I answered that I had not, and then told her (so as to give her no further excuse for hanging about me) that in future she was to take her orders from Price — an announcement which caused my maid to stand several inches taller in her shoes, and sent the housekeeper hopping downstairs with her beak in the air like an injured cockatoo.

  All the afternoon I was in a state of the utmost agitation, sometimes wondering what Martin would think of the bad manners of my husband, who after inviting him had gone away just as he was about to arrive; sometimes asking myself, with a quiver of shame, if he would imagine that this was a scheme of my own contriving; but oftenest remembering my resolution of renunciation and thinking of the much fiercer fight that was before me now that I had to receive and part with him alone.

  More than once I had half a mind to telegraph to Martin putting him off, and though I told myself that to do so would not be renunciation but merely flight from temptation, I always knew at the bottom of my heart that I really wanted him to come.

  Nevertheless I vowed to my very soul that I should be strong — strong in every word and look — and if Alma was daring me I should defy her, and she would see that I should neither yield nor run away.

  Thus I entrenched myself at last in a sort of bright strong faith in my power to resist temptation. But I must leave it to those who know better than I the way to read a woman’s heart to say how it came to pass that towards five o’clock, when I heard the sound of wheels and going on to my balcony saw a jaunting-car at the front entrance, and then opening my door heard Martin’s great voice in the hall, I flew downstairs — literally flew — in my eagerness to welcome him.

  There he was in his brown Harris tweeds and soft slouch hat with such an atmosphere of health and sweep of winds about him as almost took away my breath.

  “Helloa!” he cried, and I am sure his eyes brightened at the sight of me for they were like the sea when the sun shines on it.

  “You’re better, aren’t you?” he said. “No need to ask that, though — the colour in your face is wonderful.”

  In spite of my resolution, and the attempt I made to show him only a kind of glad seriousness, I could not help it if I blushed. Also I could not help it if, while going upstairs and telling him what had happened to the house-party, I said he was doomed to the disappointment of having nobody except myself for company, and then, woman-like, waited eagerly for what he would say.

  “So they’re all gone except yourself, are they?” he said.

  “I’m afraid they are,” I answered.

  “Well, if it had been the other way about, and you had gone and they had stayed, by the stars of God, I should have been disappointed. But things being as they are, we’ll muddle through, shan’t we?”

  Not all the vows in the world could prevent me from finding that answer delightful, and when, on entering my boudoir, he said:

  “Sorry to miss Madame though. I wanted a word with that lady before I went down to the Antarctic,” I could not resist the mischievous impulse to show him Alma’s letter.

  While he read it his bright face darkened (for all the world like a jeweller’s window when the shutter comes down on it), and when he had finished it he said once more:

  “I hate that woman! She’s like a snake. I’d like to put my foot on it.”

  And then —

  “She may run away as much as she likes, but I will yet, you go bail, I will.”

  He was covered with dust and wanted to wash, so I rang for a maid, who told me that Mr. and Mrs. Eastcliff’s rooms had been prepared for Mr. Conrad. This announcement (though I tried to seem unmoved) overwhelmed me with confusion, seeing that the rooms in question almost communicated with my own. But Martin only laughed and said:

  “Stunning! We’ll live in this wing of the house and leave the rest of the old barracks to the cats, should we?”

  I was tingling with joy, but all the same I knew that a grim battle was before me.

  SIXTY-FOURTH CHAPTER

  By the time he returned from his room I had tea served in my boudoir, and while we sat facing the open door to the balcony he told me about his visit to his old school; how at the dinner on the previous night the Principal had proposed his health, and after the lads had sung “Forty Years On” he had told them yarns about his late expedition until they made the long hiss of indrawn breath which is peculiar to boys when they are excited; how they had followed him to his bedroom as if he had been the Pied Piper of Hamelin and questioned him and clambered over him until driven off by the house-master; and how, finally, before he was out of bed this morning the smallest scholar in the junior house, a tiny little cherub with the face of his mother, had come knocking at his door to ask if he wanted a cabin boy.

  Martin laughed as if he had been a boy himself (which he always was and always will be) while telling me these stories, and I laughed too, though with a certain tremor, for I was constantly remembering my resolution and feeling afraid to be too happy.

  After tea we went out on to the balcony, and leaned side by side over the crumbling stone balustrade to look at the lovely landscape — loveliest when the sun is setting on it — with the flower-garden below and the headland beyond, covered with heather and gorse and with a winding white path lying over it like the lash of a whip until it dipped down to the sea.

  “It’s a beautiful old world, though, isn’t it?” said Martin.

  “Isn’t it?” I answered, and we looked into each other’s eyes and smiled.

  Then we heard the light shsh of a garden hose, and looking down saw an old man watering the geraniums.

  “Sakes alive! It’s Tommy the Mate,” cried Martin, and leaving me on the balcony he went leaping down the stone stairway to greet his old comrade.

  “God bless me!” said Tommy. “Let me have a right look at ye. Yes, yes, it’s himself, for sure.”

  A little gale of tender memories floated up to me from my childhood at seeing those two together again, with Martin now standing head and shoulders above the old man’s Glengarry cap.

  “You’ve been over the highways of the sea, farther than Franklin himself, they’re telling me,” said Tommy, and when Martin, laughing merrily, admitted that he had been farther south at all events, the old sailor said:

  “Well, well! Think of that now! But wasn’t I always telling the omadhauns what you’d be doing some day?”

  Then with a “glime” of his “starboard eye” in my direction he said:

  “You haven’t got a woman yet though? . . . No, I thought not. You’re like myself, boy — there’s not many of them sorts in for you.”

  After that, and a more undisguised look my way, the old man talked about me, still calling me the “lil misthress” and saying they were putting a power of gold on my fingers, but he would be burning candles to the miracles of God to see the colour of it in my cheeks too.

  “She’s a plant that doesn’t take kindly to a hot-house same as this,” (indicating the house) “and she’ll not be thriving until somebody’s bedding her out, I’m thinking.”

  It was Saturday, and after dinner Martin proposed that we should walk to the head of the cliff to see Blackwater by night, which was a wonderful spectacle, people said, at the height of the season, so I put a silk wrap over my head and we set out together.

  There was no moon and few stars were visible, but it was one of those luminous nights in summer which never forget the day. Therefore we walked without difficulty along the white winding path with its nutty odour of the heather and gorse until we came near the edge of the cliff, and then suddenly the town burst upon our view, with its promenades, theatres, and dancing palaces ablaze with electric light, which was reflected with almost equal brilliance in the smooth water of the bay.

  We were five miles from Blackwater, but listening hard we thought we could hear, through the boom of the sea on the dark cliffs below us, the thin sounds of the bands that were playing in the open-air pavilions, and looking steadfastly we thought we could see, in the black patches under the white light, the movement of the thousands of persons who were promenading along “the front.”

  This led Martin to talk of my father, saying as we walked back, with the dark outlines of the sleeping mountains confronting us, what a marvellous man he had been to transform in twenty years the little fishing and trading port into a great resort for hundreds of thousands of pleasure-seekers.

  “But is he any better or happier for the wealth it has brought him, and for the connections he has bought with it? Is anybody any better?” said Martin.

  “I know one who isn’t,” I answered.

  I had not meant to say that. It had slipped out unawares, and in my confusion at the self-revelation which it seemed to make, I tripped in the darkness and would have fallen if Martin had not caught me up.

  In doing this he had to put his arms about me and to hold me until I was steady on my feet, and having done so he took my hand and drew it through his arm and in this way we walked the rest of the way back.

  It would be impossible and perhaps foolish to say what that incident meant to me. I felt a thrill of joy, a quivering flood of delight which, with all the raptures of my spiritual love, had never come to me before.

  Every woman who loves her husband must know what it is, but to me it was a great revelation. It was just as if some new passion had sprung into life in me at a single moment. And it had — the mighty passion that lies at the root of our being, the overwhelming instinct of sex which, taking no account of religion and resolutions, sweeps everything before it like a flood.

  I think Martin must have felt it too, for all at once he ceased to speak, and I was trembling so much with this new feeling of tenderness that I could not utter a word. So I heard nothing as we walked on but the crackle of our footsteps on the gravel path and the measured boom of the sea which we were leaving behind us — nothing but that and the quick beating in my own breast.

  When we came to the garden the frowning face of the old house was in front of us, and it was all in darkness, save for the light in my room which came out on to the balcony. Everything was quiet. The air was breathless. There was not a rustle in the trees.

  We took two or three turns on the lawn in front of my windows, saying nothing but feeling terribly, fearfully happy. After a few moments (or they seemed few) a cuckoo clock on my desk struck eleven, and we went up the stone stairway into my boudoir and parted for the night.

  Even then we did not speak, but Martin took my hand and lifted my fingers to his lips, and the quivering delight I had been feeling ever since I slipped on the headland rushed through me again.

  At the next moment I was in my room. I did not turn on the light. I undressed in the darkness and when my maid came I was in bed. She wanted to tell me about a scene with the housekeeper in the kitchen, but I said:

  “I don’t want to talk to-night, Price.”

  I did not know what was happening to me. I only knew, for the first time that night, that above everything else I was a woman, and that my renunciation, if it was ever to come to pass, would be a still more tragic thing than I had expected.

  My grim battle had begun.

  SIXTY-FIFTH CHAPTER

  When I awoke in the morning I took myself severely to task. Was this how I was fulfilling the promise I had made to Martin’s mother, or preparing to carry out the counsel of Father Dan?

  “I must be more careful,” I told myself. “I must keep a stronger hold of myself.”

  The church bells began to ring, and I determined to go to mass. I wanted to go alone and much as I grudged every minute of Martin’s company which I lost, I was almost glad when, on going into the boudoir with my missal in my hand, I found him at a table covered with papers and heard him say:

  “Helloa! See these letters and telegrams? Sunday as it is I’ve got to answer them.”

  Our church was a little chapel-of-ease on the edge of my husband’s estate, opened, after centuries of neglect, by the bad Lord Raa, in his regenerate days, for the benefit of the people of his own village. It was very sweet to see their homely faces as they reverently bowed and rose, and even to hear their creachy voices when they joined in the singing of the Gloria.

  Following the gospel there was a sermon on the words “Lead us not into temptation but deliver us from evil.” The preacher was a young curate, the brother of my husband’s coachman; and it occurred to me that he could know very little of temptation for himself, but the instruction he gave us was according to the doctrine of our Church, as I had received it from the Reverend Mother and the Cardinals who used to hold retreats at the convent.

  “Beware of the temptations of the flesh, my children,” said the priest. “The Evil One is very subtle, and not only in our moments of pride and prosperity, but also in our hours of sorrow and affliction, he is for ever waiting and watching to betray us to our downfall and damnation.”

  In the rustling that followed the sermon a poor woman who sat next to me, with a print handkerchief over her head, whispered in my ear that she was sorry she had not brought her husband, for he had given way to drink, poor fellow, since the island had had such good times and wages had been so high.

  But the message came closer home to me. Remembering the emotions of the night before, I prayed fervently to be strengthened against all temptation and preserved from all sin. And when the mass was resumed I recalled some of the good words with which I had been taught to assist at the Holy Sacrifice — praying at the Credo that as I had become a child in the bosom of the Church I might live and die in it.

  When the service was over I felt more at ease and I emptied my purse, I remember, partly into the plate and partly to the poor people at the church door.

  It was in this spirit that I returned home in the broad sunshine of noonday. But half way up the drive I met Martin walking briskly down to meet me. He was bareheaded and in flannels; and I could not help it if he looked to me so good, so strong, and so well able to protect a woman against every danger, that the instructions I had received in church, and the resolutions I had formed there, seemed to run out of my heart as rapidly as the dry sand of the sea-shore runs through one’s fingers.

  “Helloa!” he cried, as usual. “The way I’ve been wasting this wonderful morning over letters and telegrams! But not another minute will I give to anything under the stars of God but you.”

  If there was any woman in the world who could have resisted that greeting I was not she, and though I was a little confused I was very happy.

  As we walked back to the house we talked of my father and his sudden illness, then of his mother and my glimpse of her, and finally of indifferent things, such as the weather, which had been a long drought and might end in a deluge.

  By a sort of mutual consent we never once spoke of the central subject of our thoughts — my marriage and its fatal consequences — but I noticed that Martin’s voice was soft and caressing, that he was walking close to my side, and that as often as I looked up at him he was looking down at me and smiling.

  It was the same after luncheon when we went out into the garden and sat on a seat in the shrubbery almost immediately facing my windows, and he spread a chart on a rustic table and pointing to a red line on it said:

  “Look, this is the course of our new cruise, please God.”

  He talked for a long time, about his captain and crew; the scientific experts who had volunteered to accompany him, his aeronautic outfit, his sledges and his skis; but whatever he talked about — if it was only his dogs and the food he had found for them — it was always in that soft, caressing voice which made me feel as if (though he never said one word of love) he were making love to me, and saying the sweetest things a man could say to a woman.

  After a time I found myself answering in the same tones, and even when speaking on the most matter-of-fact subjects I felt as if I were saying the sweetest things a woman could say to a man.

  We sat a long time so, and every moment we were together seemed to make our relation more perilous, until at length the sweet seductive twilight of the shortening autumn day began to frighten me, and making excuse of a headache I said I must go indoors.

  He walked with me up the stone-stairway and into my boudoir, until we got to the very door of my room, and then suddenly he took up both my hands and kissed them passionately.

  I felt the colour rushing to my cheeks and I had an almost irresistible impulse to do something in return. But conquering it with a great effort, I turned quickly into my bedroom, shut the door, pulled down the blinds and then sat and covered my face and asked myself, with many bitter pangs, if it could possibly be true (as I had been taught to believe) that our nature was evil and our senses were always tempting us to our destruction.

  Several hours passed while I sat in the darkness with this warfare going on between my love and my religion, and then Price came to dress me for dinner, and she was full of cheerful gossip.

  “Men are such children,” she said; “they can’t help giving themselves away, can they?”

  It turned out that after I had left the lawn she had had some conversation with Martin, and I could see that she was eager to tell me what he had said about myself.

  “The talk began about your health and altered looks, my lady. ‘Don’t you think your mistress is looking ill?’ said he. ‘A little,’ I said. ‘But her body is not so ill as her heart, if you ask me,’ said I.”

  “You never said that, Price?”

  “Well, I could not help saying it if I thought so, could I?”

  “And what did he say?”

  “He didn’t say anything then, my lady, but when I said, ‘You see, sir, my lady is tied to a husband she doesn’t love,’ he said, ‘How can she, poor thing? ‘Worse than that,’ I said, ‘her husband loves another woman.’ ‘The fool! Where does he keep his eyes?’ said he. ‘Worse still,’ said I, ‘he flaunts his infidelities in her very face.’ ‘The brute!’ he said, and his face looked so fierce that you would have thought he wanted to take his lordship by the throat and choke him. ‘Why doesn’t she leave the man?’ said he. ‘That’s what I say, sir, but I think it’s her religion,’ I said. ‘Then God help her, for there’s no remedy for that,’ said he. And then seeing him so down I said, ‘But we women are always ruled by our hearts in the long run.’ ‘Do you think so?’ said he. ‘I’m sure of it,’ said I, ‘only we must have somebody to help us,’ I said. ‘There’s her father,’ said he. ‘A father is of no use in a case like this,’ I said, ‘especially such a one as my lady’s is, according to all reports. No,’ said I, ‘it must be somebody else — somebody who cares enough for a woman to risk everything for her, and just take her and make her do what’s best for herself whether she likes it or not. Now if somebody like that were to come to my lady, and get her out of her trouble,’ I said. . . . ‘Somebody will,’ said he. ‘Make your mind easy about that. Somebody will,’ he said, and then he went on walking to and fro.”

 

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