“Well, I can have you now,” he said gently, folding me softly in his
arms with such tender reverence that I cried out in pain, “Oh, Hal,
don’t, don’t!” and struggled free. I was ashamed, knowing I was not
worthy of this.
He flushed a dusky red.
“Am I so hateful to you that you cannot bear my touch?” he asked half
wistfully, half angrily.
“Oh no; it isn’t that. I’m really very fond of you, if you’d only
understand,” I said half to myself.
“Understand! If you care for me, that is all I want to understand. I
love you, and have plenty of money. There is nothing to keep us apart.
Now that I know you care for me, I _will_ have you, in spite of the
devil.”
“There will be a great tussle between you,” I said mischievously,
laughing at him. “Old Nick has a great hold on me, and I’m sure he will
dispute your right.”
At any time Harold’s sense of humour was not at all in accordance with
his size, and he failed to see how my remark applied now.
He gripped my hands in a passion of pleading, as two years previously
he had seized me in jealous rage. He drew me to him. His eyes were dark
and full of entreaty; his voice was husky.
“Syb, poor little Syb, I will be good to you! You can have what you
like. You don’t know what you mean when you say no.”
No; I would not yield. He offered me everything—but control. He was a
man who meant all he said. His were no idle promises on the spur of the
moment. But no, no, no, no, he was not for me. My love must know, must
have suffered, must understand.
“Syb, you do not answer. May I call you mine? You must, you must, you
must!”
His hot breath was upon my cheek. The pleasant, open, manly countenance
was very near-perilously near. The intoxication of his love was
overpowering me. I had no hesitation about trusting him. He was not
distasteful to me in any way. What was the good of waiting for that
other—the man who had suffered, who knew, who understood? I might never
find him; and, if I did, ninety-nine chances to one he would not care
for me.
“Syb, Syb, can’t you love me just a little?”
There was a winning charm in his manner. Nature had endowed him
liberally with virile fascination. My hard uncongenial life had
rendered me weak. He was drawing me to him; he was irresistible. Yes; I
would be his wife. I grew dizzy, and turned my head sharply backwards
and took a long gasping breath, another and another, of that fresh cool
air suggestive of the grand old sea and creak of cordage and bustle and
strife of life. My old spirit revived, and my momentary weakness fled.
There was another to think of than myself, and that was Harold. Under a
master-hand I would be harmless; but to this man I would be as a
two-edged sword in the hand of a novice—gashing his fingers at every
turn, and eventually stabbing his honest heart.
It was impossible to make him see my refusal was for his good. He was
as a favourite child pleading for a dangerous toy. I desired to gratify
him, but the awful responsibility of the after-effects loomed up and
deterred me.
“Hal, it can never be.”
He dropped my hands and drew himself up.
“I will not take your No till the morning. Why do you refuse me? Is it
my temper? You need not be afraid of that. I don’t think I’d hurt you;
and I don’t drink, or smoke, or swear very much; and I’ve never
destroyed a woman’s name. I would not stoop to press you against your
will if you were like the ordinary run of women; but you are such a
queer little party, that I’m afraid you might be boggling at some funny
little point that could easily be wiped out.”
“Yes; it is only a little point. But if you wipe it out you will knock
the end out of the whole thing—for the point is myself. I would not
suit you. It would not be wise for you to marry me.”
“But I’m the only person concerned. If you are not afraid for yourself,
I am quite satisfied.”
We faced about and walked homewards in unbroken silence—too perturbed
to fall into our usual custom of chewing bush-leaves as we went.
I thought much that night when all the house was abed. It was tempting.
Harold would be good to me, and would lift me from this life of poverty
which I hated, to one of ease. Should I elect to remain where I was,
till the grave there was nothing before me but the life I was leading
now: my only chance of getting above it was by marriage, and Harold
Beecham’s offer was the one chance of a lifetime. Perhaps he could
manage me well enough. Yes; I had better marry him.
And I believe in marriage—that is, I think it the most sensible and
respectable arrangement for the replenishing of a nation which has yet
been suggested. But marriage is a solemn issue of life. I was as suited
for matrimony as any of the sex, but only with an exceptional
helpmeet—and Harold was not he. My latent womanliness arose and pointed
this out so plainly that I seized my pen and wrote:
Dear Harold,
I will not get a chance of speaking to you in the morning, so write.
Never mention marriage to me again. I have firmly made up my mind—it
must be No. It will always be a comfort to me in the years to come to
know that I was loved once, if only for a few hours. It is not that I
do not care for you, as I like you better than any man I have ever
seen; but I do not mean ever to marry. When you lost your fortune I was
willing to accede to your request, as I thought you wanted me; but now
that you are rich again you will not need me. I am not good enough to
be your wife, for you are a good man; and better, because you do not
know you are good. You may feel uncomfortable or lonely for a little
while, because, when you make up your mind, you are not easily
thwarted; but you will find that your fancy for me will soon pass. It
is only a fancy, Hal. Take a look in the glass, and you will see
reflected there the figure of a stalwart man who is purely virile,
possessing not the slightest attribute of the weaker sex, therefore
your love is merely a passing flame. I do not impute fickleness to you,
but merely point out a masculine characteristic, and that you are a
man, and only a man, pure and unadulterated. Look around, and from the
numbers of good women to be found on every side choose one who will
make you a fitter helpmeet, a more conventional comrade, than I could
ever do. I thank you for the inestimable honour you have conferred upon
me; but keep it till you find some one worthy of it, and by and by you
will be glad that I have set you free.
Good-bye, Hal!
Your sincere and affec. friend,
SYBYLLA PENELOPE MELVYN.
Then I crept into bed beside my little sister, and though the air
inside had not cooled, and the room was warm, I shivered so that I
clasped the chubby, golden-haired little sleeper in my arms that I
might feel something living and real and warm.
“Oh, Rory, Rory!” I whispered, raining upon her lonely-hearted tears.
“In all the world is there never a comrade strong and true to teach me
the meaning of this hollow, grim little tragedy—life? Will it always be
this ghastly aloneness? Why am I not good and pretty and simple like
other girls? Oh, Rory, Rory, why was I ever born? I am of no use or
pleasure to any one in all the world!”
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
He that despiseth little things, shall fall little by little
I
The morning came, breakfast, next Harold’s departure. I shook my head
and slipped the note into his hand as we parted. He rode slowly down
the road. I sat on the step of the garden gate, buried my face in my
hands, and reviewed the situation. I could see my life, stretching out
ahead of me, barren and monotonous as the thirsty track along which
Harold was disappearing. Today it was washing, ironing tomorrow, next
day baking, after that scrubbing—thus on and on. We would occasionally
see a neighbour or a tea-agent, a tramp or an Assyrian hawker. By hard
slogging against flood, fire, drought, pests, stock diseases, and the
sweating occasioned by importation, we could manage to keep bread in
our mouths. By training and education I was fitted for nought but what
I was, or a general slavey, which was many degrees worse. I could take
my choice. Life was too much for me. What was the end of it, what its
meaning, aim, hope, or use?
In comparison to millions I knew that I had received more than a fair
share of the goods of life; but knowing another has leprosy makes our
cancer none the easier to bear.
My mother’s voice, sharp and cross, roused me. “Sybylla, you lazy
unprincipled girl, to sit scheming there while your poor old mother is
at the wash-tub. You sit idling there, and then by and by you’ll be
groaning about this terrible life in which there’s time for nothing but
work.”
How she fussed and bothered over the clothes was a marvel to me. My
frame of mind was such that it seemed it would not signify if all our
clothes went to the dogs, and the clothes of our neighbours, and the
clothes of the whole world, and the world itself for the matter of
that.
“Sybylla, you are a dirty careless washer. You’ve put Stanley’s
trousers in the boil and the colour is coming out of them, and your
father’s best white handkerchief should have been with the first lot,
and here it is now.”
Poor mother got crosser as she grew weary with the fierce heat and
arduous toil, and as I in my abstraction continued to make mistakes,
but the last straw was the breaking of an old cup which I accidentally
pushed off the table.
I got it hot. Had I committed an act of premeditated villainy I could
not have received more lecturing. I deserved it—I was careless, cups
were scarce with us, and we could not afford more; but what I rail
against is the grindingly uneventful narrowness of the life in which
the unintentional breaking of a common cup is good for a long scolding.
Ah, my mother! In my life of nineteen years I can look back and see a
time when she was all gentleness and refinement, but the polish has
been worn off it by years and years of scrubbing and scratching, and
washing and patching, and poverty and husbandly neglect, and the
bearing of burdens too heavy for delicate shoulders. Would that we were
more companionable, it would make many an oasis in the desert of our
lives. Oh that I could take an all-absorbing interest in patterns and
recipes, bargains and orthodoxy! Oh that you could understand my desire
to feel the rolling billows of the ocean beneath, to hear the pealing
of a great organ through dimly lit arches, or the sob and wail of a
violin in a brilliant crowded hall, to be swept on by the human stream.
Ah, thou cruel fiend—Ambition! Desire!
“Soul of the leaping flame,
Heart of the scarlet fire,
Spirit that hath for name
Only the name—Desire!”
To hot young hearts beating passionately in strong breasts, the
sweetest thing is motion.
No, that part of me went beyond my mother’s understanding. On the other
hand, there was a part of my mother—her brave cheerfulness, her trust
in God, her heroic struggle to keep the home together—which went
soaring on beyond my understanding, leaving me a coward weakling,
grovelling in the dust.
Would that hot dreary day never close? What advantage when it did? The
next and the next and many weeks of others just the same were following
hard after.
If the souls of lives were voiced in music, there are some that none
but a great organ could express, others the clash of a full orchestra,
a few to which nought but the refined and exquisite sadness of a violin
could do justice. Many might be likened unto common pianos, jangling
and out of tune, and some to the feeble piping of a penny whistle, and
mine could be told with a couple of nails in a rusty tin-pot.
Why do I write? For what does any one write? Shall I get a hearing? If
so—what then?
I have voiced the things around me, the small-minded thoughts, the
sodden round of grinding tasks—a monotonous, purposeless, needless
existence. But patience, O heart, surely I can make a purpose! For the
present, of my family I am the most suited to wait about common
public-houses to look after my father when he is inebriated. It breaks
my mother’s heart to do it; it is dangerous for my brothers; imagine
Gertie in such a position! But me it does not injure, I have the
faculty for doing that sort of thing without coming to harm, and if it
makes me more bitter and godless, well, what matter?