When, on drunken and then on leaden feet, there came to Elizabeth the
ruthless to-morrow of her act, her first clear thought was to kill
herself ....
After the marriage in the mayor's office--where they paused long enough
to write the two notes that were received the next day--Blair had fled
with her up into the mountains to a little hotel, where they would not,
he felt certain, encounter any acquaintances.
Elizabeth neither assented nor objected. From the moment she had struck
her hand into his, there in the tawdry "saloon" of the toll-house, and
cried out, "_Come!_" she let him do as he chose. So he had carried her
away to the city hall, where, like any other unclassed or unchurched
lovers, they were married by a hurried city official. She had had one
more crisis of rage, when in the mayor's office, as she stood at a high
wall desk and wrote with an ink-encrusted pen that brief note to her
uncle, she said to herself that, as to David Richie, he could hear the
news from her uncle--or never hear it; she didn't care which. Then for
an instant her eyes glittered again; but except for that one moment,
she seemed stunned, mind and body. To Blair, her silent acquiescences
had been signs that he had won something more than her consent to
revenge herself upon David,--and he wanted more! In all his life he had
never deeply cared for anybody but himself; but now, under the terrible
selfishness of his act, under the primitive instinct that he called
love, there was, trembling in the depths of his nature, _Love_. It had
been born only a little while ago, this new, naked baby of Love. It had
had no power and no knowledge; unaided by that silent god of his, it
had not been strong enough to save him from himself, or save Elizabeth
from him. But he did love her, in spite of his treason to her soul, for
he was tender with her, and almost humble; yet his purpose was
inflexible. It seemed to him it must find response in her. Such purpose
might strike fire from the most unbending steel--why not from this
yielding, silent thing, Elizabeth's heart? But numb and flaccid,
perfectly apathetic, stunned by that paroxysm of fury, she no more
responded to him than down would have responded to the blow of flint ...
It was their second day in the mountains. Blair, going down-stairs very
early in the morning, stopped in the office of the hotel to write a
brief but intensely polite note to his mother, telling her of his
marriage. "Nannie will have broken it to her--poor, dear old Nannie!"
he said to himself, pounding a stamp down on the envelope, "but of
course it's proper to announce it myself." Then he dropped the
"announcement" into the post-bag, and went out for a tramp in the
woods. It was a still, furtive morning of low clouds, with an
expectancy of snow in the air. But it was not cold, and when, leaving
the road and pushing aside the frosted ferns and underbrush, he found
himself in the silence of the woods, he sat down on a fallen tree trunk
to think.... The moment had come when the only god he knew would no
longer be denied.
"I might as well face it," he said; and slowly lit a cigar. But instead
of "facing it," he began to watch the first sparse and fitful
beginnings of snow--hesitant flakes that sauntered down to rest for a
crystal moment on his coat sleeve. Suddenly he caught his thoughts
together with a jerk: "I've _got_ to think it out!" he said. Curiously
enough, when he said this his thought did not turn with any especial
distinctness to David Richie.
Instead, in the next hour of reasonings and excuses, there was always,
back in his mind, one face--scornful, contemptuous even; a face he had
known only as gentle, and sometimes tender; the face of David's mother.
Once he swore at himself, to drive that face out of his mind. "What a
fool I am! Elizabeth had broken her engagement with him. I had the
right to speak before the thing was smoothed over again. Anybody would
say so, even--even Mrs. Richie if she could really understand how
things were. But of course she will only see _his_ side." All his
excuses for his conduct were in relation to David Richie; he did not
think of Elizabeth. He honestly did not know that he had wronged her.
He loved her so crazily that he could not realize his cruelty.
It was snowing steadily now; he could hear the faint patter of small,
hard flakes on the dry oak leaves over his head. Suddenly some bleached
and withered ferns in front of him rustled, and he saw wise, bright
eyes looking at him. "I wish I had some nuts for you, bunny," he
said--and the bright eyes vanished with a furry whirl through the
ferns. He picked up the empty half of a hickory-nut, and turning it
over in his fingers, looked at the white grooves left by small sharp
teeth. "You little beggars must get pretty hungry in the winter,
bunny," he said; "I'll bring a bag of nuts out here for you some day."
But while he was talking to the squirrel, he was wrestling with his
god. It was characteristic of him that never once in that struggle to
justify himself did he use the excuse of Elizabeth's consent. His code,
which had allowed him to injure a woman, would not permit him to blame
her--even if she deserved it. Instead, over and over he heaped up his
own poor defense: "If I had waited, he might have patched it up with
her." Over and over the defense crumbled before his eyes: "it was
contemptible not to give him the chance to patch it up." Then would
come his angry retort: "That's nonsense! Besides it is better,
infinitely better, for her to marry me than a poor man like him. I can
give her everything,--and love her! God, how I love her. Apart from any
selfish consideration, it is a thousand times better for her." For an
instant his marrying her seemed actually chivalrous; and at that his
god laughed. Blair reddened sharply; to recognize his hypocrisy was the
"touch on the hollow of the thigh; and the hollow of the thigh was out
of joint"! He pitched the nut away with a vicious fling, and knew,
inarticulately, that there was no use lying to himself any longer.
With blank eyes he watched the snow piling up on a withered stalk of
goldenrod. "I wish it hadn't happened in just the way it did," he
conceded;--his god was beginning to prevail!--"but if I had waited, I
might have lost her." Then a thought stabbed him: suppose that he
should lose her anyhow? Suppose that when she came to herself--the
phrase was a confession! suppose she should want to leave him? It was
an intolerable idea. "Well, she can't," he told himself, grimly, "she
can't, now." His face was dusky with shame, yet when he said that, his
lip loosened in a furtively exultant smile. Blair would have been less,
or more, than a man if, at that moment, in spite of his shame, he had
not exulted. "She's my wife!" he said, through those shamed and smiling
lips. Then his eyes narrowed: "And she doesn't care a damn for me."
So it was that as he sat there in the snow, watching the puff of white
deepen on the stalk of goldenrod, his god prevailed yet a little more,
for, so far as Elizabeth was concerned, he did not try to fool himself:
"she doesn't care a damn." But when he said that, he saw the task of
his life before him--to make her care! It was like the touch of a spur;
he leaped to his feet, and flung up his arms in a sort of challenge.
Yes; he _had_ "done the thing a man can't do." Yes; he ought not to
have taken advantage of her anger. Yes; his honor was smirched, grant
it all! grant it all! "I was mad," he said, stung by this intolerable
self-knowledge; "I was a cur. I ought to have waited; I know it. I
admit it. But what's the use of talking about it now? It's done; and by
God, she shall love me yet!"
So it was that his god blessed him, as the best that is in us, always
blesses us when it conquers us: the blessing was the revelation of his
own dishonor. It is a divine moment, this of the consciousness of
having been faithless to one's own ideals. And Blair Maitland, a false
friend, a selfish and cruel lover, was not entirely contemptible, for
his eyes, beautiful and evasive, confessed the shock of a heavenly
vision.
As he walked home, he laid his plans very carefully: he must show her
the most delicate consideration; he must avoid every possible
annoyance; he must do this, he must not do that. "And I'll buy her a
pearl necklace," he told himself, too absorbed in the gravity of the
situation to see in such an impulse the assertion that he was indeed
his mother's son! But the foundation of all his plans for making
Elizabeth content, was the determination not to admit for a single
instant, to anybody but himself, that he had done anything to be
ashamed of. Which showed that his god was not yet God.
When he got back to the hotel, he found that Elizabeth had not left her
room; and rushing up-stairs two steps at a time, he knocked at her
door. . . . She was sitting on the edge of her bed, her lips parted,
her eyes staring blindly out of the window at the snow. The flakes were
so thick now that the meadow on the other side of the road and the
mountain beyond were blurred and almost blotted out; there was a gray
pallor on her face as if the shadow of the storm had fallen on it.
Instantly Blair knew that she "had come to herself." As he stood
looking at her, something tightened in his throat; he broke out into
the very last thing he had meant to say: "Elizabeth?-forgive me!"
"I ought to die, you know," she said, without turning her eyes from the
window and the falling snow.
He came and knelt down beside her, and kissed her hand. "Elizabeth,
dearest! When I love you so?"
He kissed her shoulder. She shivered.
"My darling," he said, passionately.
She looked at him dully; "I wish you would go away."
"Elizabeth, let me tell you how I love you."
"Love me?" she said; "_me?_"
"Elizabeth!" he protested; "you are an angel, and I love you--no man
ever loved a woman as I love you."
In her abasement she never thought of reproaching him, of saying "if
you loved me, why did you betray me?" She had not gone as far as that
yet. Her fall had been so tremendous that if she had any feeling about
him, it was nothing more than the consciousness that he too, had gone
over the precipice. "Please go away," she said.
"Dearest, listen; you are my wife. If--if I hurried you too much, you
will forgive me because I loved you so? I didn't dare to wait, for
fear--" he stumbled on the confession which his god had wrung from him,
but which must not be made to her. Elizabeth's heavy eyes were suddenly
keen.
"Fear of what?"
"Oh, don't look at me that way! I love you so that it kills me to have
you angry at me!"
"I am not angry with you," she said, faintly surprised; "why should I
be angry with _you_? Only, you see, Blair, I--I can't live. I simply
can't live."
"You have got to live!--or I'll die," he said. "I love you, I tell you
I love you!" His outstretched, trembling hands entreated hers, but she
would not yield them to his touch; her shrinking movement away from
him, her hands gripped together at her throat, filled him with absolute
terror: "Elizabeth! _don't_--" She glanced at him with stony eyes.
Blair was suffering. Why should _he_ suffer? But his suffering did not
interest her. "Please go away," she said, heavily.
He went. He dared not stay. He left her, going miserably down-stairs to
make a pretense of eating some breakfast. But all the while he was
arranging entreaties and arguments in his own mind. He went to the door
of their room a dozen times that morning, but it was locked. No, she
did not want any breakfast. Wouldn't she come out and walk? No, no, no.
Please let her alone. And then in the afternoon; "Elizabeth, I _must_
come in! You must have some food."
She let him enter; but she was indifferent alike to the food and to the
fact that by this time there was, of course, a giggling consciousness
in the hotel that the "bride and groom had had a rumpus." ... "A nice
beginning for a honeymoon," said the chambermaid, "locking that pretty
young man out of her room!--and me with my work to do in there. Well,
I'm sorry for him; I bet you she's a case."
Blair, too, was indifferent to anything ridiculous in his position; the
moment was too critical for such self-consciousness. When at last he
took a little tray of food to his wife, and knelt beside her, begging
her to eat, he was appalled at the ruin in her face. She drank some tea
to please him; then she said, pitifully:
"What shall we do, Blair?" That she should say "we" showed that these
hours which had plowed her face had also sowed some seed of
unselfishness in her broken soul.
"Darling," he said, tenderly, "have you forgiven me?"
At this she meditated for a minute, staring with big, anguished eyes
straight ahead of her at nothing; "I _think_ I have, Blair. I have
tried to. Of course I know I was more wicked than you. It was more my
doing than yours. Yes. I ought to ask you if you would forgive me."
"Elizabeth! Forgive you? When you made me so happy! Am I to forgive you
for making me happy?"
"Blair," she said--she put the palms of her hands together, like a
child; "Blair, please let me go." She looked at him with speechless
entreaty. The old dominant Elizabeth was gone; here was nothing but the
weak thing, the scared thing, pleading, crouching, begging for mercy.
"Please, Blair, _please_--"
But the very tragedy of such humbleness was that it made an appeal to
passion rather than to mercy. It made him love her more, not pity her
more. "I can't let you go, Elizabeth," he said, hoarsely; "I can't; I
love you--I will never let you go! I will die before I will let you go!"
With that cry of complete egotism from him, the storm which her egotism
had let loose upon their little world broke over her own head. As the
sense of the hopelessness of her position and the futility of her
struggle dawned upon her, she grew frightened to the point of violence.
She was outrageous in what she said to him--beating against the walls
of this prison-house of marriage which she herself had reared about
them, and crying wildly for freedom. Yet strangely enough, her fury was
never the fury of temper; it was the fury of fear. In her voice there
was a new note, a note of entreaty; she demanded, but not with the old
invincible determination of the free Elizabeth. She was now only the
woman pleading with the man; the wife, begging the husband.
Through it all, her jailer, insulted, commanded, threatened, never lost
a gentleness that had sprung up in him side by side with love. It was,
of course, the gentleness of power, although he did not realize that,
for he was abjectly frightened; he never stopped to reassure himself by
remembering that, after all, rave as she might, she was his! He was
incredibly soft with her--up to a certain point: "I will never let you
go!" If his god spoke, the whisper was drowned in that gale of
selfishness. Elizabeth, now, was the flint, striking that she might
kindle in Blair some fire of anger which would burn up the whole
edifice of her despair. But he opposed to her fiercest blows of terror
and entreaty nothing but this softness of frightened love and
unconscious power. He cowered at the thought of losing her; he
entreated her pity, her mercy; he wept before her. The whole scene in
that room in the inn, with the silent whirl of snow outside the
windows, was one of dreadful abasement and brutality on both sides.
"I am a bad woman. I will not stay with you. I will kill myself first.
I am going away. I am going away to-night."
"Then you will kill me. Elizabeth! Think how I love you; think!
And--_he_ wouldn't want you, since you threw him over. You couldn't go
back to him."
"Go back to David? now? How can you say such a thing! I am dead, so far
as he is concerned. Oh--oh--oh,--why am I not dead? Why do I go on
living? I will kill myself rather than stay with you!" It seemed to
Elizabeth that she had forgotten David; she had forgotten that she had
meant to write him a terrible letter. She had forgotten everything but
the blasting realization of what had happened to her. "Do not dare to
speak his name!" she said, frantically. "I cannot bear it! I cannot
bear it! I am dead to him. He despises me, as I despise myself. Blair,
I can't--I can't live; I can't go on--"
In the end he conquered. There were two days and nights of struggle;
and then she yielded. Blair's reiterated appeal was to her sense of
justice. Curiously, but most characteristically, through all the clamor
of her despair at this incredible thing that she had done, justice was
the one word which penetrated to her consciousness. Was it fair, she
debated, numbly, in one of their long, aching silences, was it just,
that because she had ruined herself, she should ruin him?
She had locked herself in her room, and was sitting with her head on
her arms that were stretched before her on a little table. Blair had
gone out for one of his long, wretched walks through the snow;
sometimes he took the landlord's dog along for company, and on this
particular morning, a morning of brilliant sunshine and cold, insolent
wind, he had stopped to buy a bag of nuts for the hungry squirrels in
the woods. As he walked he was planning, planning, planning, how he
could make his misery touch Elizabeth's heart; he was all unconscious
that her misery had not yet touched his heart. But Elizabeth, locked in
her room, was beginning to think of his misery. Dully at first, then
with dreary concentration, she went over in her mind his arguments and
pleadings: he was satisfied to love her even if she didn't love him; he
had known what stakes he played for, and he was willing to abide by
them; she ought to do the same; she had done this thing--she had
married him, was it fair, now, to destroy him, soul and body, just
because she had acted on a moment's impulse? In a crisis of terror, his
primitive instinct of self-preservation had swept away the acquired
instinct of chivalry, and like a brutal boy, he had reminded her that
she was to blame as well as he. "You did it, too," he told her.
sullenly. She remembered that he had said he had not fully understood
that it was only impulse on her part; "I thought you cared for me a
little, or else you wouldn't have married me." In the panic of the
moment he really had not known that he lied, and in her absorption in
her own misery she did not contradict him. She ought, he said, to make
the best of the situation; or else he would kill himself. "Do you want
me to kill myself?" he had threatened. If she would make the best of
it, he would help her. He would do whatever she wished; he would be her
friend, her servant,--until she should come to love him.
"I shall never love you," she told him. "I will always love you! But I
will not make you unhappy. Let me be your servant; that's all I ask."
"I love David. I will always love him."
He had been silent at that; then broke again into a cry for mercy. "I
don't care if you do love him! Don't destroy me, Elizabeth."
He had had still one other weapon: _they were married_. There was no
getting round that. The thing was done; except by Time and the
outrageous scandal of publicity, it could not be undone. But this
weapon he had not used, knowing perfectly well that the idea of public
shame would be, just then, a matter of indifference to
Elizabeth?-perhaps even a satisfaction to her, as the sting of the
penitential whip is a satisfaction to the sinner. All he said was
summed up in three words: "Don't destroy me."
There was no reply. She had fallen into a silence which frightened him
more than her words. It was then that he went out for that walk on the
creaking snow, in the sunshine and fierce wind, taking the bag of nuts
along for the squirrels. Elizabeth, alone, her head on her arms on the
table, went over and over his threats and entreaties, until it seemed
as if her very mind was sore. After a while, for sheer weariness, she
left the tangle of motives and facts and obligations, and began to
think of David. It was then that she moaned a little under her breath.
Twice she had tried to write to him to tell him what had happened. But
each time she cringed away from her pen and paper. After all, what
could she write? The fact said all there was to say, and he knew the
fact by this time. When she said that, her mind, drawn by some horrible
curiosity, would begin to speculate as to how he had heard the fact?
Who told him? What did he say? How did he--? and here she would groan
aloud in an effort _not_ to know "how" he took it! To save herself from
this speculation which seemed to dig into a grave, and touch and handle
the decaying body of love, she would plan what she should say to him
when, after a while, "to-morrow," perhaps, she should be able to take
up her pen: "David,--I was out of my head. Think of me as if I were
dead." . . . "David,--I don't want you to forgive me. I want you to
hate me as I hate myself." . . . "David,--I was not in my right
mind--forgive me. I love you just the same. But it is as if I were
dead." Again and again she had thought out long, crying, frightened
letters to him; but she had not written them. And now she was beginning
to feel, vaguely, that she would never write them. "What is the use? I
am dead." The idea of calling upon him to come and save her, never
occurred to her. "I am dead," she said, as she sat there, her face
hidden in her arms; "there is nothing to be done."
After a while she stopped thinking of David and the letter she had not
been able to write; it seemed as if, when she tried to make it clear to
herself why she did not write to him, something stopped in her mind--a
cog did not catch; the thought eluded her. When this happened--as it
had happened again and again in these last days; she would fall to
thinking, with vague amazement, that this irremediable catastrophe was
out of all proportion to its cause. It was monstrous that a crazy
minute should ruin a whole life--two whole lives, hers and David's. It
was as if a pebble should deflect a river from its course, and make it
turn and overflow a landscape! It was incredible that so temporary a
thing as an outbreak of temper should have eternal consequences. She
gasped, with her face buried in her arms, at the realization--which
comes to most of us poor human creatures sooner or later--that sins may
be forgiven, but their results remain. As for sin--but surely that
meaningless madness was not sin? "It was insanity," she said, shivering
at the memory of that hour in the toll-house--that little mad hour,
that brought eternity with it! She had had other crazy hours, with no
such weight of consequence. Her mind went back over her engagement: her
love, her happiness--and her tempers. Well, nothing had come of them.
David always understood. And still further back: her careless, fiery
girlhood--when the knowledge of her mother's recreancy, undermining her
sense of responsibility by the condoning suggestion of heredity, had
made her quick to excuse her lack of self-control. Her girlhood had
been full of those outbreaks of passion, which she "couldn't help";
they were all meaningless, and all harmless, too; at any rate they were
all without results of pain to her.
Suddenly it seemed to her, as she looked across the roaring gulf that
separated her from the past, that all her life had been just a sunny
slope down to the edge of the gulf. All those "harmless" tempers which
had had no results, had pushed her to this result!
Her poor, bright, shamed head lay so long and so still on her folded
arms that one looking in upon her might have thought her dead. Perhaps,
in a way, Elizabeth did die then, when her heart seemed to break with
the knowledge that it is impossible to escape from yesterday. "Oh," she
said, brokenly, "why didn't somebody tell me? Why didn't they stop me?"
But she did not dwell upon the responsibility of other people. She
forgot the easy excuse of 'heredity.' This new knowledge brought with
it a vision of her own responsibility that filled her appalled mind to
the exclusion of everything else. It is not the pebble that turns the
current--it is the easy slope that invites it. All her life Elizabeth
had been inviting this moment; and the moment, when it came, was her
Day of Judgment. What she had thought of as an incredible injustice of
fate in letting a mad instant turn the scales for a whole life, was
merely an inevitable result of all that had preceded it. When this
fierce and saving knowledge came to her, she thought of Blair. "I have
spoiled my own life and David's life. I needn't spoil Blair's. He said
if I left him, it would destroy him.... Perhaps if I stay, it will be
my punishment. I can never be punished enough."
When Blair came home, she was standing with her forehead against the
window, her dry eyes watching the dazzling white world.
Coming up behind her, he took her hand and kissed it humbly. She turned
and looked at him with somber eyes.
"Poor Blair," she said.
And Blair, under his breath, said, "Thank God!"