it. Why, he thought his marriage was almost as wrong as his affairs
without marriage. He considered the social evil a necessity and wouldn't
condemn downright polygamy. In one place he admits divorce for adultery;
in another he merely 'doubts' if there is any other good cause, and in
the third he won't have it at all. When he finally gets down to
bed-rock, he says that the text on which the anti-divorce people take
their stand is so hazy that anybody is justified in making a mistake."
Stainton paused to relight his cigar.
"But you are talking of divorce," said von Klausen, "not of remarriage."
"Remarriage follows logically," Jim responded. "The one flows from the
other."
Von Klausen shrugged.
"Yes," persisted Jim. "Jerome declared against a second marriage after
the death of the first husband or wife, but your faith doesn't follow
him, does it? The Fathers differed in this just as they did in
everything else connected with the subject. The early bishops publicly
blessed the remarriage of at least one woman that had divorced her
husband on the ground of adultery. Epiphanius said that if a divorced
person remarried the Church would absolve him from blame. It was
weakness, he said, and I suppose it is, but the Church would tolerate
the weakness and wouldn't reject him from its rites or its salvation.
Origen didn't approve of remarriage, but he said that it was no more
than mere technical adultery, and the furthest that St. Augustine
himself could go was to have 'grave doubts' about it."
The Austrian, despite his nervousness, had shown an intellectual
interest in Stainton's exposition, but the interest was only
intellectual.
"It makes no matter what they said the Church should do," he insisted;
"it is what the Church has done. The Church has made marriage a
sacrament."
"Doesn't the Church rule that a marriage can be consummated only by an
act of the flesh?"
"Yes."
"Then how can what is done by the flesh be a sacrament?"
"I do not know. I know that it is. The Church, whether early or late,
has spoken and it has said that marriage is a sacrament indissoluble
save by the death of the husband or the wife."
Stainton put down his cigar.
"Captain," he said, "you are in earnest, aren't you?"
The Austrian flushed, but did not flinch.
"I am," said he.
"You love her?"
"I do."
"Truly?"
"With heart and soul, both."
"And there is no changing your faith?"
"No way."
"There isn't any short-cut, any quick trail over the mountain, any
bridle-path? A fellow cannot get an Indulgence--nothing of that sort?"
"I wish--I wish deeply that one might; but--no."
"No," said Jim with a little sigh, "I suppose not nowadays. I looked
that up, too. Public opinion is pretty strong, and as wrong as usual."
He seemed to shake the subject from him. "And," he ended, "now that I
have bored you with my cheap pedantry, I remember that I have been a bad
host: I have not asked you your errand."
What change was coming over the madman now?
"My errand?" asked von Klausen.
"Exactly. You come here at about 9 A.M., and I take up your valuable
time with a discussion of ecclesiastical polity. What was it that you
wanted to see me about?"
What the Austrian had wanted he had long since learned. He had no sooner
left the villa on the night previous than he began to doubt whether his
supposition that Stainton was unsuspicious was quite so well founded as
he had at first imagined. He recalled a certain constraint in the
husband's deportment, and then he imagined other tokens that had not
been displayed. In the end, he decided to return to Muriel's home at the
earliest possible moment, discover whether there were any real danger
and, if there was, face its consequences. Now, however he learned that
Muriel had made some sort of confession to Stainton and that Stainton
had received that confession in a manner inexplicable to von Klausen.
Confronted with Jim's abrupt question, he did not know what to say, and
so he found himself saying:
"I should like to see Mrs. Stainton."
Stainton whistled.
"I wish you could," he answered. "Indeed, indeed, I wish you could, my
boy; but I am sorry to say that it is out of the question."
"You forbid it?" Von Klausen wished that these confounded Americans
could be brought to see the simplicity of settling complex difficulties
by the code of honour.
"I didn't say that I forbade it; I said it was out of the question. I
meant that it was out of the question."
The Austrian bent forward, hot anger in his eyes.
"Do you dare to deprive her of her liberty?" he asked.
"On the contrary, my dear sir, she has taken her liberty. She has gone
away."
The thing seemed incredible to von Klausen:
"Away from Marseilles?"
Stainton nodded.
"That's it," he agreed.
There shot through von Klausen's mind the thought that this lunatic had
killed her. If so, he would surely kill the lunatic or be killed in the
attempt.
"I don't believe it," he said. "I believe that you are----"
"Captain von Klausen, I have learned all that I want to know about your
religious faith, and I am not in the slightest degree interested in the
question of your other beliefs. I say to you that my wife has gone away,
and I am afraid that, whether you like it or not, you are obliged, for
the present, to accept my word."
"I will not accept your word!"
"Pardon me, but I don't see what else you can very well do. Of course,
you might watch the house, but the Corniche gets very hot by midday."
"You joke. You can joke about such a thing!"
"I have never been so serious as I am now."
Stainton emphasised his words with a gesture of his left hand, in which
he held the now crumpled letter.
"That letter!" said von Klausen with sudden inspiration. "It is from
her!"
"It is."
"Ah, you have intercepted a letter from her to me!"
"I am not in the habit of reading my wife's personal letters to other
people--when she writes any. This note is addressed to me, and it is
this note that tells me of her departure."
"It tells you where she is going?"
"It tells me that and more. It tells me that she is sorry for a wound
she thinks she has inflicted on my feelings, and she proposed to look
for rest in a certain secluded place."
The Austrian's blue eyes brightened.
"A secluded place?" he repeated, excitedly.
"Exactly; but I shall not tell you its name. I shall keep that to myself
until I have had another interview with my wife."
The Captain looked closely at Stainton.
"You mean to follow and chastise her?" he asked.
"There," said Stainton, quietly, "I think we reach a point where the
matter becomes entirely my own affair."
XXI
THE MAN AND HIS GOD
If you look in your Baedeker's "Southern France," you will find, in very
small type, on page 479, the following brief paragraph:
"From Aubagne or Auriol to the Ste. Baume. From Aubagne an omnibus
(5 fr.) plies four times weekly via (3 M.) Gemenos to the (4 hrs.)
Hotellerie (see below). From Auriol an omnibus (50 c.) plies to the
(51/2 M.) St. Zacherie (Lion d'Or), whence we have still 8 M. of bad
road (carr. 10-20 fr.) to the Hotellerie de la Ste. Baume, situated on
the plateau or Plan d'Aulps, 3/4 hr. below the grotto. The E. portion of
the plateau is occupied by a virgin *Forest with fine trees--The Ste.
Baume is, according to tradition, the grotto to which Mary Magdalen
retired to end her days; it has been transformed into a chapel and is
still a frequented pilgrim resort. It has given its name to the
mountains among which it lies."
So much for Baedeker. But Baedeker either does not know everything, or
else, like a really good traveller, he keeps to himself, lest tourists
spoil, some of the best things that he has seen. The plateau above which
hangs the cave that tradition describes as The Magdalen's last
residence is, in fact, as far out of the world as if its first tenant
had tried to climb as near to Heaven as she could before she quitted the
earth altogether, and so far as the wandering American is concerned, it
might quite as well be across the celestial border.
Yet it was to the Ste. Baume that Muriel had gone, and that she had
written to her husband. For Muriel, too, had passed a night of wracking
reflection, and the dim dawn had found her clear upon one resolve.
The anger that had been kindled by Stainton's accusation slowly died
away. She saw that, though he had assumed her love for von Klausen to
have carried her so much farther than she had indeed been carried, the
difference was only of degree; and, though she was far from condemning
herself, she knew that her husband would, even knowing all, condemn her
because he would judge her by the standards of that ancient fallacy
which sees wrong not in the deed but in the desire.
She was clear in her own mind as to the course that she had pursued, but
she was equally clear that Jim had acted as truly in conformance with
his lights as she had with hers. She recognised as she had never before
recognised those qualities in Jim which, she felt, should have at least
won from her a less recriminative tone than she had, the night before,
assumed toward him. She remembered the evening when she had promised
herself to him in that long ago and far away New York--how tall and
strong and fine he had seemed, how virile and yet how much the master,
of his fate and of himself as well. She remembered how he had crushed
her to his breast--how she had responded. She was changed. She was sure
that she was changed for the better. But what was it that had changed
her? That night in New York the miracle had happened. Were miracles of
such short life?
In an agony of endeavour she set herself to recalling his thousand
little kindnesses, and each one seemed to rise at her summons to point
its accusing finger at her anger. Why couldn't she have been gentler to
him? She was at a loss for the answer. She told herself that, in
character, he was unscalable heights above her. She was ashamed of her
anger, ashamed of her hatred; she regarded him, in her self-abasement,
as something even of a saint, yet love him she could not: the thought of
any physical contact with him made her shiver.
Franz von Klausen she knew that she did love and would always love. She
was married to Jim, and Franz himself said that marriage was a
sacrament. Where, then, was the occult power of the sacrament that it
could not hold her heart? She could not, in honesty, live with Jim as
his wife; according to von Klausen's standard, she could not in moral
rectitude live with von Klausen. What was left for her but to run away?
Thus it was that she arrived at her decision. In her primal impulses
she was still only a young animal that had been caught in the marriage
trap, that had torn herself free, and that now, wounded and bleeding,
wanted to hide and suffer alone.
She had some money in her purse--a thousand francs. She wrote the note
to Jim, who she felt certain would supply her with any more money that
she might require, gave it to the maid, left the house on her tiptoes
and, after a few hesitant enquiries of a lonely policeman, took the tram
to Aubagne. In Aubagne she hired a carriage for the Ste. Baume.
It was a marvellous drive under a sky of brilliant blue. Leaving behind
a fruitful valley dotted with prettily gardened, badly designed villas,
they climbed for four hours, into a tremendous sweep of rugged
mountains. Upward, until the vegetation lost its luxuriance and became
sparse, the carriage curved around and around peak set upon peak, only
thirty miles from the sea, yet nine hundred metres above it. Sometimes,
looking over the side, she could count five loops of the road beneath
her and as many more above, glistening yellow and deserted among the
gaunt outlines of rock. Not a house, not another wayfarer was in view,
only the billowing mountains that rose out of wild timberlands below to
gigantic cliffs bare of any growth, perpendicular combs, sheer
precipices miles long and nearly a thousand feet in height, which seemed
to bend and sway along the sky-edge. With a sudden curve that showed
even Marseilles and the ocean shimmering against the horizon, they
rounded the last height, descended but a few hundred feet upon a wide
plateau, the sides of which were partially wooded chasms, and came,
among a dozen scattered houses, to the Hotellerie that had for many
years been a Dominican monastery and still maintained the simplicity of
its builders.
They ushered her through the tiled halls, past the chapel, and, amid
sacred images set in the whitewashed walls, to her room, the bare cell
of a priest, with the name of one of the early Fathers of the Church
inscribed above the door and a crucifix over the narrow iron bed.
A flood of memories from her convent days deluged her. Muriel sank upon
her knees and prayed.
She had not breakfasted, and she could eat no lunch. A half-hour after
her arrival she began her ascent to the Grotto of the Magdalen.
She walked across the plain, first through the fields and then through a
gradually mounting forest to which an axe had never been laid. The hill
became steeper and steeper; it grew into a mountain. The leaf-strewn
path turned, under ancient trees with interlacing branches, about giant
boulders covered with moss through the centuries that had gone by since
they were first flung there from the towering frost-loosened crags
above. She passed an old spring and a ruined shrine, and so she reached
at last the foot of a precipice as bare as her hand, a huge wall of
smooth rock that leaned far forward from the clouds as if it were about
to fall.
Under a crumbling gateway she passed and ascended the worn, canting
steps, which, by a series of sharply angular divergences, led a third of
the way up the face of the precipice. There, fronting a narrow, deserted
natural balcony, was the grotto.
Doors had been placed at the mouth of the great cave, but the doors were
open. Through them, far in the cool shadows, Muriel caught a glimpse of
the white altar and a sound of dripping water that fell from the
cavern's ceiling of living rock into the Holy Pool. She took an
irresolute step toward this strange chapel; then she turned toward the
low parapet and looked over the mountain side, over the primaeval forest,
to the plateau far below and the peaks and ridges beyond. She remembered
von Klausen's words:
"The silent chapel; the long, fertile plain that seems a world away; the
snow-capped peaks to the northward; the faint tinkle of distant
sheep-bells, and the memory----"
She gave a little gasp: her husband was coming up the steps.
He mounted slowly. His back bent painfully to the climb. She could see
that he was breathing heavily and, as he raised his face to hers, she
noticed with a throb of self-accusation that it looked tired and old.
"You followed?"
He nodded briefly.
"Why did you follow me?" she asked.
It was fully a minute before he regained his breath; but when he spoke
he spoke calmly and gently.
"I came," he said, "to say some things that I should have said last
night."
Muriel braced herself against the parapet.
"Very well," said she.
He understood her.
"I don't mean to scold you, dear," began Stainton.
His eyes regarded her wistfully, and she turned away, glancing first
over the precipice where, below them, the treetops tossed and then up,
far up, straight up, to the awful height of sheer cliff overhead where,
somewhere just beyond her sight, there nestled, she knew, the little
chapel of St. Pilon.
"Why not?" she asked.
"Wait and you will understand."
She felt now that forgiveness was the one thing that she could not bear.
She was learning the most difficult of the moral lessons: that, hard as
punishment may be, there is nothing so terrible as pardon.
"I want you to be angry," she said. "You ought to be angry. I was angry
with you. That is what I am sorry for. It is all that I am sorry for,
but I am very, very sorry for it. I ought to love you--I promised to
love you; I thought I did love you, and if ever a man deserved to be
loved, you deserve it. And yet I don't love you. I can't! Oh, I'll come
back with you. I can't live with you as your wife, but I'll live with
you. If you want me to, we can start right away."
But Stainton would not yet hear of that.
"Wait," he said, "wait. Perhaps we can think of something. Perhaps
something will turn up." Jim put out a hand, a hand grown thin and
heavily veined since his marriage, and timidly patted her arm. "My poor
little girl!" he whispered. "My poor little child!"
"No, no!" she said, drawing away. "You must hate me!"
"I could never do that, Muriel."
"But you have to! Think of it: I don't love you--you, my husband--and I
do--I do----"
The words that had come so easily by night and in anger she dared not
utter here in calmness and by day. But Stainton supplied:
"You do love him?"
She bowed her dark head in assent.
"You are very sure?" he asked.
"Very, very sure."
"So that it was not"--he hesitated as if he knew that he had no right to
put the question--"it was not merely passion?"
Muriel looked straight into his eyes.
"It was so far from merely passion," she answered, "that I have only
twice even so much as kissed him."
Stainton believed her now. His hand dropped from her arm. It seemed to
him that she would have hurt him less had her love for von Klausen been
baser.
There was a long pause.
"I see," said Stainton at last; and again: "I see."
He looked up at the high cliff bending far above them.
"And--von Klausen," he presently pursued--"you will let me ask it, won't
you? In a moment you will see that I have a good reason. You are sure
that his love for you is--is of the same sort that yours is for him?"
"Quite."
"Why?"
"On the same evidence."
"I see. I had begun to think so this morning. He came to see me."
She gave a short cry.
"Is he hurt?" she asked.
"Why should I hurt him? It is not his fault that he has hurt me. No, I
didn't hurt him; I merely came by train to Aubagne, and thence here by
motor-bus, to learn--what I have learned; and to say--what I am about to
say."
"You told him where I was?"
"I did not name the place. I simply said that you had gone away, leaving
a note in which you told me that you were bound for a certain secluded
spot to be alone."
Muriel clasped her white hands in distress.
"He will guess," she said. "He will guess from that. It was he told me
of this place--told me only the other day in much those words."
Stainton smiled a little.
"I fancied he would guess," said he: "I intended that he should."
"But he will follow!"
"No doubt."
"You--you--why do you speak so?"
"He can't get a convenient train from Marseilles, so he will probably
come the whole way by motor."
"He will--he will! He will know that you have come----"
"I told him that I meant to."
"And he will think you mean to punish me----"
"Yes."
"And--oh, don't you see?--he will come to protect me!"
The husband again put his hand timidly upon her arm.
"My dear," he said, "that is just what I wanted him to do--and what I
feared he might not do if I told him that I wanted it. The worst thing
about this whole tragedy is that it is unnecessary, a quite useless
tragedy. I've thought a great deal since you spoke out plainly to me,
and I am beginning to see--even I, who wish not to see it--that you were
not so far from right; for if man's stupidity hadn't devised for itself
a wholly crooked and muddled system for the conduct of his life, this
sort of now common catastrophe simply couldn't happen. Listen."
He plucked at her sleeve, and she turned her pale face toward him.
"All my life," he went on, "I've been afraid of two things: old age
and--something else. Perhaps I've learned better in the last few hours.
I've tried to learn that only the laws of man are horrible and bad and
that no natural law can be, if we face it for what it is, either
repellent or wrong. Before, I tried to be young. I trained myself to be
young. I denied my youth, believing that I could strengthen and prolong
it. I decided that youth was a state of mind--that it could be retained
by an effort of the will. I postponed love with that in mind, and I
postponed too long. Then, when I never doubted myself, I married you."
He released her arm.
"I married you," he continued; "and so, from sinning against myself, I
began to sin against another. Much that you said last night was right. I
have been selfish. I have robbed you of your youth, and I've given you
nothing in return but what a man might give to spoil a child or to
flatter a mistress. It wasn't a marriage. I see that now. The white heat
of passion fused together two pieces of greatly differing metals, but
when the passion cooled, the welding wouldn't hold: the joint snapped. I
thought I could hold you. Hold you--as if that could be love which must
be held! I took a low advantage of your ignorance of life. I came to
you, who knew nothing, and said: 'I will teach you'--but--I was giving
you the half-sunshine of the sunset when your just portion was the blaze
of noon. I was keeping youth from youth."
Her large eyes were tender with tears.
"Do you mean it?" she asked. "Do you really mean--all this?"
"As I never meant anything else in my life. I violated nature and must
pay the price."
Throughout all time and lands, he now felt, youth calls to youth,
generation to generation, and not all the laws upon the statute-books of
all the world can silence it.
"I've thought that you were ignorant," he was saying; "perhaps you were
wiser than I. You are not breaking the law. You are fulfilling it. I was
the one that was ignorant. I was the one that was wrong."
Out of sheer generosity, though her brain and heart cried assent to his
every word, she tried to protest. But the youth in her heart clamoured
that he was speaking truth.
"And so," he concluded, "now that I am sure that you truly love each
other, I mean to step aside."
She looked at him blankly.
"Step aside?" she repeated.
"I mean to make what reparation is possible: I must."
Muriel's face quivered.
"So that I--that we----" she started.
"So that you and von Klausen may marry."
"But we can't anyhow! Oh--that's the horror of it! That's why the thing
can never be mended. In his religion there is no divorce. Marriage is a
sacrament. Final. It lasts until one or the other dies."
Stainton frowned. It was a slight frown, rather of annoyance than of
pain.
"Yes," he said. "I gave all my earlier life for my superstition, and
now----"
"You see," she was running on, "in his faith, a marriage----"
"Yes, yes," he interrupted. "I know. They are flat-footed on that. I am
only wondering----"
His speech dropped from the vocabulary of emotion to the trivial phrases
of the colloquial.
"Look there!" he broke off.
Her eyes followed his pointing finger: in a little gap through the
tree-tops they could see the path below, and up the path a figure was
bounding: fevered, lithe, young.
Muriel clutched the parapet.
"It's Franz!" she said.
"Yes, it's Franz," said Jim. "Just as I began talking to you, I thought
I saw a motor scorching down the road toward the Hotellerie. He must
have left the car there and come right on."
"I know it is he. It is." She turned to her husband. "And, O, Jim, what
shall I do?"
"See him, of course."
"Why? Why should we fight it all over again? There's no way out: we'll
just have to go on forever. There's nothing to do. Why should I fight it
all over again? I'm tired--I'm so tired!"
Stainton looked at her long and earnestly. He did not speak, did not
take her hand. He did nothing, he believed, that she could afterward
translate into a good-bye.
"Nonsense!" he said, shortly. "You see him and try to bring him around
to looking at marriage as the mere contract that the law has made it."
"There is no chance. The other view is part of his life--you've said so
yourself."
Stainton smiled.
"Anyhow," he said, "there's no harm in trying. See him and make one more
appeal. I'll cut around here and have a try at climbing to the top of
the cliff. There's a path by the back way. The hotel proprietor spoke
enough English to tell me there was a small chapel on the top of this
cliff over our heads, and a wonderful view, from Toulon to
Marseilles--Try it, Muriel--for my sake. I want to pay up. I don't
pretend to be happy, but I want to pay up. So long! Good luck. And never
say die!"
He rattled out his careless words so swiftly that she could not answer.
He scarcely reached their end before he raised his hat and darted down
the steps.
She saw him disappear, and waited. She waited until von Klausen's young
head and shoulders came above the steps.
"Franz!" she cried.
The Austrian hurried to her.