"Even if you could not it would not alter the fact. And then, at the
height of my success, and on the brink of a marriage that I dreamed would
bring me the fulfilment of every hope a man may cherish, one impulse of
pity and charity towards a wretched little woman brought me ruin, ruin,
ruin!"
Pity for a wretched woman had brought it all about. She was glad to see
the Saxham of her knowledge in that Saxham whom she had not known. He
folded his great arms upon his broad breast and went on:
"Nothing was left to me. Everything was gone. Rehabilitation in the eyes
of the Law--for I gained that much--did not clear me in the eyes of
Society--that hugs the guilt-stained criminal to its heart in the full
consciousness of what his deeds are, and shudders at the innocent man upon
whom has once fallen the shadow of that grim and bloody Idol that
civilisation misnames Justice. I was cast out. Even by the brother I had
trusted and the woman I had loved. I had in a vague way believed in God
until then; I know I used to pray to Him to bless those I loved, and help
me to achieve great things for their sakes. But nothing at all was left of
that except a dull aching desire to throw back in the face of the Deity
the little He had left to me. My health, and my intellectual powers, and
my self-respect...."
Her voice came to his ears in the half-whispered words:
"Had He left you so little, after all?"
"Little enough," said Saxham doggedly, "compared with what I had lost. And
as it is the privilege of the Christian to blame either the Almighty or
the devil for whatever ills are brought on him by his own blind, reckless
challenging of the Inevitable--termed Fate and Destiny by classical
Paganism,--so I found myself at odds with One I had been taught to call my
Maker."
In His own acre, close to her beloved dead, with all those little white
crosses marking where other dust that had once praised Him with the human
voice lay waiting for the summons of the Resurrection, it was incredibly
awful to her to hear Him thus denied. She grew pale and shuddered, and
Saxham saw.
"You see that I wish to be honest with you, and open and above-board. I
would not ever have you say to yourself, 'This man deceived--this man
misled me, wishing me to think him better than he was.' There is not much
more to tell you--save that I took what money remained to me at the bank
and from the sale of my last possessions--about a thousand pounds--and
shook the dust off from my shoes, and came out here, drunk, to carry out
my purpose of self-degradation to the uttermost. And I became a foul beast
among beasts that were even fouler, but less vile and less shameful
because their mental and moral standard was infinitely lower than my own.
And they gave me the name you know of." His voice had the ring of steel
smitten on steel. He drew himself up with a movement of almost savage
pride, and the knotted veins swelled on his broad white forehead, and his
blue eyes blazed under his thunderous smudge of black eyebrows.
"The name you know. It used to be called after me when I reeled the
streets--they whispered it afterwards as I rode by. To-day it is
forgotten." His nostrils quivered, and he threw out his hands as if with
that action he tossed something worthless to the winds. "Miss Mildare, I
have not touched Drink--the stuff that was my nourishment and my
sustenance, my comfort and my bane, my deadliest enemy and my only
friend--since that hour when with the last effort of my will I rallied all
my mental and bodily forces to resist its base allurement."
"I know it, Dr. Saxham. I am sure of it." She rose and held out her hands
to him, but he folded his arms more closely over his starving, famished
heart, and would not see them yet.
"You can be sure of it. Alcohol is no longer my master and my god. I stand
before you a free man, because I willed to be free." There was a little
blob of foam at one corner of his mouth, but the square pale face was
composed, even impassive. "Once, not so long ago, I filled a place of
standing in the professions of Surgery and Medicine; I knew what it was to
be esteemed and respected by the world. For your dear sake I promise to
regain what I have lost; be even more than I used to be, achieve greater
things than are done by other men of equal powers with mine. I am not a
man to pledge my word lightly, Miss Mildare...." His voice shook now and
his blue eyes glistened. "If you would be so--so unutterably kind as to
become my wife, I promise you a worthy husband. I swear to you upon what I
hold dearest and most sacred--your own life, your own honour, your own
happiness, never to give you cause to regret marrying me! For I may die,
indeed, but living I will never fail you!"
There was a lump in her throat choking her. Her eyes had gone to that
other grave some fifty paces distant from the Catholic portion of the
Cemetery. There were freshly-gathered flowers upon it, as upon the grave
that lay so near, and two gorgeous butterflies were hovering about the
blooms, in mingled dalliance and greediness.
"You loved him," said Saxham, following the journey of her wistful eyes.
"Love him still; remember him for every trait and quality of his that was
worthy of love from you. But give me the hope of one day gaining from you
some shadow of--of return for what I feel for you. Is it Passion? I hardly
know. Whether it is Love, in the sense in which that word is employed by
many of the women and nearly all the men I have met, I do not know either.
But that it is the life of my life to me and the breath of my being--you
cannot look at me and doubt!"
She was not looking at him. Her eyes were on the little white cross above
the Mother's grave; there was an anxious fold between the slender dark
eyebrows.
"You--you wish to marry a Catholic--you, who tell me that you were once a
Christian and are now Agnostic?"
"If I have not what is called Faith," said Saxham, "I may at least lay
claim to the quality of reverence. And I honour the religion that has made
you what you are. Cleave to your Church, child--hold to your pure beliefs,
and keep a little love back, Lynette, from your Holy Family and your
Saints in Heaven, to give to a poor devil who needs it desperately!"
The sweet colour flushed her, and her face was more than beautiful in its
compassion. She said:
"I pray for you now, and I will always. And one day our Lord will give you
back the faith that you have lost."
"Thank you, dear!" said Saxham humbly. She was opening her lips to speak
again when he lifted his hand and stopped her.
"There is one other thing I should like to make clear. I--am not rich. But
neither am I absolutely poor. Letters that I have received from a firm of
solicitors acting for the trustees and executors of--a near relative
deceased, will prove to you that I am possessed of some small property,
bringing in an annual income of something like two hundred pounds, and
funds sufficient to settle a few thousands upon my wife by way of
marriage-jointure. Believe me," he added, in answer to her look, "I know
you to be incapable of a mercenary thought. But what I should have
explained to"--he pointed to the grave that lay so near--"to _her_, I must
make clear to you. It could not be otherwise."
She went over to the grave and knelt beside it, and laid her pure cheek
upon it, and spoke to the Dead in a low, murmuring tone. Saxham knew as he
watched her, breathing heavily, that the consent of the Mother would never
have been given to the marriage he proposed. That other obstacle in the
road of his desire, the lover who had deceived, had been swept away, with
the stern and tender guardian, in one cataclysm of Fate. He went back in
thought to the ending of his long shooting-match _a outrance_ with Father
Noah, and remembered how he had promised himself that all should go well
with Saxham provided Saxham's bullet got home first.
Were not things going better than he had hoped? She had not even recoiled
from him when he had told her of those degraded days of wastrelhood.
Surely things were going well for Saxham, he said, as he waited with his
hungering eyes upon his heart's desire. What it cost him not to step over
to her, snatch her from the ground, and crush her upon his heart with hot
and passionate kisses and wild words of worship, he knew quite well. But
in that he was able to exercise such a mastery over himself and keep that
other Saxham down, Saxham gave praise to that strange god he had set up,
and worshipped, and bowed down before, calling it The Omnipotent Human
Will.
She rose by-and-by, and stood with clasped hands, thinking. It was very
still, and the air was sweet and balmy, and beyond the lines of the
defence-works miles upon miles of sunlit veld rolled away to the hills
that were mantled in clear hyacinth-colour and hooded with pale rose.
"If I married you, you would take me away from this country and these
people who have killed her?"
She had the thought of another in her heart and the name of another upon
her lips. But only her eyes spoke, travelling to that more distant grave
where the butterflies were hovering above the flowers, as Saxham answered:
"I would take you away, if you wished it."
"To England?"
"Back to England."
"I should see London, and the house where Mother lived...." She seemed to
have forgotten Saxham, and to be uttering her thoughts aloud. "I might
even see the green mountains of Connemara in Ireland--her own mountains
she used to call them. I might one day meet people who are of her blood
and name----"
"And of _his_," thought Saxham, following her eyes' wistful journey to
that other grave.
"But," she went on, "it would all depend"--she breathed with agitation and
knitted her slim white fingers together, and looked round at him with that
anxious wrinkle between her fine eyebrows--"upon how much you asked of me!
Suppose I----" His intent and burning eyes confused her, and she dropped
her own beneath them. "If I were to marry you, would you leave me
absolutely free?"
"Absolutely," said Saxham. "With the most complete freedom a wife could
possibly desire."
"I meant--a different kind of freedom from a wife's." She knitted and
unknitted her hands. "It is difficult to explain. Would you be willing to
ask nothing of me that a friend or a sister might not give? Would you be
content----"
Her transparent skin glowed crimson with the rush of blood. Her bosom
laboured with the hurry of her breathing. Her white lids veiled her eyes,
or the sudden terrible change in Saxham's face might have wrung from her a
cry of terror and alarm. But he mastered the raging jealousy that tore
him, and said, with a jarring note of savage irony in the voice that had
always spoken to her gently until then:
"Would I be content to enter, with you for my partner, into a marriage
that should be practically no marriage at all--a formal contract that is
not wedlock? That might never change as Time went on, and alter into the
close union that physically and mentally makes happiness for men and women
who love? Is that what you ask me, Miss Mildare?"
She looked at him full and bent her head. And the man's heart, that had
throbbed so wildly, stopped beating with a sudden jerk, and the divine
fire that burned and tingled in his blood died out, and the cold sickness
of baffled hope weighed on him like a mantle of lead. And the voice that
had whispered to him so alluringly, telling him that it was not too late,
that he might even yet win this virginal pure, sweetly-budding maiden, and
know the bliss of being loved at last, sank into silence. His face was
set like granite, and as grey. His eyes burned darkly under his heavy
brows. He waited, sombrely and hopelessly, for her to speak again.
"There are such marriages----?"
The question was diffidently and timidly put. He answered:
"Assuredly there are. But not between those who are--physically and
mentally, sane and healthy men and women,--at least, in my experience. One
case, of three I am at liberty to quote, was that of an aged and wealthy
woman of position and a young and rising public man."
"Were--weren't they happy?"
The face of the inward, unseen Saxham was twisted in a miserable grin, but
the outward man preserved immobility.
"He enjoyed life. She sat by, and saw, every day joining nearer, her
death, that was to leave him free."
"And the others?"
She asked it with an indrawn breath of anxiety.
"The second case was that of a man, middle-aged and helplessly paralysed
by an accident in the hunting-field, and of a beautiful and high-spirited
young woman--almost a girl. She took a romantic interest in him--talked of
his ruined career and blighted life, and all that sort of thing. And--they
married, and she found her bondage intolerable.... It ended in his
divorcing her. The _decree nisi_ was made absolute a few days before I
left London. The third case bears more analogy to yours and mine."
"Please go on."
"There was no great disparity of age between these two people. They were
sympathetic, cultured, independent both. Their views upon many
subjects--including the sex question--were identical," said Saxham slowly.
"And they entered into a bond of union that had for its ultimate aim the
culture of the intellect and the development of what they called the Soul.
The Flesh had nothing in it; the Body," said Saxham, with a grating
sarcasm, "was utterly ignored. I forget whether they were Agnostics,
Buddhists, or Christians. They certainly suffered for their creed.
But"--his voice softened and deepened--"at any rate, the woman suffered
most!"
Her lips parted, her eyes were intent upon him.
"You have lived with Sisters of Mercy in a Convent," went on Saxham. "You
know of their lives even more than I--greatly to my advantage--have
learned. Energetic, useful, stirring, active, never complaining, always
ready to make the best of the world as they find it, and help others to do
the same; always regarding it as the preparatory school or
training-college for a state of being infinitely greater, nobler, and more
glorious than anything the merely mundane imagination can conceive--you
can realise how infinitely to the nuns' advantage is the contrast between
them and the laywomen of Society, peevish, hysterical, neurotic, sensual,
and bored. But before these chastened, temperate bodies, these serene and
well-balanced minds attained the state of self-control and crossed the
Rubicon of resignation, what struggles their owners must have
undergone!--what ordeals of anguish they must have endured! Did that never
strike you?"
Her lips were pale, and there were shadows under her eyes. She bent her
head.
"The woman, who was not a nun, did for the sake of a man what the nun
feels supernaturally called upon to do for her God," said Saxham. "She
thrust her hand deep into her woman's bosom, and dragged out her woman's
heart, and wrung from it every natural human yearning, and purged it--or
thought she purged it--of every earthly desire, before she laid the
pulseless, emptied thing down before his feet for him to tread upon. And
that is what he did!"
He heard her pant softly, and saw her hand move upward to her beating
heart. His deadly earnestness appalled her. Was he not fighting for what
was more than life to him? He folded his arms over his great chest, and
said:
"For ten years he and she lived together in a union called ideal by
ignorant enthusiasts and high-minded cranks. Then she drooped and
died--victim of the revolt of outraged Nature. A little before the end
they sent for me. I said to the man: 'A child would have saved her!' And
he--I can hear him now, answering: 'Ah! but that would have nullified all
the use and purpose of our example for humanity.' The idiot--the abortive,
impossible, dreary idiot! And if ever there was a woman intended by
wholesome Nature to bear and nurture babes, it was that woman, who died
to prove the possibility of carrying on the business of living according
to his damned theories."
His broad chest heaved; a mist came before his eyes; his deep vibrating
voice had in it a passionate appeal to her.
"The nun would tell you that in the lofty, mystical sense marriage and
motherhood are hers, 'Christ being her Spouse.' I echo this in no spirit
of mockery. But this woman of whom I have told you knew no vocation and
took no vow. She merely tried to ignore the fundamental truth that every
normal woman of healthy instincts was meant to be a mother."
He added:
"And every husband who loves his wife sees his manhood proved and
perfected in her. She was dear and beloved before; she is holy,
sacred--worshipped in his eyes, when they look upon his child in her arms,
at her breast."
Something like a sob broke from him. His heart cried:
"Lynette! have pity upon yourself and upon me!"
He stood and waited for her reply. She was so exquisite and so full of
womanly allure, and yet so crystal-cold and passionless, that he knew his
arguments thrown away, his entreaties mere dust upon the wind.
"Tell me," he said at length, "do I inspire you with antipathy? Am I
physically repulsive to you, or disagreeable? Answer me frankly, for in
that case I would--cease to urge my suit with you, and go upon my way,
wherever it might lead me."
She looked at him, and there was no shrinking in her regard--only a gentle
friendliness, as far removed from the feeling he would have roused in her
as the North is from the South.
"I will tell you exactly how I feel towards you." He writhed under the
knowledge that it was possible to her to analyse and to explain. "I like
you, Dr. Saxham. I am deeply grateful to you----"
"Gratitude!" He shrugged his shoulders. "You owe me none; and even if you
did, what use is gratitude to a man who asks for love?"
"I trust you; I rely upon you," she said. "It is--pleasant to me to know
that you are near." A line of perplexity came between the dark fine
eyebrows; the sweet colour in her face wavered and sank. "But--if you were
to touch me--to take me in your arms--I----" She shivered.
"You need not say more!" If she was pale, Saxham's stern, square face was
ashen. His eyes glowered and fell under hers, and a purple vein swelled in
the middle of his broad white forehead. "I understand!"
"You do not understand quite yet." She moved away from the Mother's grave,
saying to him with a slight beckoning gesture of the hand, "Please
come!..."
Saxham followed her, hearing the harsh, jeering laughter of that other
Saxham above the faint rustle of her dress. His covetous, despairing eyes
dwelt on her and clung about her. Ah! the exquisite poise of the little
head, with its red-brown waves and coils; the upright, slender elegance of
shape, like a young palm-tree; the long, smooth, undulating step with
which she moved between the graves, picking her way with sedulous,
delicate care among the little crowding white-painted crosses; the
atmosphere of girlish charm and womanly allurement that breathed from her
and environed her!...
His torpid pulses throbbed again. The voice began again its whispering at
his ear.
"You cannot live without her. Accept her conditions. Better to be unhappy
in the sight and sound and touch of her, unpossessed, than to be
desperate, lacking her. Accept her conditions with a mental reservation.
Trust to Time, the healer, to bring change and forgetfulness. Or, break
your promise to that dead man, and tell her--as he would have had you tell
her, remember!--as he would have had you tell her!--that when he asked her
hand in marriage, he was the wedded husband of the dancer, Lessie
Lavigne!"
He knew where she was leading him--to Beauvayse's grave. The voice kept
whispering, urging as they went. He saw and heard as a man sees and hears
in a dream the pair of butterflies that hovered yet about the fresh
flowers her hands had gathered and placed there. One jewel-winged,
diamond-eyed insect rose languidly and wavered away as Lynette's light
footsteps drew near. The other remained, poised upon the lip of a honeyed,
waxen blossom, with closed, vertically-held wings and quivering antennae,
sucking its sweet juices as greedily as the dead man had drunk of the joy
of life.
Now she was speaking:
"Dr. Saxham, I have brought you here because I have something to tell you
that _he_"--her face quivered--"should have been told. When you spoke a
little while ago of openness and candour--when you said that you would
never mislead or deceive me for your own advantage, that I should know the
worst of you together with the best--you held up before me, quite
unknowingly, an example that showed me--that proved to me"--her voice
wavered and broke--"how much I am your inferior in honesty and truth!"
"_You_ my inferior!" Saxham almost laughed. "_I_ an example of light and
leading, elevated for your guidance! If you were capable of irony----"
He broke off, for she went on as though he had not spoken:
"When first we met--I mean yourself and me--I remember telling you, upon a
sudden impulse of confidence and trust in you, what I had determined my
life-work was to be----"
"Dear, innocent-wise enthusiast," thought Saxham, "dreaming over your
impossible plan for regenerating the world! Beloved child-Quixote, tilting
at the Black Windmills, how dare I, who was once the Dop Doctor of
Gueldersdorp, love you and seek you for my own? Madness--madness on the
face of it!" But, madness or sanity, he could not choose but love her.
"Your life-work!... It was to be carried out among _those others_ whose
voices you heard calling you. See," he said, with the shadow of a smile,
"how I remember everything you say, or have ever said, in my hearing!"
"You think too well of me," she broke out, with sudden energy.
"It is not possible to think too well of you!"
"You think so now, perhaps, but when you know----"
Her eyes brimmed and the tears welled over her white under-lids. She put
up both her little hands, and rubbed the salt drops away with her
knuckles, like a child.
"When I have told you, you will alter--you cannot help but alter your
opinion!"
"No!" denied Saxham; and the monosyllable seemed to drop from his grim
lips like a stone. Her bosom heaved with short, quick sobs.
"I meant to go out into the world, and meet those women who think and work
for women, and hear all they have to say, and learn all they have to
teach. Then----"
She was Beatrice again, as she turned her face full on Saxham, and once
more the virginal veil fell, and he was conscious of strange abysses of
knowledge opening in those eyes.
"--Then I meant to seek out those women and girls and children of whom I
spoke to you, those who lie fettered with chains that wicked men have
riveted, in the dark dungeons that their tyrants and torturers have
quarried out of the living rock, out of the reach of fresh air and
sunshine, beyond the reach of those who would pity and help ... I meant to
go down to them, and comfort them, and raise them up. I meant to have
said: 'Trust me, believe me, listen to me, follow me! For my sorrow is
your sorrow, and my wrong your wrong, and my shame yours--O! my poor, poor
unhappy sisters!...'"
There was a great drumming and surging of the blood in Saxham's ears. His
heart beat in heavy laboured, measured strokes, like the tolling of a
death-bell. He saw her cover her face with her hands, and drop upon her
knees amongst the grasses that greenly clothed the red soil. He saw the
butterfly, startled from its feast, rise and waver away. And he saw, too,
his veiled nymph, his virginal white goddess, his chaste, veiled maiden
Artemis, toppled from her pedestal and lying in the gutter.
Her sorrow the sorrow of those spotted ones! her wrong theirs, and theirs
her shame!... So this was the sordid secret that haunted the depths of
those eyes--the eyes of Beatrice! He turned his head away, so as not to
look upon her, and his face grew dark with the rush of blood. But still he
heard her speaking, as a man hears in a dream.
"At school all the older girls thought and talked of nothing but Love, and
most of the younger ones did the same.... And I, who knew the dreadful,
cruel, hideous side of the thing that each of them set up and
worshipped--I who shuddered when a man's breath, and a man's voice, and a
man's face came near--I said in my heart that Love should never find a
dupe and a slave and a tool in me. I meant to live for the Mother, and be
to those poor sisters of mine what she was--oh, my darling! my
darling!--to me! And all the while Love was coming nearer and nearer, and
at last----"
She swept the tears from her face with the palms of her slight open hands,
and drew a deep, shuddering breath, and went on brokenly, with sobs
between the gasped-out sentences:
"--At last it came. I never tried to struggle against it; it wrapped me in
a net of exquisite sweet softness, that held me like a cage of steel. I
gave myself up to the blissfulness and the joy of it. I was unfaithful to
those others--I forgot them for Beauvayse! Oh, why should Love make it so
easy to do unlovely things? to be unworthy, to break promises, and to be
false to vows? You are in earnest when you make them ... you are proud to
be so sure that nothing shall change or turn you.... Then eyes that are
like strange jewels look deep into yours. A voice that is like no other
voice whispers at your ear. It says strange, sweet, secret things--things
that come back and burn you--and his breath upon your cheek drowns out
your scruples in wave upon wave of magical, thrilling, wonderful
sensation!..." She shuddered. "And everything else is blotted out, and no
one else matters! You are not even sorry that you have left off caring....
Love has made you indifferent as well as unkind!"
She looked up at Saxham from where she crouched down at his feet among the
grasses, and her distress melted some of the ice that was closing round
his heart.
"Love cannot be good. It brings no peace, no happiness--nothing but
restless misery and burning pain. It makes you even willing to deceive
_him_." Her lids fluttered and she caught her breath. "When another to
whom I was dear, and who knew, said, 'Never tell him! I command you never
to tell him!' I pretended to myself that the words had not been spoken out
of pity, because my darling loved me too well to see me suffer; and I told
myself that it was right to obey."
Saxham, following the yearning look that went back to that other's grave,
heard the unforgettable voice uttering the command.
"_He_ never dreamed of my miserable secret. He was so free, so frank, so
open himself. He had nothing to hide--he was incapable of deceit! It never
occurred to him--oh, Beau! Beau!"
Saxham's face was set like a mask carved in granite, but that other
Saxham, within the man she saw through her tears, was wrung and twisted
and wrenched in spasms and gusts of insane, uncontrollable, helpless
laughter.
"_Nothing to hide--incapable of deceit!_" It seemed to him that the dead
man, all that way down under the red earth and the grass and the flowers,
must be laughing, too, at the Dop Doctor who was fool enough not to speak
out and end the farce for ever.
Should he? Why not? But for what reason now, and to what end, since his
virginal-pure, dew-pearled, Convent lily lay trodden in the mire? And yet,
to look in those eyes....
They did not falter or droop under his again, as she told him in few and
simple words the story of what had happened in the tavern on the veld.
"Now you know all!" she said; "now you understand!... Sister Tobias knows,
too, and there is one other.... I do not speak of ..."--she shuddered and
grew pale--"but of a man whom all of us here have learned to look up to,
and believe in, and trust. No confidence has ever passed between us. I
cannot give you any reason for this belief of mine in his knowledge of my
story. I only feel that it is no secret to the Colonel, whenever he looks
at me with those wise, kind, pitying eyes."
There was a look in Saxham's eyes that was not pity. The sunbeam that
shone through the loose plait of her coarse straw hat, and gilded the
edges of the red-brown hair-waves, aureoled again for him the head of
Beatrice.
"I have no faith left, but I am capable of reverence," he had said to her.
Now, as he knelt down in the grass before the little brown shoes, and
lifted the hem of her linen gown and kissed it, the hulking-shouldered
Doctor proved his possession of the quality. Devouring desire, riotous
passion, were, if not killed in him, at least quelled and overthrown and
bound. Pure pity and tenderness awakened in him. And Chivalry, all
_cap-a-pie_ in silver mail, rose up to do battle for her against the world
and against that other Saxham.
"I accept the trust you are willing should be mine. Take my name--take all
I have to give! I make no reservations. I stipulate no conditions. I ask
for nothing in return, except the right to be your brother and guardian
and defender. Trust me! The life-work you have chosen shall be yours; as
far as lies in my power, I will help you in it. Your pure ends and noble
aims shall never be thwarted or hindered. And have no fear of me, my sweet
saint, my little sister. For I may die," said Saxham once again, "but,
living, I will never fail you!"