Chapter X: Front Matter (10)

I sat alone in a box on the ground tier while Alma and my husband and their friends were below on the level of the _poltroni_ (the stalls) that had been arranged for the dancing, which began immediately after we arrived and went on without a break until long after midnight.

Then there was supper on the stage, and those who did not eat drank a good deal until nearly everybody seemed to be under the influence of alcohol. As a consequence many of the people, especially some of the women (not good women I fear), seemed to lose all control of themselves, singing snatches of noisy songs, sipping out of the men's glasses, taking the smoke of cigarettes out of the men's mouths, sitting on the men's knees, and even riding astride on the men's arms and shoulders.

I bore these sights as long as I could, making many fruitless appeals to my husband to take me home; and I was just about to leave of myself, being sick of the degradation of my sex, when a kind of rostrum, with an empty chair on top of it, was carried in on the shoulders of a number of men.

This was for the enthronement of the Queen of Beauty, and as it passed round the arena, with the mock judges in paper coronets, walking ahead to make their choice, some of the women, lost to all sense of modesty, were shouting "Take _me_! Take _me_!"

I felt sure they would take Alma, so I reached forward to get a better view of her, where she stood below my box; but as they approached her, with the chair still empty, I saw her make a movement in my direction and say something to the judges about "the little nun," which made my husband nod his head and then laugh uproariously.

At the next moment, before I knew what they were doing, six or seven men jumped into my box, lifted me on to the rostrum and placed me in the chair, whereupon the whole noisy company in the theatre broke into wild shouts of salutation and pelted me with flowers and confetti.

If there was any pride there was more mortification in the position to which Alma and my husband had exposed me, for as I was being carried round the arena, with the sea of foaming faces below me, all screaming out of their hot and open mouths, I heard the men cry:

"Smile, Signorina!"

"Not so serious, Mademoiselle!"

It would do no good to say what memories of other scenes flashed back on my mind as I was being borne along in the mad procession. I felt as if it would last for ever. But it came to an end at length, and as soon as I was released, I begged my husband again to take me home, and when he said, "Not yet; we'll all be going by-and-by," I stole away by myself, found a cab, and drove back to the hotel.

The day was dawning as I passed through the stony streets, and when I reached my room, and pulled down my dark green blinds, the bell of the Capuchin monastery in the Via Veneto was ringing and the monks were saying the first of their offices.

I must have been some time in bed, hiding my hot face in the bed-clothes, when Price, my maid, came in to apologise for not having seen me come back alone. The pain of the woman's scrutiny was more than I could bear at that moment, so I tried to dismiss her, but I could not get her to go, and at last she said:

"If you please, my lady, I want to say something."

I gave her no encouragement, yet she continued.

"I daresay it's as much as my place is worth, but I'm bound to say it."

Still I said nothing, yet she went on:

"His Lordship and Madame have also arrived. . . . They came back half an hour ago. And just now . . . I saw his lordship . . . coming out of Madame's room."

"Go away, woman, go away," I cried in the fierce agony of my shame, and she went out at last, closing the door noisily behind her.

* * * * *

We did not go next day to Benediction at the Reverend Mother's church. But late the same night, when it was quite dark, I crept out of my room into the noisy streets, hardly knowing where my footsteps were leading me, until I found myself in the piazza of the Convent of the Sacred Heart.

It was quiet enough there. Only the Carabinieri were walking on the paved way with measured steps, and the bell of the Dominican monastery was slowly ringing under the silent stars. I could see the light on the Pope's loggia at the Vatican and hear the clock of St. Peter's striking nine.

There were lights in the windows of some of the dormitories also, and by that I knew that the younger children, the children of the Infant Jesus, were going to bed. There was a light too, in the large window of the church, and that told me that the bigger girls were saying their night prayers.

Creeping close to the convent wall I heard the girls' voices rising and falling, and then through the closed door of the church came the muffled sound of their evening hymn--

"_Ave maris stella
Dei Mater Alma--_"

I did not know why I was putting myself wilfully to this bitter pain--the pain of remembering the happy years in which I myself was a girl singing so, and then telling myself that other girls were there now who knew nothing of me.

I thought of the Reverend Mother, and then of my own mother, my saint, my angel, who had told me to think of her when I sang that hymn; and then I remembered where I was and what had happened to me.

"_Virgin of all virgins,
To thy shelter take me_."

I felt like an outcast. A stifling sensation came into my throat and I dropped to my knees in the darkness. I thought I was broken-hearted.

FORTY-NINTH CHAPTER

Not long after that we left Italy on our return to England. We were to reach home by easy stages so as to see some of the great capitals of Europe, but I had no interest in the journey.

Our first stay was at Monte Carlo, that sweet garden of the Mediterranean which God seems to smile upon and man to curse.

If I had been allowed to contemplate the beautiful spectacle of nature I think I could have been content, but Alma, with her honeyed and insincere words, took me to the Casino on the usual plea of keeping her in countenance.

I hated the place from the first, with its stale air, its chink of louis d'or, its cry of the croupiers, its strained faces about the tables, and its general atmosphere of wasted hopes and fears and needless misery and despair.

As often as I could I crept out to look at the flower fêtes in the streets, or to climb the hill of La Turbie and think I was on my native rocks with Martin Conrad, or even to sit in my room and watch the poor wounded pigeons from the pigeon-traps as they tumbled and ducked into the sea after the shots fired, by cruel and unsportsmanlike sportsmen, from the rifle-range below.

In Monte Carlo my husband's vices seemed to me to grow rank and fast. The gambling fever took complete possession of him. At first he won and then he drank heavily, but afterwards he lost and then his nature became still more ugly and repulsive.

One evening towards eight o'clock, I was in my room, trying to comfort a broken-winged pigeon which had come floundering through the open window, when my husband entered with wild eyes.

"The red's coming up at all the tables," he cried breathlessly. "Give me some money, quick!"

I told him I had no money except the few gold pieces in my purse.

"You've a cheque book--give me a cheque, then."

I told him that even if I gave him a cheque he could not cash it that night, the banks being closed.

"The jewellers are open though, and you have jewels, haven't you? Stop fooling with that creature, and let me have some of them to pawn."

The situation was too abject for discussion, so I pointed to the drawer in which my jewels were kept, and he tore it open, took what he wanted and went out hurriedly without more words.

After that I saw no more of him for two days, when with black rings about his eyes he came in to say he must leave "this accursed place" immediately or we should all be ruined.

Our last stopping-place was Paris, and in my ignorance of the great French capital which has done so much for the world, I thought it must be the sink of every kind of corruption.

We put up at a well-known hotel in the Champs Elysées, and there (as well as in the cafés in the Bois and at the races at Longchamps on Sundays) we met the same people again, most of them English and Americans on their way home after the winter. It seemed to me strange that there should be so many men and women in the world with nothing to do, merely loafing round it like tramps--the richest being the idlest, and the idlest the most immoral.

My husband knew many Frenchmen of the upper classes, and I think he spent several hours every day at their clubs, but (perhaps at Alma's instigation) he made us wallow through the filth of Paris by night.

"It will be lots of fun," said Alma. "And then who is to know us in places like those?"

I tolerated this for a little while, and then refused to be dragged around any longer as a cloak for Alma's pleasures. Telling myself that if I continued to share my husband's habits of life, for any reason or under any pretext, I should become like him, and my soul would rot inch by inch, I resolved to be clean in my own eyes and to resist the contaminations of his company.

As a consequence, he became more and more reckless, and Alma made no efforts to restrain him, so that it came to pass at last that they went together to a scandalous entertainment which was for a while the talk of the society papers throughout Europe.

I know no more of this entertainment than I afterwards learned from those sources--that it was given by a notorious woman, who was not shut out of society because she was "the good friend" of a King; that she did the honours with clever imitative elegance; that her salon that night was crowded with such male guests as one might see at the court of a queen--princes, dukes, marquises, counts, English noblemen and members of parliament, as well as some reputable women of my own and other countries; that the tables were laid for supper at four o'clock with every delicacy of the season and wines of the rarest vintage; that after supper dancing was resumed with increased animation; and that the dazzling and improper spectacle terminated with a _Chaîne diabolique_ at seven in the morning, when the sun was streaming through the windows and the bells of the surrounding churches were ringing for early mass.

I had myself risen early that morning to go to communion at the Madeleine, and never shall I forget the effect of cleansing produced upon me by the sacred sacrament. From the moment when--the priest standing at the foot of the altar--the choir sang the _Kyrie eleison_, down to the solemn silence of the elevation, I had a sense of being washed from all the taint of the contaminating days since my marriage.

The music was Perosi's, I remember, and the voices in the _Gloria in excelsis_, which I used to sing myself, seemed to carry up the cry of my sorrowful heart to the very feet of the Virgin whose gracious figure hung above me.

"Cleanse me and intercede for me, O Mother of my God."

It was as though our Blessed Lady did so, for as I walked out of the church and down the broad steps in front of it, I had a feeling of purity and lightness that I had never known since my time at the Sacred Heart.

It was a beautiful day, with all the freshness and fragrance of early morning in summer, when the white stone houses of Paris seem to blush in the sunrise; and as I walked up the Champs Elysées on my way back to the hotel, I met under the chestnut trees, which were then in bloom, a little company of young girls returning to school after their first communion.

How sweet they looked! In their white muslin frocks, white shoes and stockings and gloves, white veils and coronets of white flowers, they were twittering away as merrily as the little birds that were singing unseen in the leaves above them.

It made me feel like a child myself to look at their sweet faces; but turning into the hotel I felt like a woman too, for I thought the great and holy mystery, the sacrament of union and love, had given me such strength that I could meet any further wrong I might have to endure in my walk through the world with charity and forgiveness.

But how little a woman knows of her heart until it is tried in the fires of passion!

As I entered the salon which (as usual) divided my husband's bedroom from mine, I came upon my maid, Price, listening intently at my husband's closed door. This seemed to me so improper that I was beginning to reprove her, when she put her finger to her lip and coming over to me with her black eyes ablaze she said:

"I know you will pack me off for what I'm going to say, yet I can't help that. You've stood too much already, my lady, but if you are a woman and have any pride in yourself as a wife, go and listen at that door and see if you can stand any more."

With that she went out of the salon, and I tried to go to my own room, but I could not stir. Something held me to the spot on which I stood, and I found myself listening to the voices which I could distinctly hear in my husband's bedroom.

There were two voices, one a man's, loud and reckless, the other a woman's soft and cautious.

There was no need to tell myself whose voices they were, and neither did I ask myself any questions. I did not put to my mind the pros and cons of the case for myself or the case for my husband. I only thought and felt and behaved as any other wife would think and feel and behave at such a moment. An ugly and depraved thing, which my pride or my self-respect had never hitherto permitted me to believe in, suddenly leapt into life.

I was outraged. I was a victim of the treachery, the duplicity, the disloyalty, and the smothered secrecy of husband and friend.

My heart and soul were aflame with a sense of wrong. All the sweetening and softening and purifying effects of the sacrament were gone in an instant, and, moving stealthily across the carpet towards my husband's door, I swiftly turned the handle.

The door was locked.

I heard a movement inside the room and in a moment I hurried from the salon into the corridor, intending to enter by another door. As I was about to do so I heard the lock turned back by a cautious hand within. Then I swung the door open and boldly entered the room.

Nobody was there except my husband.

But I was just in time to catch the sound of rustling skirts in the adjoining apartment and to see a door closed gently behind them.

I looked around. Although the sun was shining, the blinds were down and the air was full of a rank odour of stale tobacco such as might have been brought back in people's clothes from that shameless woman's salon.

My husband, who had clearly been drinking, was looking at me with a half-senseless grin. His thin hair was a little disordered. His prominent front teeth showed hideously. I saw that he was trying to carry things off with an air.

"This _is_ an unexpected pleasure. I think it must be the first time . . . the very first time that. . . ."

I felt deadly cold; I almost swooned; I could scarcely breathe, but I said:

"Is that all you've got to say to me?"

"All? What else, my dear? I don't understand. . . ."

"You understand quite well," I answered, and then looking towards the door of the adjoining apartment, I said, "both of you understand."

My husband began to laugh--a drunken, idiotic laugh.

"Oh, you mean that . . . perhaps you imagine that. . . ."

"Listen," I said. "This is the end of everything between you and me."

"The end? Why, I thought that was long ago. In fact I thought everything ended before it began."

"I mean. . . ." I knew I was faltering . . . "I mean that I can no longer keep up the farce of being your wife."

"Farce!" Again he laughed. "I congratulate you, my dear. Farce is exactly the word for it. Our relations have been a farce ever since the day we were married, and if anything has gone wrong you have only yourself to blame for it. What's a man to do whose wife is no company for anybody but the saints and angels?"

His coarse ridicule cut me to the quick. I was humiliated by the thought that after all in his own gross way my husband had something to say for himself.

Knowing I was no match for him I wanted to crawl away without another word. But my silence or the helpless expression of my face must have been more powerful than my speech, for after a few seconds in which he went on saying in his drawling way that I had been no wife to him, and if anything had happened I had brought it on myself, he stopped, and neither of us spoke for a moment.

Then feeling that if I stayed any longer in that room I should faint, I turned to go, and he opened the door for me and bowed low, perhaps in mockery, as I passed out.

When I reached my own bedroom I was so weak that I almost dropped, and so cold that my maid had to give me brandy and put hot bottles to my feet.

And then the tears came and I cried like a child.

FIFTIETH CHAPTER

I was far from well next morning and Price wished to keep me in bed, but I got up immediately when I heard that my husband was talking of returning to London.

Our journey was quite uneventful. We three sat together in the railway carriage and in the private cabin on the steamer, with no other company than Bimbo, my husband's terrier, and Prue, Alma's Pekinese spaniel.

Although he made no apology for his conduct of the day before my husband was quiet and conciliatory, and being sober he looked almost afraid, as if telling himself that he might have to meet my father soon--the one man in the world of whom he seemed to stand in fear.

Alma looked equally frightened, but she carried off her nervousness with a great show of affection, saying she was sorry I was feeling "badly," that France and the South did not agree with me, and that I should be ever so much better when I was "way up north."

We put up at a well-known hotel near Trafalgar Square, the same that in our girlhood had been the subject of Alma's dreams of future bliss, and I could not help observing that while my husband was selecting our rooms she made a rather ostentatious point of asking for an apartment on another floor.

It was late when we arrived, so I went to bed immediately, being also anxious to be alone that I might think out my course of action.

I was then firmly resolved that one way or other my life with my husband should come to an end; that I would no longer be befouled by the mire he had been dragging me through; that I should live a clean life and drink a pure draught, and oh, how my very soul seemed to thirst for it!

This was the mood in which I went to sleep, but when I awoke in the morning, almost before the dawn, the strength of my resolution ebbed away. I listened to the rumble of the rubber-bound wheels of the carriages and motor-cars that passed under my window and, remembering that I had not a friend in London, I felt small and helpless. What could I do alone? Where could I turn for assistance?

Instinctively I knew it would be of no use to appeal to my father, for though it was possible that he might knock my husband down, it was not conceivable that he would encourage me to separate from him.

In my loneliness and helplessness I felt like a shipwrecked sailor, who, having broken away from the foundering vessel that would have sucked him under, is yet tossing on a raft with the threatening ocean on every side, and looking vainly for a sail.

At last I thought of Mr. Curphy, my father's advocate, and decided to send a telegram to him asking for the name of some solicitor in London to whom I could apply for advice.

To carry out this intention I went down to the hall about nine o'clock, when people were passing into the breakfast-room, and visitors were calling at the bureau, and livened page-boys were shouting names in the corridors.

There was a little writing-room at one side of the hall and I sat there to write my telegram. It ran--

"Please send name and address reliable solicitor London whom I can consult on important business."

I was holding the telegraph-form in my hand and reading my message again and again to make sure that it would lead to no mischief, when I began to think of Martin Conrad.

It seemed to me that some one had mentioned his name, but I told myself that must have been a mistake,--that, being so helpless and so much in need of a friend at that moment, my heart and not my ears had heard it.

Nevertheless as I sat holding my telegraph-form I became conscious of somebody who was moving about me. It was a man, for I could smell the sweet peaty odour of his Harris tweeds.

At length with that thrill which only the human voice can bring to us when it is the voice of one from whom we have been long parted, I heard somebody say, from the other side of the desk:

"Mary, is it you?"

I looked up, the blood rushed to my face and a dazzling mist floated before my eyes, so that for a moment I could hardly see who was there. But I _knew_ who it was--it was Martin himself.

He came down on me like a breeze from the mountain, took me by both hands, telegram and all, and said:

"My goodness, this is stunning!"

I answered, as well as I could for the confusion that overwhelmed me.

"I'm so glad, so glad!"

"How well you are looking! A little thin, perhaps, but such a colour!"

"I'm so glad, so glad!" I repeated, though I knew I was only blushing.

"When did you arrive?"

I told him, and he said:

"_We_ came into port only yesterday. And to think that you and I should come to the same hotel and meet on the very first morning! It's like a fate, as our people in the island say. But it's stunning, perfectly stunning!"

A warm tide of joy was coursing through me and taking away my breath, but I managed to say:

"I've heard about your expedition. You had great hardships."

"That was nothing! Just a little pleasure-trip down to the eighty-sixth latitude."

"And great successes?"

"That was nothing either. The chief was jolly good, and the boys were bricks."

"I'm so glad, so glad!" I said again, for a kind of dumb joy had taken possession of me, and I went on saying the same thing over and over again, as people do when they are very happy.

For two full minutes I felt happier than I had ever been in my life before; and then an icy chill came over me, for I remembered that I had been married since I saw Martin Conrad last and I did not know how I was to break the news to him.

Just then my husband and Alma came down the lift, and seeing me with a stranger, as they crossed the hall to go into the breakfast-room, they came up and spoke.

I had to introduce them and it was hard to do, for it was necessary to reveal everything in a word. I looked at Martin Conrad when I presented him to my husband and he did not move a muscle. Then I looked at my husband and under a very small bow his face grew dark.

I could not help seeing the difference between the two men as they stood together--Martin with his sea-blue eyes and his look of splendid health, and my husband with his sallow cheeks and his appearance of wasted strength--and somehow from some unsearchable depths of my soul the contrast humbled me.

When I introduced Alma she took Martin's hand and held it while she gazed searchingly into his eyes from under her eyebrows, as she always did when she was being presented to a man; but I saw that in this instance her glance fell with no more effect on its object than a lighted vesta on a running stream.

After the usual banal phrases my husband inquired if Martin was staying in the house, and then asked if he would dine with us some day.

"Certainly! Delighted! With all the pleasure in the world," said Martin.

"Then," said my husband with rather frigid politeness, "you will see more of your friend Mary."

"Yes," said Alma, in a way that meant much, "you will see more of your friend Mary."

"Don't you worry about that, ma'am. You _bet_ I will," said Martin, looking straight into Alma's eyes; and though she laughed as she passed into the breakfast-room with my husband, I could see that for the first time in her life a man's face had frightened her.

"Then you knew?" I said, when they were gone.

"Yes; a friend of mine who met you abroad came down to see us into port and he . . ."

"Dr. O'Sullivan?"

"That's the man! Isn't he a boy? And, my gracious, the way he speaks of you! But now . . . now you must go to breakfast yourself, and I must be off about my business."

"Don't go yet," I said.

"I'll stay all day if you want me to; but I promised to meet the Lieutenant on the ship in half an hour, and . . ."

"Then you must go."

"Not yet. Sit down again. Five minutes will do no harm. And by the way, now that I look at you again, I'm not so sure that you . . . Italy, Egypt, there's enough sun down there, but you're pale . . . a little pale, aren't you?"

I tried to make light of my pallor but Martin looked uneasy, and after a moment he asked:

"How long are you staying in London?"

I told him I did not know, whereupon he said:

"Well, I'm to be here a month, making charts and tables and reports for the Royal Geographical Society, but if you want me for anything . . . do you want me now?"

"No-o, no, not now," I answered.

"Well, if you _do_ want me for anything--anything at all, mind, just pass the word and the charts and the tables and the reports and the Royal Geographical Society may go to the . . . Well, somewhere."

I laughed and rose and told him he ought to go, though at the bottom of my heart I was wishing him to stay, and thinking how little and lonely I was, while here was a big brave man who could protect me from every danger.

We walked together to the door, and there I took his hand and held it, feeling, like a child, that if I let him go he might be lost in the human ocean outside and I should see no more of him.

At last, struggling hard with a lump that was gathering in my throat, I said:

"Martin, I have been so happy to see you. I've never been so happy to see anybody in my life. You'll let me see you again, won't you?"

"Won't I? Bet your life I will," he said, and then, as if seeing that my lip was trembling and my eyes were beginning to fill, he broke into a cheerful little burst of our native tongue, so as to give me a "heise" as we say in Ellan and to make me laugh at the last moment.

"Look here--keep to-morrow for me, will ye? If them ones" (my husband and Alma) "is afther axing ye to do anything else just tell them there's an ould shipmate ashore, and he's wanting ye to go 'asploring.' See? So-long!"

It had been like a dream, a beautiful dream, and as soon as I came to myself in the hall, with the visitors calling at the bureau and the page-boys shouting in the corridors, I found that my telegraph-form, crumpled and crushed, was still in the palm of my left hand.

I tore it up and went in to breakfast.

FOURTH PART