There are just as many different ways of falling in love as there are
characters and temperaments, and even the same man--unless he be a
fellow of no originality--will not fall in love twice in the same
fashion. As to the wisdom or righteousness or the mere everyday question
of plain honour involved in the permission which Paul Armstrong gave
himself to fall in love at all, under the conditions in which he stood,
there seemed room for no illusion. He should by this time have been
something of a man of the world, and might reasonably be supposed to be
acting with his eyes open to consequences. He had his compunctions by
the hundred, his hoverings by the way, and turnings back from it. But
many delicate signs which would have been invisible to him had he been
less interested persuaded him that love lay ready for him, and after all
the follies of his slaveries here and there, he persuaded himself that
if he could but accept it, it was of a kind to atone for all that had
gone before. And why, he asked himself, if this were true, should he
stand for ever in loneliness? It was in him to be constant if only truth
were met with truth. He could have been faithful to Claudia. He could
have been faithful to Annette. He could have been faithful to Gertrude.
And though no man whose sense of the humour of life does not leave him
wholly blind to the comedy of his own existence could fail to see the
bitter jest that lay here against himself, he urged the point seriously.
He _had_ been true in each case until faith had grown into blind folly,
and bare respect for an old idol had become impossible. The one crime of
his life had been acted against himself. He had believed Annette, and in
the mere feebleness of acquiescence he had hung a weight about his neck
which he was doomed to carry as long as her life should last.
And now, had he the right to redress the wrong he had inflicted upon
himself? Feeble always, always a drifter, a good deal of a coward in his
way of shrinking from avoidable pain, but never deliberately cruel or
selfish. And now, was he to do a deliberately cruel and selfish thing?
Or was as much mischief as might well be done wrought already?
For months had gone by, and the drifting policy had brought him plainly
to the question, Was this quiet, sweet little girl in love with him?
No blame to her if it were so. He had signalled her from the first for
attention and companionship, and she knew nothing of his history. She
had no guess as to the fatal bond which held him. Every day he knew her
better. Her mind and heart opened out before him like twin flowers, full
of purity and sweet odour.
She was courage incarnate, and her hatred of cruelty was a passion. A
hulking blackguard of a teamster was cruelly flogging an overladen horse
one day, and Madge, at the risk of her life, was in amongst the traffic
of the street in a flash, and stood between the beast and his dumb
victim voiceless and pale with rage, her little figure at its height
and her eyes blazing. Paul’s chance presence and the neighbourhood of
a policeman were probably answerable for the peaceful solution of this
episode, for the girl had snatched the whip from the bully’s hand, and
he was in an attitude which threatened violence when Paul intervened.
‘My dear child!’ said Paul in a tone of remonstrance as he conducted her
from the scene.
‘Oh,’ she broke in, with her little teeth clenched, ‘I couldn’t bear
it!’
He saw the folly of reproof and held his tongue, and when they came in
sight of the theatre she ran indoors and escaped him.
He had fallen into a habit of walking home with her when the night’s
work was over, and saying good-bye to her at the door of her lodgings.
This fact made her mightily unpopular with the ladies of the company,
who saw no reason why she should be thus distinguished, and the snubs
she took disposed him to be more attentive to her.
They drifted closer, but no confidences were exchanged between them.
The company made for Australia, and there were six days of travel
aboard a well-found steamer, and this gave more than ample time for the
position to solidify. There were long promenades on deck by moonlight
and starlight, and the two found a perch in the bows out of the way
of all observation and regard, and there exchanged all manner of
confidences. The girl’s simple life unrolled itself--its hopes, its
ambitions! its home affections. She talked of her reading, of her music,
of all the little intimacies of home-life. Before the brief voyage was
over he seemed, to his own apprehension, to know his companion more
completely than he had ever known man or woman, and he was hourly more
and more in love with her. He was feather-headed and irresponsible
enough to be happy in the circumstances for hours at a time, but when he
was alone, and his heart was no longer flattered by the worship she so
innocently offered, the skeleton he carried about with him came out of
its cupboard and seemed to mop and mow before him in derision. He was
bound hand and foot to his fate, and the bonds were not to be severed
There was Annette in far-away London and Paris dragging out a miserable
and ignominious life, which was likely to last as long as his own, and
he could see no hope of freedom. With every passing day he felt
more clearly that he was bent upon an inexcusable wrong, and yet, so
strangely fashioned is the conscience of a man who is without the power
of will, all his self-reproaches did but add to the tenderness and
fervour of his desire.
The steamer reached its destination late upon a Saturday, and Sunday was
a holiday. Paul and Madge spent the day together, wandering on a long
stretch of sandy coast which lay between the port and the bright
green waters of the sea; and all the time there was a growing sense
of inevitability in his mind. He knew that he was going to ask for
happiness, and that he was prepared to pay his self-respect and manhood
for it. The talk was of trifles in the morning until they strolled
home to luncheon; it was of trifles again in the afternoon until they
strolled home to dinner, and it was of trifles still when they set out
in the yellow sunset to saunter once more in a scene which had already
grown strangely memorable and familiar. There were no sunset clouds, but
the pageant of the dying day had a sort of sullen and pathetic beauty.
The blazing sun dropped behind the far-off sea-line, and a great band of
saffron rimmed the whole horizon, fading into palest green as it spread
upward, and this in turn melted into a blue which at the zenith looked
unfathomable. A full moon, which had until now been invisible, looked
down from the very centre of the sky. There was none of the lingering
twilight of more temperate climates. The change from broad daylight, in
which every outline and detail of the landscape was accented strongly,
to the dim, mystic and diffused radiance of the moon and stars was like
an episode in a transformation-scene at the theatre. A mere ten minutes
had sufficed to change the whole character and sentiment of the scene.
It was like walking out of one world into another, and a rude chorus of
voices, accompanied by the sounds of a banjo and a concertina, came from
some body of merrymakers beyond a distant island in the bay. It moved
away farther and farther into the distance until the harshness was
softened to an almost spiritual melody, and after awhile it reached the
ear only at uncertain intervals.
They came to a place at which they had rested in the afternoon. Some
high tide of long ago had deposited here a great wreath of wrack, a
hundred yards inland, and piled up in places to a height of some twelve
feet. There were scores of cushiony resting-places here like great
luxurious arm-chairs, and the wrack when disturbed by a touch gave out
dry and stinging odours of sea-salt and iodine.
Paul, with a mere motion of the hand to his companion, threw himself
into one of the hollows, and she took a seat at a little distance from
him. He lay, the brim of his hat sheltering his eyes from the moonlight,
and stared at the spangled vault above him, where the stars seemed to
hang from threads of gold and silver as if they were upheld by an actual
tangible roof. He knew that his hour had come, but he obeyed the impulse
which controlled him with an infinite self-accusation.
‘Madge,’ he said, rolling over where he lay and stretching out his hand
towards her. It fell upon her own, and she made no motion to evade
him. It was the first caress he had ever offered her, and her tacit
acceptance of it hurried him into passion. ‘Madge,’ he said again; ‘dear
little Madge!’
She glanced at him for an instant only, and in the moonlight her eyes
glinted with sudden tears.
‘I have no right,’ he said, ‘to speak to you like this. I have had no
right to claim your companionship as I have done since we first began to
know each other.’
She was quite silent; but under his light caress he felt her hand
tremble, and she glanced at him once more and looked away again.
‘I have not had a happy life,’ he went on, ‘but that ought to dispose me
to do what I can to keep unhappiness out of the lives of other people.
If I tell you that I am very conscious of having deceived you, of having
left you in the dark about myself in respect to things you have a right
to know, what shall you say to me? What will you think of me?’
Again she turned to look at him, and this time her glance rested on him,
but still she made no answer.
Paul withdrew his hand, sat upright, and began mechanically to charge
his pipe and to smoke.
‘I met an utterly worthless woman many years ago,’ he began, after a
long pause, ‘and I threw my life away upon her. We were married, and
she is still alive. She is likely to live for many years to come; and,
indeed, there is no probability of escape from her. It is not likely
that she and I will ever see each other any more; but I am legally bound
to her so long as she shall live. I ought to have told you this months
ago.’
He rose and began to pace up and down the sands before her. He looked up
at her from time to time, and her eyes followed him as he moved. Not
a sound escaped her lips, but her fast-flowing tears glittered on her
cheeks like rain.
‘I should have told you,’ he cried, writhing between self-accusation and
self-excuse, ‘but I had not the courage to put an end to a time which
has been so lull of sweetness, so full of a mad kind of hope which I
should never have admitted to my heart I know,’ he went on, pausing
desperately before her, ‘what must be in your mind. I know that you are
asking how I dared to draw you on to such a friendship as ours has been
through an acted lie, and how I have dared at last to tell the truth I
have postponed so long. You have a right to be wounded; you have a
right to be angry. You will do yourself the merest justice if you teach
yourself to despise and hate me; and if you tell me to go away at once
and darken your life no further, I will do it But let me say just this
one thing: whatever my cowardly silence may seem to prove, I have never
had a thought of you that has not been full of the profoundest respect
and reverence. You know now the truth about me, and you know that in
spite of it I have made love to you for months past. I can’t tell what
a high-minded and pure-hearted woman may feel in such a case. I can’t
guess if such a woman could find it in her nature to accept the lifelong
worship and affection of a man who is circumstanced as I am, if she
could find the courage and self-sacrifice to join her destinies with a
broken life like mine. Oh, if it were possible!’ he cried, ‘and oh, if
it were possible that I could nourish such a hope in fancy, and not know
in my inmost heart that only a scoundrel could be guilty of it! There,
Madge, it is all said now. It had to be said, but I shall never forgive
myself for having said it.’
The accusations he brought against himself were just as real as the
passion and despair which urged him on.
The Solitary, in his smoke-clouded mountain eyrie, surveyed all this, as
he had surveyed the varied experiences of life which had passed before
it in clear vision through his mind, and still the passion and despair
and the self-accusing, self-excusing thoughts were as real to him as
they had been at the moment he recalled. He accepted that reality as a
proof, scarcely needed, of the already established shallowness of his
own nature--a brawling stream always ready to rave round any little
impediment in its path; a mere miniature of the torrent, with no
resolute strength or purpose in it, but full of a fussy vivacity and
self-importance which he could most heartily and bitterly despise.
All his life long the same futile story repeated: the same headlong
impetuosity, the same want of steadfast force, the same absence of
control. And yet, even in the depth of self-reproach, he could not deny
to himself some hint of purpose which had an honest meaning in his mind,
and, looking back, he saw that he had found an entrance to a purer and
better life than he had known before. Had he been worthy of the trust he
asked for, he would have blamed himself less for asking. Tears were hot
and harsh in his throat as the scene unrolled itself before him.
Paul Armstrong--the Paul Armstrong of those irrevocable bygone
years--was striking up and down the sand, and the girl was still weeping
without a sound, when the Exile’s thought flew back to them. It was as
if a curtain had descended for an instant only, and had risen again to
reveal the same actors in the same scene.
‘I had better leave you now, Madge,’ said Paul, half maddened by the
sight of the uncomplaining grief he had awakened. ‘I will watch you home
as soon as you care to go, but I won’t intrude upon you any longer.’
The slight figure rose from its seat upon the wrack, and stood before
him with downcast and averted head, but he could still see the
tears falling like diamond-drops in the clear moonlight. He turned
irresolutely away, but he had made only a single step before he was
vividly back again with an impulsive and imploring hand upon her
shoulder.
‘Tell me,’ he said, ‘that you forgive me. Tell me that you will be able
to think of me when I am gone with something--some feeling that will not
be all contempt. You won’t always despise me, will you, Madge?’
‘I shall never despise you,’ she answered, in a voice she could barely
control; ‘I shall always remember this time.’
‘And you don’t hate me for having spoken?’
She looked up at him with a strange smile, which was so tender and so
full of pity that he caught his breath at the sight of it.
‘No,’ she said, ‘I shall never hate you. I must be as truthful as you
have been. I must tell you that I had heard something of what you have
told me before we left New Zealand. I didn’t know if it were true, and I
did not even wish to ask.’
He stood still with that unconscious hand upon her shoulder, and his
heart gave a leap as he asked:
‘You knew I loved you, Madge--you knew I loved you?’
‘I was quite sure of that,’ she answered ‘I have believed it for a long
time.’
‘Madge,’ he said, ‘are you strong enough--are you brave enough--can you
put such faith in me? Can you believe that I will lay a life’s unfailing
devotion at your feet--that the very fact that there can be no legal tie
between us will make me always all the truer to you? I swear to you that
if you trust yourself to me, my whole life shall be one act of gratitude
for your faith and courage, and that no act or word of mine shall ever
cause you to regret the compact.’
Her tears had ceased to fall, and when she next looked at him her face
was grave, and looked in the moonlight as pale as snow.
‘If I were alone,’ she answered, ‘you should have my answer now, but I
have others to consider.’
‘Oh, who,’ he cried, ‘can come between us?’
‘Let us go home,’ she answered simply and bravely. ‘I must have time
to think. Please say no more to me to-night.’ She moved away, and Paul,
taking his place beside her, walked in silence ‘There is no one,’ she
said, when they had traversed a hundred yards or more, ‘who has a right
to dictate what my life shall be; but I have never done anything without
my mother’s knowledge and consent, and I never shall.’
Paul had passed from despair almost to certainty, but this chilled him
suddenly.
‘Ah,’ he said, with a gasping breath, ‘is there any mother in the world
who would consent to such a scheme?’
‘You must write to me,’ she answered, ‘such a letter as I can send to
her. I will write, too, and I will ask her not to answer until she has
seen us both.’
‘That rings a death-knell,’ said Paul ‘I have no hope of consent in such
a case.’
‘I can’t tell,’ she answered simply, ‘but there is no other way.’
‘And yet you love me, Madge?’ said Paul. She made no answer, and he drew
nearer to her, and put an arm about her shoulder. ‘You love me, little
Madge?’ he urged her.
She gave a sigh of acquiescence, a half-breathed ‘Yes.’
‘And you could deny your own heart and mine? You could let me go away
alone, and live alone yourself, with an empty heartache?’
Her answer came, like an echo of a former tone, just the same
half-breathed token of assent. There was a quiet resolution in it, for
all it was so softly spoken, which bound him to silence for a time.
There was more strength of resolution, more power and purpose,
expressed thus simply than he had ever been conscious of himself, and he
recognised that fact quite clearly.
They walked from this time forth in silence, until at the outskirts of
the town they reached the small and retired hotel at which the girl had
taken lodgings, and there they parted formally enough.
‘You will write?’ she asked, holding out her hand to him in token of
dismissal.
‘I will write,’ he answered, taking her hand, and bowing over it.
There were some Sabbath loiterers in the street, and it was necessary
that the two should part undemonstratively.
Paul, as he walked to his own more pretentious hostel, recognised the
fact that for good or evil he had shot his bolt There was nothing at
that hour of which he was more certain than that his present destiny and
the destiny of Madge lay in the hands of a woman he had never seen,
and he did not even attempt to disguise from himself the overwhelming
probability against an affirmative answer to his hopes. He was very
miserably certain that he had no right to hope, and that accusing
conscience of his which never permitted him to stray without rebuke, and
yet had never been worth a farthing to him in his whole career, worried
him without ceasing. But he knew enough of himself already to have
learned that the fault of character which had wrecked him was half
made up of reluctance to add pain to pain. It is not always the wholly
selfish wrongdoer who is answerable for the greater sorrows of life. It
is assuredly not he who suffers in his own person; but, worse than that,
the tender-hearted, conscience-worried man of feeble will is always
afraid of causing a slight grief by retracing a mistaken step, and so
goes on inevitably to the creation of troubles which appal him when he
comes to contemplate them in after-hours. And to have a full theoretical
knowledge of this fact enforced by years of experience is to be
gifted with no safeguard. ‘To be weak’--there is no wiser saying among
the utterances of the wise--‘to be weak is to be miserable.’ To be a
fool and to know it is the extreme of misery, and this extreme does not
fall to the lot of those who are extremest in folly.
What Paul wrote that night is barely worth chronicling, and may be
fairly constructed by anyone who has so far pursued his story. But the
Exile, sitting over the embers of the fire at which he had cooked his
coarse mid-day meal, threw himself backward on the trodden grass,
and, groping behind the flap of the tent, dragged his brown canvas bag
towards him, and having made a search among its contents, found a heap
of stained, crumpled and disordered papers, one of which he smoothed
out upon his knee and read. It had been given to him in that first
unspeakably tranquil and happy year which Madge and he had spent
together in Europe. It was the first blotted draft of the letter to her
mother with which she had accompanied his own, and it ran thus:
‘My darling Mother,
‘I am putting this into a separate envelope, and on the envelope I am
writing to ask you to read Mr. Armstrong’s letter to me before you read
my own. He has explained everything there, and now I must make my appeal
to you. I have promised that I will do nothing without your consent,
and I am not very hopeful that I shall secure it. You know that I am not
light-minded, or in the habit of saying what I do not mean, and I shall
only tell you this: I love him with my whole heart and mind, and if you
decide that we are to part I shall accept your decision, but I shall
never know a happy day again. Paul is not only a great man but a good
one.’
(The reader had faced this blow so often that he was ready for it,
but he had no guard against it, and it struck home so heavily that he
groaned aloud.)
‘I know now, partly from what I have lately learned from other people,
partly from what he told me last night, but mainly from the letter you
have read, the story of his life, and I know how profoundly unhappy it
has been. I want to comfort and sustain him, and I am not afraid to face
all the difficulties which lie before me. I can hear a clear call to
duty, and I am sure that his love and mine will strengthen me to do it.
You have never known me to be frivolous or foolish in my thoughts about
such things as these, and until we can all three meet together, you must
have patience with me. It would be wrong and cruel on my side to
throw everything upon you, and I shall not ask you to make yourself
responsible for what you may think my wrong-doing. There are a hundred
thousand things in my heart which I cannot say, and amongst them all
there is the dreadful fear that I may have lost your respect. But you
ought to know the truth, and the whole truth. I have not lost my own,
and I cannot believe that I shall ever have the right to be ashamed.’
There was much more than this. There were half-articulate expressions of
affection and fear of an agony of regret for a possible severance. And
through it all there beamed like a star, steadfast and unobscured in
tempest, the loyal heart, the uncountable soul which, in whatsoever
error, knows love and fealty as its only guides.