The clustering hillsmen followed Traherne, but Yazok, the temple priest,
did not. His penance and oblations done at last, he stood immovable, his
deep-set, inimical eyes fixed, cold and narrowed, on Crespin and
Lucilla.
With eyes even more venomous Major Crespin watched Traherne out of
sight. Then he seated himself with a bulky, determined assertion of a
right—a proprietor’s right—beside his wife on the broad flat stone.
She took no notice.
“Well, Lucilla!” he said. There was insult in the tone, and there was
pain and appeal. The insult was veiled; the pain and appeal were not.
But the woman heard the accusation, and was deaf to the cry.
“Well?” she answered indifferently, and without looking at him.
He fumbled for another cigarette, saying, “That was a narrow squeak!”
“Yes, I suppose so,” she said, still more indifferently. It lashed him
and he winced, because he knew that her indifference was for him, and
not for the accident or for their plight, and because he thought that
she had meant him to know that it was. Crespin was wrong there—she did
not care whether he knew, or what he knew, and she cared even less what
he felt.
“All’s well that ends well, eh?” he persisted, looking at her ominously
through gloomy, blood-shot eyes.
“Of course,” she said listlessly.
“You don’t seem very grateful to Providence.” He would not leave her
alone.
“For sending the fog?” his wife returned contemptuously.
“For getting us down safely—all three,” Crespin corrected her, with a
significant emphasis on the last two words.
Lucilla Crespin took the gauntlet up then. “It was Dr. Traherne’s nerve
that did that,” she told him, looking him full in the face. He had been
watching her narrowly, hungrily too, all the time, but she had not given
him a glance till now. “If he hadn’t kept his head—”
“We should have crashed. I wish to God we had. One or other of us would
probably have broken his neck; and, if Providence had played up, it
might have been the right one.”
His wife swung round to him at that, as they sat, “What do you mean?”
she demanded.
“It might have been me,” he told her in a harsh, smoldering voice. “Then
you’d have thanked God right enough!”
The woman caught the insinuation and held it squarely. But the pain and
the prayer she did not hear—or, if she heard, she scorned to heed.
There is no other mercilessness so hard and cold as that of one ultra
type of good woman. Lucilla Crespin was of that type—now. Her days of
forgiveness and bending had passed—at least for him. Ancestry had so
predisposed her, and the last bad years had frozen it in. Should her boy
live to sin as his father had sinned, probably the flood-gates of
understanding and pity would open again, and grief and womanliness
sweeten her soul again—but never again for the man beside her. Had her
heart stirred to him now, far as he’d gone, she might have saved and
remanned him. But her heart was dead to him, as hard and unresponsive as
the flint on which they sat.
That they quarreled here—for it _was_ quarrel bitter and violent, for
all the yearning in him, for all her high-bred self-control—that they
_could_ quarrel here, after such an adventure and mishap as they had
just shared, in the thick of such unfathomed peril as they were sharing,
showed what the breach between them meant to them both—despair and
soul-damnation to the man, love and comradeship quite dead to the woman.
It was hopeless—the life-split and abyss, or else the hours they’d just
come through, the peril they’d escaped, the less-known, and for that the
more unnerving peril that menaced them now as they sat side by side on
the stone, must have reunited and reconciled them.
Lucilla Crespin faced her husband squarely, more in unveiled contempt
than in courage or in injured pride. “Why,” she complained impatiently,
“will you talk like this, Antony? If I hadn’t sent Dr. Traherne away
just now, you’d have been saying these things in his hearing.”
“Well, why not?” Crespin retorted hotly. “Don’t tell me he doesn’t know
all about the ‘state of our relations,’ as they say in the divorce
court.”
“If he does, it’s not from me,” the wife said coldly, then added sourly:
“No doubt he knows what the whole station knows.”
What the whole station knew! Aye, there was the rub—the blistering rub
to her woman’s pride and shame, the galling, smarting rub to the man’s.
How often life’s chasms could be bridged, even its cesspools purged and
sweetened, if only no others knew. Lucilla said it not unnastily, all
the more so for the high-bred quality of civility and self-control with
which she spoke. A husband’s faults—not even the unbearable fault of
infidelity—never in themselves bear on a woman so crushingly and
painfully as does having others know of them. For a husband’s sins and
malodorous peccadilloes are the damnable hall-mark of a wife’s failure,
branded on her soul and her flesh in a festering sore that never heals,
and that all can see. Thousands of women go to the scaffold of the
divorce court because what others know compels them. Lucilla Crespin
knew what it had cost her that the whole station knew, but she gave no
thought at all to what it had cost Antony. Only the highest souls
realize and accept that he who sins is far more to be pitied, aye, and
loved, if love is what the highest human passion should be, than is the
one against whom the sinner has sinned.
“And what does the whole station know?” Crespin demanded. His eyes
blazed through their blear, and the hand on his knee trembled. “What
does the whole station know? Why, that your deadly coldness drives me to
drink!” His voice broke just a little. “I’ve lived for three years in an
infernal clammy fog like that we’ve passed through. Who’s to blame if I
take a whiskey peg now and then, to keep the chill out? Who?”
“Oh, Antony, why go over it all again?” She half rose, and then, as if
it were not worth while to move, sank back as she’d been. “You know very
well it was drink—and other things—that came between us; not my
coldness, as you call it, that drove you to drink.”
“Oh,” Crespin cried in a rasping voice, “you good women! You patter
after the parson, ‘Forgive us as we forgive those who trespass against
us.’ But you don’t know what forgiveness means. ‘Plaster saints’ every
one of you, your vaunted Christianity to be shattered at the first
hammer-tap of what you don’t like. Blind to every fault of your own,
fiendish and merciless to every fault of another, if it happens to nick
you on your own petty raw. Damn such ‘good women’ I say. You’ll make a
fine show on Judgment Day when you file up one by one to have your sins
forgiven even as you have forgiven us poor rotten scum that have
trespassed against you. You—you don’t know your own faults, I tell you.
You take them for virtues, even when they smell to heaven. You have no
faults, you, you scourgers of others, not a fault of your own.
Forgiveness! You don’t know what it means. You’re not fit to know!”
Never had Antony Crespin spoken to her so before. The force of his
terrible passion reached her, but not its meaning. She heard the storm,
and she saw its wreck: knotting muscles, quivering nostrils, wild,
agonized eyes. But its pathos never reached her. He cried out to her for
bread—new, clean, white bread, and she pitched a stone of contempt into
his outstretched hand. Perhaps, if Basil Traherne had not been there
behind the rock—perhaps, if she and Traherne had never met—Antony
Crespin’s wife might have heard his appeal and responded to it in his
hour of utmost need, utmost abasement—for that was what his outburst of
rage and accusation was: shame, longing, the old, old cry for one more
chance.
But Lucilla was dead now to any need or appeal of his. Well, he had
earned it. Alas, for life’s heaviest tragedy—we usually have. We earn
what we get—most of us—and, sweet heaven help us! we get it God does
not always pay on Saturday—but He pays.
Mrs. Crespin, her eyes strained for what might come from the Raja’s
castle, her ears strained to catch Traherne’s returning footsteps,
answered his words, but only his words.
“What’s the use of it, Antony?” she said drearily. “Forgive? I have
forgiven you. I don’t try to take the children from you, though it might
be better for them if I did. But to forgive is one thing, to forget
another. When a woman has seen a man behave as you have behaved, do you
think it is possible for her to forget it, and to love afresh? There are
women in novels, and perhaps in the slums, who have such short memories;
but I am not one of them.”
“No, by God, you’re not!” And at the passion in the Englishman’s voice,
Yazok the priest, still watching them steadily, moved a little. “So a
whole man’s life is to be ruined—”
“Do you think yours is the only life to be ruined?” She, too, moved as
she spoke, and left an inch or two more space between them on the stone
where they both still sat, Crespin too shaken to rise, she too
indifferent.
He had forgotten where they were, forgotten their danger even. The woman
had not. She thrust her chin in her palms, her elbows on her knees, and
searched the path to the castle with anxious eyes. Her nerves were
aching now with the strain of delay and uncertainty, and because her
nerves ached so, she prodded back at him again with her vicious
question, viciously asked, “Do you think yours is the only life to be
ruined?”
Crespin crouched over towards her like some jungle beast crouching to
spring. “Ah!” he snapped. “There we have it! I’ve not only offended your
sensibilities; I’m in your way. You love this other man, this model of
all the virtues!”
His wife made no pretense of not understanding him. “You have no right
to say that,” she said simply.
Crespin disregarded her protest—if it was protest she had deigned to
make—as he must have disregarded any interruption now that was less
than some yielding, some warming of hers.
“He’s a paragon!” he pounded on. “He’s a wonder! He’s a mighty
microbe-killer before the Lord; he’s going to work heaven knows what
miracles, only he hasn’t brought them off yet. And you’re cursing the
mistake you made in marrying a poor devil of a soldier-man instead of a
first-class scientific genius. Come! Make a clean breast of it! You may
as well!”
One word from her—just one word of denial—would have healed and helped
him, and she knew, at least, that it would have slaked his angry fever.
But she did not give that cup of cold water; perhaps because she held
truth too sacred—the virtues are an almost supreme asset, but they can
be terribly cruel, and they should not be made of cast-iron—perhaps
because she had for him too little kindness left.
“Come on, Lu,” he urged. “Tell me. Do.”
“I have nothing to answer,” she returned without troubling to look at
him even. “While I continue to live with you, I owe you an account of my
actions—but not of my thoughts.”
“Your actions? Oh, I know very well you’re too cold—too damned
respectable—to kick over the traces. And then you have the children to
think of.”
“Yes,” the wife said sadly. “I have the children to think of. I have the
children.”
“Besides,” Crespin went on, torturing himself, which is the success that
often crowns our efforts to torture others, “there’s no hurry. If you
only have patience for a year or two, I’ll do the right thing for once,
and drink myself to death.”
A year or two more of his cups! That would be hard and long to bear.
Again and again she had felt that she had reached her tether’s
taut-pulled length—and then again and again she had tried once more.
Why was Traherne so long? She had asked him to look at the crashed
aeroplane, not to build a new one. Or, was it possible, the wreck was
less hopeless than he’d thought, and already he was seeing a way to
patch and repair? When would some word or move be made from the great
sullen castle-place, with its gray turrets and scalloped arches turning
to silver and pink now as the Asian sun slipped down the sapphire sky? A
year or two more! And the children, still babies of course, were growing
so. What might not Ronny notice and understand in another two years? Two
years more! She never had measured before in her mind the probable
stretch of the bad time still before her—and only for one instant did
the thought come to her now—and Antony himself had put it there. His
death was the one way out she never had thought of. And she would not
think of it now. And even she spoke a little more kindly than she had
done for some time—at least when they had been alone—and she turned
and looked at him with almost a friendly look in her eyes, as she said:
“You have only to keep yourself a little in hand to live to what they
call ‘a good old age.’”
The friendliness in her eyes maddened him anew—it was not her
friendship he wanted—but even so he was grateful for it, it was so much
better than nothing to go on with—and he pressed his hurt and anger out
of sight, and, leaning away from her the better to watch her face, said
slowly:
“’Pon my soul, I’ve a mind to try to, though goodness knows, my life is
not worth living,” for he had caught the distraction on her face; she
was listening, but not most to him. “I was a fool to come on this crazy
expedition——”
“Why, it was yourself that jumped at Dr. Traherne’s proposal,” his wife
reminded him.
“I thought we’d get to the kiddies a week earlier. They’d be glad to see
me, poor little things. They don’t despise their daddy.”
Something of what he felt, something of what he still _was_—in spite of
whatever he’d _done_—reached Antony Crespin’s wife then. He had always
loved his children—there was no doubt of that. It had not served him
for strength enough, even as his love of her had not, but he always had
loved them, invariably he had been tender to them. And Lucilla
remembered it now.
“It shan’t be my fault, Antony,” she told him gently, “if they ever do.”
And then she spoilt it, soured the grace she had shown, by adding with a
weary sigh, “But you don’t make it easy to keep up appearances.” O curse
of woman’s tongue!
Antony Crespin rose to his feet, and stood before her. He saw the
natives clustered just over there, screening the projecting wing of the
broken aeroplane; he saw Yazok watching, sentineling too, perhaps; he
saw the great _puissant_ fortified castle, he recalled where they were,
he knew their peril—but for all that, for all that or more, he gave not
one damn. . . . He stood there before her, alone in the world with his
wife, all his imperfections on his back, and put up his plea.
“Oh, Lu, Lu,” he begged, “if you would treat me like a human being—if
you would help me, and make life tolerable for me, instead of a thing
that won’t bear looking at except through the haze of drink—we might
retrieve the early days. God knows I never cared two pins for any woman
but you——”
It was the acutest moment of Antony Crespin’s life. And his wife turned
him down.
“No,” she said, “the others, I suppose, only helped you, like whiskey,
to see the world through a haze. I saw the world through a haze when I
married you; but you have dispelled it once for all.” She saw his face
blanch, she saw his fingers knot, she saw his shoulders sag; but she
went on. “Don’t force me to tell you how impossible it is for me to be
your wife again. I am the mother of your children—that gives you a
terrible hold over me. Be content with that.”