“In the end one experiences only one’s true self.”
NIETZSCHE.
Arthur Field had crippled himself at twenty-three when he married
Rosamonde Dormay, the very pretty daughter of a neighbouring squire, and
everybody said he had done very well for himself. Mrs. Dormay had some
mysterious malady called “headache,” which frequently confined her to
her room for days at a time, a malady apparently escaping definition.
Two months after his marriage with Rosamonde, coming back one night late
from his practice, he found her lying on the sofa. She was very flushed,
and complained of pain in the head. It was so bad that she did not see
she had left the brandy bottle on the table. Her husband carried her up
to bed, and the next morning asked her about it. She was very
frightened, very angry, and very hysterical, finally she confessed that
it was the malady which escaped definition in her mother, but she swore
it was the first time for herself. Arthur Field did not believe her, and
he never believed her from that hour. He understood why the Dormays had
been so ready to accept him for a son-in-law. He did all that human
service and skill could suggest to cure his pretty young wife. He spent
far more than he could afford on the best specialists of his time, he
put her under the most excellent treatment he could procure, and people
thought he could not be very kind to his wife or she would not go away
from him so often. Stories grew up about him, and his practice fell off.
He went to London and fought for fame, and because he was utterly
concentrated on his profession, desperate, unhappy, and entirely alone
and also, perhaps, because he cared very little about it, he became
known as one of the “best men” in London. His wife lived under a
different name at a little seaside place with a good nurse. She hated
her husband, but she was abjectly afraid of him, and her family almost
from the time of her marriage had nothing to do with her. In spite of
most careful watching she still, from time to time, had headaches.
In his holidays Arthur Field went to Paris and studied hypnotism. When
he felt himself to have mastered all that was as yet found out about it,
he tried the process on his wife. At first it seemed an evident success,
and he began to hope; while he was with her, she even resisted
temptation. The day after he went back to London the nurse telegraphed,
“Failure.”
That day he performed an operation that his older colleagues had
pronounced out of the question. It was a success, and the patient
recovered, but there was one thing that never recovered, and that was
Arthur Field’s hope.
No one in London knew that Arthur Field was married. The little country
place where it had all happened was too far off; only one of the Dormays
ever met him again, and Lady Middleton wished to hear nothing of her
sister. “For what,” she said, “is the use of hearing anything, when
there is nothing pleasant to hear?” Arthur Field quite agreed with her,
and would indeed have avoided her sedulously, had it not been for his
introduction to Daphne and the sudden opening of his closed and saddened
heart to the child. He knew that there was no happiness for him in
honesty, but his whole nature was starving for it. He had never drugged
his misery with the antidotes, that the world tries to supply, and now
every thwarted passion, controlled desire, and keen zest, for the beauty
of life, clamoured at his heart. He was a man of honour and he did not
mean to harm the child. There were ways of proving to the Dormays that
Rosamonde was dead, if it was necessary to prove anything. No one would
ask any questions, partly because he was a man that people were a little
afraid to question, and also because everyone would wish to take the
answers for granted. It would be an ugly secret, but as a visible fact
it was a much more ugly truth. Daphne would never know, and oh! he would
be good to her! He never counted on Daphne’s speaking to Vera before the
fact was accomplished. He knew she hated her stepmother; but when the
fact that he had never counted upon happened (as it usually does) though
the girl was practically in his power, though he could have persuaded
her to do anything that he chose, he deliberately let her go. She knew,
and now she must prove the strength of her love, he would never give her
an excuse to regret. It cost him more than anything in his life had ever
cost him, and for three years he called himself a fool daily, but he
never gave in to wisdom. When he saw Daphne again, she had confused the
issues of things with principles of which before she had been ignorant,
and which he had always ignored. At first he could not face the notion
of giving her up; what he considered her underhand engagement to David
Grey only strengthened his decision. He never meant to force her will,
and only threatened her to see if, after all, there was not at the back
of her attempt to send him away, a desire for him to refuse to go. Then
circumstances, through the illness and death of Dora, drove Daphne’s
heart away from him; she wrote him a terrible little letter, and because
he could not see her face, he believed every word of it. He thought over
it all with the deliberate intention of doing the best for them both.
There was only one thing he left out of his calculations, and that
was—three years. They had influenced him as well as Daphne. He was now
thirty-eight, and he loved his profession. When, after a bitter struggle
with himself against his longing for the beautiful girl, he reached the
knowledge that his duty was to give her up, he thought his last joy in
life was killed with his own hand. There was an important consultation
to be held the next day, and he began to take some notes on the subject.
They presented a fresh and entirely original idea, and he forgot Daphne.
More of us do right because to do wrong breaks into our life, than we
know, but in this case Arthur Field had given up a lower life for the
sake of a higher, and even if this higher were not the highest, it was
distinctly a step towards it.