for your maid.”
“Twice,” she muttered in the same vague way.
He obeyed her, ringing twice.
Presently the woman came.
“Your mistress,” said Michael in a low voice to her at the door, “has
been suddenly seized with faintness. I leave her to you.”
Without looking round he passed through the doorway and out into his own
self-seeking life. But Anna Agar's revenge began from that moment. To a
man of his nature, in whose veins ran the taint of a semi-superstitious
Oriental blood, there was a nameless terror in the hatred of a human
being, however helpless. Surely the hell of the coward will be a twilight
land of vague shadowy dangers ever approaching and receding.
In such a land Seymour Michael moved for some months, until he returned
to India; and there, in the daily round of a new life, he gradually
learnt to shake off the past. The world is very large despite chance
meetings. It is easy enough to find room for two even in the same county,
with the exercise of a little care.
Twenty-five years elapsed before these two met again, and then they only
had time to exchange a glance. By that time the result of their own
actions had passed beyond their control.
Seymour Michael walked across the Common, which was in those days still
wild and almost beautiful; and on the whole he was pleased with the
result of this interview. He knew that it was destined to come sooner or
later--he had known that all along; and it might have been worse. It is
characteristic of an untruthful nature to be impervious to the shame of
mere detection. In Eastern countries the liar detected smiles in one's
face. Detection is to an Oriental no punishment; something more tangible
is required to pierce his mental epidermis.
Being quite incapable of a strong love this man was innocent of consuming
hatred. He therefore vaguely wondered whether the day might come wherein
he would once more lay siege to the affections of Anna Agar, a rich
widow.
Had he seen the face of the woman whom he had just left as it lay
at that moment, hardly less pale than the pillow between the fluted
mahogany pillars of a huge four-post bed, he would not have understood
its meaning. He would never have divined that the dull gleam shining
between her half-closed eyelids was simple hatred of himself, that the
restless, twitching lips were whispering curses upon his head, that the
half-stunned brain was struggling back to circulation and thought for
the sole purpose of devising hurt to him.
Seymour Michael, ignorant of all this, went peaceably back to his club,
where he dressed, dined, and proceeded to pass the evening at a theatre.
That night, while he was displaying his diamond studs in the stalls of
Drury Lane Theatre, was born into the world--long before his time--a
child, Arthur Agar, destined to walk the smoothest paths of life,
literally in silk attire; for he grew up to love such things.
But the ways of Nature are strange. She is very quiet; patient as death
itself. She holds her hand for years--sometimes for a generation--but she
strikes at last.
She is more cruel than man, or even than woman which is saying much, She
is the best friend we have, and the worst foe, for she never forgives an
outrage.
Nature raised her hand over this puny, whimpering child, Arthur Agar. She
never forgot a mother's selfish passion. She forgets nothing. When first
he opened his little pink lids upon the world he looked round with a
scared wonder in a pair of colourless blue-grey eyes; and that vague look
of expectation never left his eyes in later life. It almost seemed as if
the infant orbs could see ahead into the future--could discern the
lowering hand of outraged Nature.
This hand was suspended over the ill-fated, poorly-endowed head for
years, then Nature struck--hard.