"You must choose between us, Mary," I cried. "It is impossible you
should stay here! You cannot stay here."
She turned upon me, a creature at bay. "Why shouldn't I stay here? Why
must I choose between two men? I want neither of you. I want myself. I'm
not a thing. I'm a human being. I'm not your thing, Justin--nor yours,
Stephen. Yet you want to quarrel over me--like two dogs over a bone. I
am going to stay here--in my house! It's my house. I made it. Every room
of it is full of me. Here I am!"
She stood there making this magnificently extravagant claim; her eyes
blazing blue, her hair a little dishevelled with a strand across her
cheek.
Both I and Justin spoke together, and then turned in helpless anger upon
one another. I remember that with the clumsiest of weak gestures he bade
me begone from the house, and that I with a now rather deflated
rhetoric answered I would go only with Mary at my side. And there she
stood, less like a desperate rebel against the most fundamental social
relations than an indignant princess, and demanded of us and high
heaven, "Why should I be fought for? Why should I be fought for?"
And then abruptly she gathered her skirts in her hand and advanced.
"Open that door, Stephen," she said, and was gone with a silken whirl
and rustle from our presence.
We were left regarding one another with blank expressions.
Her departure had torn the substance out of our dispute. For the moment
we found ourselves left with a new situation for which there is as yet
no tradition of behavior. We had become actors in that new human comedy
that is just beginning in the world, that comedy in which men still
dispute the possession and the manner of the possession of woman
according to the ancient rules, while they on their side are determining
ever more definitely that they will not be possessed....
We had little to say to one another,--mere echoes and endorsements of
our recent declarations. "She must come to me," said I. And he, "I will
save her from that at any cost."
That was the gist of our confrontation, and then I turned about and
walked along the gallery towards the entrance, with Justin following me
slowly. I was full of the wrath of baffled heroics; I turned towards him
with something of a gesture. Down the perspective of the white and empty
gallery he appeared small and perplexed. The panes of the tall French
windows were slashed with rain....
§ 11
I forget now absolutely what I may have expected to happen next. I
cannot remember my return to my father's house that day. But I know that
what did happen was the most unanticipated and incredible experience of
my life. It was as if the whole world of mankind were suddenly to turn
upside down and people go about calmly in positions of complete
inversion. I had a note from Mary on the morning after this discovery
that indeed dealt with that but was otherwise not very different from
endless notes I had received before our crisis. It was destroyed, so
that I do not know its exact text now, but it did not add anything
material to the situation, or give me the faintest shadow to intimate
what crept close upon us both. She repeated her strangely thwarting
refusal to come away and live with me. She seemed indignant that we had
been discovered--as though Justin had indulged in an excess of existence
by discovering us. I completed and despatched to her a long letter I had
already been writing overnight in which I made clear the hopeless
impossibility of her attitude, vowed all my life and strength to her,
tried to make some picture of the happiness that was possible for us
together, sketched as definitely as I could when and where we might meet
and whither we might go. It must have made an extraordinary jumble of
protest, persuasion and practicality. It never reached her; it was
intercepted by Justin.
I have gathered since that after I left Martens he sent telegrams to Guy
and Philip and her cousin Lord Tarvrille. He was I think amazed beyond
measure at this revelation of the possibilities of his cold and distant
wife, with a vast passion of jealousy awaking in him, and absolutely
incapable of forming any plan to meet the demands of his extraordinary
situation. Guy and Philip got to him that night, Tarvrille came down
next morning, and Martens became a debate. Justin did not so much
express views and intentions as have them extracted from him; it was
manifest he was prepared for the amplest forgiveness of his wife if only
I could be obliterated from their world. Confronted with her brothers,
the two men in the world who could be frankly brutal to her, Mary's
dignity suffered; she persisted she meant to go on seeing me, but she
was reduced to passionate tears.
Into some such state of affairs I came that morning on the heels of my
letter, demanding Lady Mary of a scared evasive butler.
Maxton and Tarvrille appeared: "Hullo, Stratton!" said Tarvrille, with a
fine flavor of an agreeable chance meeting. Philip had doubts about his
greeting me, and then extended his reluctant hand with a nervous grin to
excuse the delay.
"I want to see Lady Mary," said I, stiffly.
"She's not up yet," said Tarvrille, with a hand on my shoulder. "Come
and have a talk in the garden."
We went out with Tarvrille expanding the topic of the seasons. "It's a
damned good month, November, say what you like about it." Philip walked
grimly silent on my other hand.
"And it's a damned awkward situation you've got us into, Stratton," said
Tarvrille, "say what you like about it."
"It isn't as though old Justin was any sort of beast," he reflected,
"or anything like that, you know. He's a most astonishing decent chap,
clean as they make them."
"This isn't a beastly intrigue," I said.
"It never is," said Tarvrille genially.
"We've loved each other a long time. It's just flared out here."
"No doubt of that," said Tarvrille. "It's been like a beacon to all
Surrey."
"It's one of those cases where things have to be readjusted. The best
thing to do is for Mary and me to go abroad----"
"Yes, but does Mary think so?"
"Look here!" said Philip in a voice thick with rage. "I won't have Mary
divorced. I won't. See? I won't."
"What the devil's it got to do with _you_?" I asked with an answering
flash of fury.
Tarvrille's arm ran through mine. "Nobody's going to divorce Mary," he
said reassuringly. "Not even Justin. He doesn't want to, and nobody else
can, and there you are!"
"But we two----"
"You two have had a tremendously good time. You've got found out--and
there you are!"
"This thing has got to stop absolutely now," said Philip and echoed with
a note of satisfaction in his own phrasing, "absolutely _now_."
"You see, Stratton," said Tarvrille as if he were expanding Philip's
assertion, "there's been too many divorces in society. It's demoralizing
people. It's discrediting us. It's setting class against class.
Everybody is saying why don't these big people either set about
respecting the law or altering it. Common people are getting too
infernally clear-headed. Hitherto it's mattered so little.... But we
can't stand any more of it, Stratton, now. It's something more than a
private issue; it's a question of public policy. We can't stand any more
divorces."
He reflected. "We have to consider something more than our own personal
inclinations. We've got no business to be here at all if we're not a
responsible class. We owe something--to ourselves."
It was as if Tarvrille was as concerned as I was for this particular
divorce, as if he struggled with a lively desire to see me and Mary
happily married after the shortest possible interval. And indeed he
manifestly wasn't unsympathetic; he had the strongest proclivity for the
romantic and picturesque, and it was largely the romantic
picturesqueness of renunciation that he urged upon me. Philip for the
most part maintained a resentful silence; he was a clenched anger
against me, against Mary, against the flaming possibilities that
threatened the sister of Lord Maxton, that most promising and
distinguished young man.
Of course their plans must have been definitely made before this talk,
probably they had made them overnight, and probably it was Tarvrille had
given them a practicable shape, but he threw over the whole of our talk
so satisfying a suggestion of arrest and prolonged discussion that it
never occurred to me that I should not be able to come again on the
morrow and renew my demand to see Mary. Even when next day I turned my
face to Martens and saw the flag had vanished from the flagstaff, it
seemed merely a token of that household's perturbation. I thought the
house looked oddly blank and sleepy as I drew near, but I did not
perceive that this was because all the blinds were drawn. The door upon
the lawn was closed, and presently the butler came to open it. He was in
an old white jacket, and collarless. "Lady Mary!" he said. "Lady Mary
has gone, sir. She and Mr. Justin went yesterday after you called."
"Gone!" said I. "But where?"
"I _think_ abroad, sir."
"Abroad!"
"I _think_ abroad."
"But---- They've left an address?"
"Only to Mr. Justin's office," said the man. "Any letters will be
forwarded from there."
I paused upon the step. He remained stiffly deferential, but with an air
of having disposed of me. He reproved me tacitly for forgetting that I
ought to conceal my astonishment at this disappearance. He was indeed an
admirable man-servant. "Thank you," said I, and dropped away defeated
from the door.
I went down the broad steps, walked out up the lawn, and surveyed house
and trees and garden and sky. To the heights and the depths and the
uttermost, I knew now what it was to be amazed....
§ 12
I had felt myself an actor in a drama, and now I had very much the
feeling an actor would have who answers to a cue and finds himself in
mid-stage with the scenery and the rest of the cast suddenly vanished
behind him. By that mixture of force and persuasion which avails itself
of a woman's instinctive and cultivated dread of disputes and raised
voices and the betrayal of contention to strangers, by the sheer tiring
down of nerves and of sleepless body and by threats of an immediate
divorce and a campaign of ruin against me, these three men had obliged
Mary to leave Martens and go with them to Southampton, and thence they
took her in Justin's yacht, the _Water-Witch_, to Waterford, and thence
by train to a hired house, an adapted old castle at Mirk near Crogham in
Mayo. There for all practical purposes she was a prisoner. They took
away her purse, and she was four miles from a pillar-box and ten from a
telegraph office. This house they had taken furnished without seeing it
on the recommendation of a London agent, and in the name of Justin's
solicitor. Thither presently went Lady Ladislaw, and an announcement
appeared in the _Times_ that Justin and Lady Mary had gone abroad for a
time and that no letters would be forwarded.
I have never learnt the particulars of that abduction, but I imagine
Mary astonished, her pride outraged, humiliated, helpless, perplexed and
maintaining a certain outward dignity. Moreover, as I was presently to
be told, she was ill. Guy and Philip were, I believe, the moving spirits
in the affair; Tarvrille was their apologetic accomplice, Justin took
the responsibility for what they did and bore the cost, he was bitterly
ashamed to have these compulsions applied to his wife, but full now of a
gusty fury against myself. He loved Mary still with a love that was
shamed and torn and bleeding, but his ruling passion was that infinitely
stronger passion than love in our poor human hearts, jealousy. He was
prepared to fight for her now as men fight for a flag, tearing it to
pieces in the struggle. He meant now to keep Mary. That settled, he was
prepared to consider whether he still loved her or she him....
Now here it may seem to you that we are on the very verge of romance.
Here is a beautiful lady carried off and held prisoner in a wild old
place, standing out half cut off from the mainland among the wintry
breakers of the west coast of Ireland. Here is the lover, baffled but
insistent. Here are the fierce brothers and the stern dragon husband,
and you have but to make out that the marriage was compulsory, irregular
and, on the ground of that irregularity, finally dissoluble, to furnish
forth a theme for Marriott Watson in his most admirable and adventurous
vein. You can imagine the happy chances that would have guided me to the
hiding-place, the trusty friend who would have come with me and told the
story, the grim siege of the place--all as it were _sotto voce_ for fear
of scandal--the fight with Guy in the little cave, my attempted
assassination, the secret passage. Would to heaven life had those rich
simplicities, and one could meet one's man at the end of a sword! My
siege of Mirk makes a very different story from that.
In the first place I had no trusted friend of so extravagant a
friendship as such aid would demand. I had no one whom it seemed
permissible to tell of our relations. I was not one man against three or
four men in a romantic struggle for a woman. I was one man against
something infinitely greater than that, I was one man against nearly all
men, one man against laws, traditions, instincts, institutions, social
order. Whatever my position had been before, my continuing pursuit of
Mary was open social rebellion. And I was in a state of extreme
uncertainty how far Mary was a willing agent in this abrupt
disappearance. I was disposed to think she had consented far more than
she had done to this astonishing step. Carrying off an unwilling woman
was outside my imaginative range. It was luminously clear in my mind
that so far she had never countenanced the idea of flight with me, and
until she did I was absolutely bound to silence about her. I felt that
until I saw her face to face again, and was sure she wanted me to
release her, that prohibition held. Yet how was I to get at her and hear
what she had to say? Clearly it was possible that she was under
restraint, but I did not know; I was not certain, I could not prove it.
At Guildford station I gathered, after ignominious enquiries, that the
Justins had booked to London. I had two days of nearly frantic
inactivity at home, and then pretended business that took me to London,
for fear that I should break out to my father. I came up revolving a
dozen impossible projects of action in my mind. I had to get into touch
with Mary, at that my mind hung and stopped. All through the twenty-four
hours my nerves jumped at every knock upon my door; this might be the
letter, this might be the telegram, this might be herself escaped and
come to me. The days passed like days upon a painful sick-bed, grey or
foggy London days of an appalling length and emptiness. If I sat at home
my imagination tortured me; if I went out I wanted to be back and see if
any communication had come. I tried repeatedly to see Tarvrille. I had
an idea of obtaining a complete outfit for an elopement, but I was
restrained by my entire ignorance of what a woman may need. I tried to
equip myself for a sudden crisis by the completest preparation of every
possible aspect. I did some absurd and ill-advised things. I astonished
a respectable solicitor in a grimy little office behind a queer little
court with trees near Cornhill, by asking him to give advice to an
anonymous client and then putting my anonymous case before him.
"Suppose," said I, "it was for the plot of a play." He nodded gravely.
My case as I stated it struck me as an unattractive one.
"Application for a Writ of Habeas Corpus," he considered with eyes that
tried to remain severely impartial, "by a Wife's Lover, who wants to
find out where she is.... It's unusual. You will be requiring the
husband to produce her Corpus.... I don't think--speaking in the same
general terms as those in which you put the circumstances, it would be
likely to succeed.... No."
Then I overcame a profound repugnance and went to a firm of private
detectives. It had occurred to me that if I could have Justin,
Tarvrille, Guy or Philip traced I might get a clue to Mary's
hiding-place. I remember a queer little office, a blusterous,
frock-coated creature with a pock-marked face, iron-grey hair, an
eyeglass and a strained tenor voice, who told me twice that he was a
gentleman and several times that he would prefer not to do business than
to do it in an ungentlemanly manner, and who was quite obviously ready
and eager to blackmail either side in any scandal into which spite or
weakness admitted his gesticulating fingers. He alluded vaguely to his
staff, to his woman helpers, "some personally attached to me," to his
remarkable underground knowledge of social life--"the illicit side."
What could he do for me? There was nothing, I said, illicit about me.
His interest waned a little. I told him that I was interested in
certain financial matters, no matter what they were, and that I wanted
to have a report of the movements of Justin and his brothers-in-law for
the past few weeks and for a little time to come. "You want them
watched?" said my private enquiry agent, leaning over the desk towards
me and betraying a slight squint. "Exactly," said I. "I want to know
what sort of things they are looking at just at present."
"Have you any inkling----?"
"None."
"If our agents have to travel----"
I expressed a reasonable generosity in the matter of expenses, and left
him at last with a vague discomfort in my mind. How far mightn't this
undesirable unearth the whole business in the course of his
investigations? And then what could he do? Suppose I went back forthwith
and stopped his enquiries before they began! I had a disagreeable
feeling of meanness that I couldn't shake off; I felt I was taking up a
weapon that Justin didn't deserve. Yet I argued with myself that the
abduction of Mary justified any such course.
As I was still debating this I saw Philip. He was perhaps twenty yards
ahead of me, he was paying off a hansom which had just put him down
outside Blake's. "Philip," I cried, following him up the steps and
overtaking him and seizing his arm as the commissionaire opened the door
for him. "Philip! What have you people done with Mary? Where is Mary?"
He turned a white face to me. "How dare you," he said with a catch of
the breath, "mention my sister?"
I spoke in an undertone, and stepped a little between him and the man at
the door in order that the latter might not hear what I said. "I want
to see her," I expostulated. "I _must_ see her. What you are doing is
not playing the game. I've _got_ to see her."
"Let go of my arm, sir!" cried he, and suddenly I felt a whirlwind of
rage answering the rage in his eyes. The pent-up exasperation of three
weeks rushed to its violent release. He struck me in the face with the
hand that was gripped about his umbrella. He meant to strike me in the
face and then escape into his club, but before he could get away from me
after his blow I had flung out at him, and had hit him under the
jawbone. My blow followed his before guard or counter was possible. I
hit with all my being. It was an amazing flare up of animal passion;
from the moment that I perceived he was striking at me to the moment
when both of us came staggering across the door-mat into the dignified
and spacious hall-way of Blake's, we were back at the ancestral ape, and
we did exactly what the ancestral ape would have done. The arms of the
commissionaire about my waist, the rush of the astonished porter from
his little glass box, two incredibly startled and delighted pages, and
an intervening member bawling out "Sir! Sir!" converged to remind us
that we were a million years or so beyond those purely arboreal days....
We seemed for a time to be confronted before an audience that hesitated
to interfere. "How dare you name my sister to me?" he shouted at me, and
brought to my mind the amazing folly of which he was capable. I
perceived Mary's name flung to the four winds of heaven.
"You idiot, Philip!" I cried. "I don't _know_ your sister. I've not seen
her--scarcely seen her for years. I ask you--I ask you for a match-box
or something and you hit me."
"If you dare to speak to her----!"
"You fool!" I cried, going nearer to him and trying to make him
understand. But he winced and recoiled defensively. "I'm sorry," I said
to the commissionaire who was intervening. "Lord Maxton has made a
mistake."
"Is he a member?" said someone in the background, and somebody else
suggested calling a policeman. I perceived that only a prompt retreat
would save the whole story of our quarrel from the newspapers. So far as
I could see nobody knew me there except Philip. I had to take the risks
of his behavior; manifestly I couldn't control it. I made no further
attempt to explain anything to anybody. Everyone was a little too
perplexed for prompt action, and so the advantage in that matter lay
with me. I walked through the door, and with what I imagined to be an
appearance of the utmost serenity down the steps. I noted an ascending
member glance at me with an expression of exceptional interest, but it
was only after I had traversed the length of Pall Mall that I realized
that my lip and the corner of my nostril were both bleeding profusely. I
called a cab when I discovered my handkerchief scarlet, and retreated to
my flat and cold ablutions. Then I sat down to write a letter to
Tarvrille, with a clamorous "Urgent, Please forward if away" above the
address, and tell him at least to suppress Philip. But within the club
that blockhead, thinking of nothing but the appearances of our fight and
his own credit, was varying his assertion that he had thrashed me, with
denunciations of me as a "blackguard," and giving half a dozen men a
highly colored, improvised, and altogether improbable account of my
relentless pursuit and persecution of Lady Mary Justin, and how she had
left London to avoid me. They listened, no doubt, with extreme avidity.
The matrimonial relations of the Justins had long been a matter for
speculative minds.
And while Philip was doing this, Guy, away in Mayo still, was writing a
tender, trusting, and all too explicit letter to a well-known and
extremely impatient lady in London to account for his continued absence
from her house. "So that is it!" said the lady, reading, and was at
least in the enviable position of one who had confirmatory facts to
impart....
And so quite suddenly the masks were off our situation and we were open
to an impertinent world. For some days I did not realize what had
happened, and lived in hope that Philip had been willing and able to
cover his lapse. I went about with my preoccupation still, as I
imagined, concealed, and with an increasing number of typed letters from
my private enquiry agent in my pocket containing inaccurate and
worthless information about the movements of Justin, which appeared to
have been culled for the most part from a communicative young policeman
stationed at the corner nearest to the Justins' house, or expanded from
_Who's Who_ and other kindred works of reference. The second letter, I
remember, gave some particulars about the financial position of the
younger men, and added that Justin's credit with the west-end tradesmen
was "limitless," points upon which I had no sort of curiosity
whatever....
I suppose a couple of hundred people in London knew before I did that
Lady Mary Justin had been carried off to Ireland and practically
imprisoned there by her husband because I was her lover. The thing
reached me at last through little Fred Riddling, who came to my rooms in
the morning while I was sitting over my breakfast. "Stratton!" said he,
"what is all this story of your shaking Justin by the collar, and
threatening to kill him if he didn't give up his wife to you? And why do
you want to fight a duel with Maxton? What's it all about? Fire-eater
you must be! I stood up for you as well as I could, but I heard you
abused for a solid hour last night, and there was a chap there simply
squirting out facts and dates and names. Got it all.... What have you
been up to?"
He stood on my hearthrug with an air of having called for an explanation
to which he was entitled, and he very nearly got one. But I just had
some scraps of reserve left, and they saved me. "Tell me first," I said,
delaying myself with the lighting of a cigarette, "the particulars ...
as you heard them."
Riddling embarked upon a descriptive sketch, and I got a minute or so to
think.
"Go on," I said with a note of irony, when he paused. "Go on. Tell me
some more. Where did you say they have taken her; let us have it right."
By the time his little store had run out I knew exactly what to do with
him. "Riddling," said I, and stood up beside him suddenly and dropped my
hand with a little added weight upon his shoulder, "Riddling, do you
know the only right and proper thing to do when you hear scandal about a
friend?"
"Come straight to him," said Riddling virtuously, "as I have done."
"No. Say you don't believe it. Ask the scandal-monger how he knows and
insist on his telling you--insist. And if he won't--be very, very rude
to him. Insist up to the quarrelling point. Now who were those people?"
"Well--that's a bit stiff.... One chap I didn't know at all."
"You should have pulled him up and insisted upon knowing who he was, and
what right he had to lie about me. For it's lying, Riddling. Listen! It
isn't true that I'm besieging Lady Mary Justin. So far from besieging
her I didn't even know where she was until you told me. Justin is a
neighbor of my father's and a friend of mine. I had tea with him and his
wife not a month ago. I had tea with them together. I knew they were
going away, but it was a matter of such slight importance to me, such
slight importance"--I impressed this on his collarbone--"that I was left
with the idea that they were going to the south of France. I believe
they are in the south of France. And there you are. I'm sorry to spoil
sport, but that's the bleak unromantic truth of the matter."
"You mean to say that there is nothing in it all?"
"Nothing."
He was atrociously disappointed. "But everybody," he said, "everybody
has got something."
"Somebody will get a slander case if this goes on. I don't care what
they've got."
"Good Lord!" he said, and stared at the rug. "You'll take your oath----"
He glanced up and met my eye. "Oh, of course it's all right what you
say." He was profoundly perplexed. He reflected. "But then, I say
Stratton, why did you go for Maxton at Blake's? _That_ I had from an
eye-witness. You can't deny a scrap like that--in broad daylight. Why
did you do that?"
"Oh _that's_ it," said I. "I begin to have glimmerings. There's a little
matter between myself and Maxton...." I found it a little difficult to
improvise a plausible story.
"But he said it was his sister," persisted Riddling. "He said so
afterwards, in the club."
"Maxton," said I, losing my temper, "is a fool and a knave and a liar.
His sister indeed! Lady Mary! If he can't leave his sister out of this
business I'll break every bone of his body." ... I perceived my temper
was undoing me. I invented rapidly but thinly. "As a matter of fact,
Riddling, it's quite another sort of lady has set us by the ears."
Riddling stuck his chin out, tucked in the corners of his mouth, made
round eyes at the breakfast things and, hands in pockets, rocked from
heels to toes and from toes to heels. "I see Stratton, yes, I see. Yes,
all this makes it very plain, of course. Very plain.... Stupid thing,
scandal is.... Thanks! no, I won't have a cigarette."
And he left me presently with an uncomfortable sense that he did see,
and didn't for one moment intend to restrain his considerable histrionic
skill in handing on his vision to others. For some moments I stood
savoring this all too manifest possibility, and then my thoughts went
swirling into another channel. At last the curtain was pierced. I was no
longer helplessly in the dark. I got out my Bradshaw, and sat with the
map spread out over the breakfast things studying the routes to Mayo.
Then I rang for Williams, the man I shared with the two adjacent
flat-holders, and told him to pack my kit-bag because I was suddenly
called away.
§ 13
Many of the particulars of my journey to Ireland have faded out of my
mind altogether. I remember most distinctly my mood of grim elation that
at last I had to deal with accessible persons again....
The weather was windy and violent, and I was sea-sick for most of the
crossing, and very tired and exhausted when I landed. Williams had
thought of my thick over-coat and loaded me with wraps and rugs, and I
sat in the corner of a compartment in that state of mental and bodily
fatigue that presses on the brows like a painless headache. I got to
some little junction at last where I had to wait an hour for a
branch-line train. I tasted all the bitterness of Irish hospitality, and
such coffee as Ireland alone can produce. Then I went on to a station
called Clumber or Clumboye, or some such name, and thence after some
difficulty I got a car for my destination. It was a wretched car in
which hens had been roosting, and it was drawn by a steaming horse that
had sores under its mended harness.
An immense wet wind was blowing as we came over the big hill that lies
to the south of Mirk. Everything was wet, the hillside above me was
either intensely green sodden turf or great streaming slabs of
limestone, seaward was a rocky headland, a ruin of a beehive shape, and
beyond a vast waste of tumbling waters unlit by any sun. Not a tree
broke that melancholy wilderness, nor any living thing but ourselves.
The horse went stumblingly under the incessant stimulation of the
driver's lash and tongue....
"Yonder it is," said my man, pointing with his whip, and I twisted
round to see over his shoulder, not the Rhine-like castle I had
expected, but a long low house of stone upon a headland, backed by a
distant mountain that vanished in a wild driven storm of rain as I
looked. But at the sight of Mirk my lassitude passed, my nerves
tightened, and my will began to march again. Now, thought I, we bring
things to an issue. Now we come to something personal and definite. The
vagueness is at an end. I kept my eyes upon the place, and thought it
more and more like a prison as we drew nearer. Perhaps from that window
Mary was looking for me now. Had she wondered why I did not come to her
before? Now at any rate I had found her. I sprang off the car, found a
bell-handle, and set the house jangling.
The door opened, and a little old man appeared with his fingers thrust
inside his collar as though he were struggling against strangulation. He
regarded me for a second, and spoke before I could speak.
"What might you be wanting?" said he, as if he had an answer ready.
"I want to see Lady Mary Justin," I said.
"You can't," he said. "She's gone."
"Gone!"
"The day before yesterday she went to London. You'll have to be getting
back there."
"She's gone to London."
"No less."
"Willingly?"
The little old man struggled with his collar. "Anyone would go
willingly," he said, and seemed to await my further commands. He eyed me
obliquely with a shadow of malice in his eyes.
It was then my heart failed, and I knew that we lovers were beaten. I
turned from the door without another word to the janitor. "Back," said I
to my driver, and got up behind him.
But it is one thing to decide to go back, and another to do it. At the
little station I studied time-tables, and I could not get to England
again without a delay of half a day. Somewhere I must wait. I did not
want to wait where there was any concourse of people. I decided to stay
in the inn by the station for the intervening six hours, and get some
sleep before I started upon my return, but when I saw the bedroom I
changed my plan and went down out of the village by a steep road towards
the shore. I wandered down through the rain and spindrift to the very
edge of the sea, and there found a corner among the rocks a little
sheltered from the wind, and sat, inert and wretched; my lips salt, my
hair stiff with salt, and my body wet and cold; a miserable defeated
man. For I had now an irrational and entirely overwhelming conviction of
defeat. I saw as if I ought always to have seen that I had been pursuing
a phantom of hopeless happiness, that my dream of ever possessing Mary
again was fantastic and foolish, and that I had expended all my strength
in vain. Over me triumphed a law and tradition more towering than those
cliffs and stronger than those waves. I was overwhelmed by a sense of
human weakness, of the infinite feebleness of the individual man against
wind and wave and the stress of tradition and the ancient usages of
mankind. "We must submit," I whispered, crouching close, "we must
submit." ...
Far as the eye could reach the waves followed one another in long
unhurrying lines, an inexhaustible succession, rolling, hissing,
breaking, and tossing white manes of foam, to gather at last for a
crowning effort and break thunderously, squirting foam two hundred feet
up the streaming faces of the cliffs. The wind tore and tugged at me,
and wind and water made together a clamor as though all the evil voices
in the world, all the violent passions and all the hasty judgments were
seeking a hearing above the more elemental uproar....
§ 14
And while I was in this phase of fatigue and despair in Mayo, the scene
was laid and all the other actors were waiting for the last act of my
defeat in London. I came back to find two letters from Mary and a little
accumulation of telegrams and notes, one written in my flat, from
Tarvrille.
Mary's letters were neither of them very long, and full of a new-born
despair. She had not realized how great were the forces against her and
against us both. She let fall a phrase that suggested she was ill. She
had given in, she said, to save herself and myself and others from the
shame and ruin of a divorce, and I must give in too. We had to agree not
to meet or communicate for three years, and I was to go out of England.
She prayed me to accept this. She knew, she said, she seemed to desert
me, but I did not know everything,--I did not know everything,--I must
agree; she could not come with me; it was impossible. _Now_ certainly it
was impossible. She had been weak, but I did not know all. If I knew all
I should be the readier to understand and forgive her, but it was part
of the conditions that I could not know all. Justin had been generous,
in his way.... Justin had everything in his hands, the whole world was
behind him against us, and I must give in. Those letters had a quality I
had never before met in her, they were broken-spirited. I could not
understand them fully, and they left me perplexed, with a strong desire
to see her, to question her, to learn more fully what this change in her
might mean.
Tarvrille's notes recorded his repeated attempts to see me, I felt that
he alone was capable of clearing up things for me, and I went out again
at once and telegraphed to him for an appointment.
He wired to me from that same house in Mayfair in which I had first met
Mary after my return. He asked me to come to him in the afternoon, and
thither I went through a November fog, and found him in the drawing-room
that had the plate glass above the fireplace. But now he was vacating
the house, and everything was already covered up, the pictures and their
frames were under holland, the fine furniture all in covers of faded
stuff, the chandeliers and statues wrapped up, the carpets rolled out of
the way. Even the window-curtains were tucked into wrappers, and the
blinds, except one he had raised, drawn down. He greeted me and
apologized for the cold inhospitality of the house. "It was convenient
here," he said. "I came here to clear out my papers and boxes. And
there's no chance of interruptions."
He went and stood before the empty fireplace, and plunged into the
middle of the matter.
"You know, my dear Stratton, in this confounded business my heart's with
you. It has been all along. If I could have seen a clear chance before
you--for you and Mary to get away--and make any kind of life of
it--though she's my cousin--I'd have helped you. Indeed I would. But
there's no sort of chance--not the ghost of a chance...."
He began to explain very fully, quite incontrovertibly, that entire
absence of any chance for Mary and myself together. He argued to the
converted. "You know as well as I do what that romantic flight abroad,
that Ouidaesque casa in some secluded valley, comes to in reality. All
round Florence there's no end of such scandalous people, I've been among
them, the nine circles of the repenting scandalous, all cutting one
another."
"I agree," I said. "And yet----"
"What?"
"We could have come back."