"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 sh.o.r.e. 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 pa.s.sions 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 acc.u.mulation 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 gla.s.s 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."
Tarvrille paused, and then leant forward. "No."
"But people have done so. It would have been a clean sort of divorce."
"You don"t understand Justin. Justin would ruin you. If you were to take Mary away.... He"s a queer little man. Everything is in his hands.
Everything always is in the husband"s hands in these affairs. If he chooses. And keeps himself in the right. For an injured husband the law sanctifies revenge....
"And you see, you"ve got to take Justin"s terms. He"s changed. He didn"t at first fully realize. He feels--cheated. We"ve had to persuade him.
There"s a case for Justin, you know. He"s had to stand--a lot. I don"t wonder at his going stiff at last. No doubt it"s hard for you to see that. But you have to see it. You"ve got to go away as he requires--three years out of England, you"ve got to promise not to correspond, not to meet afterwards----"
"It"s so extravagant a separation."
"The alternative is--not for you to have Mary, but for you two to be flung into the ditch together--that"s what it comes to, Stratton.
Justin"s got his case. He"s set like--steel. You"re up against the law, up against social tradition, up against money--any one of those a man may fight, but not all three. And she"s ill, Stratton. You owe her consideration. You of all people. That"s no got-up story; she"s truly ill and broken. She can no longer fly with you and fight with you, travel in uncomfortable trains, stay in horrible little inns. You don"t understand. The edge is off her pluck, Stratton."
"What do you mean?" I asked, and questioned his face.
"Just exactly what I say."
A gleam of understanding came to me....
"Why can"t I see her?" I broke in, with my voice full of misery and anger. "Why can"t I see her? As if seeing her once more could matter so very greatly now!"
He appeared to weigh something in his mind. "You can"t," he said.
"How do I know that she"s not being told some story of my abandonment of her? How do I know she isn"t being led to believe I no longer want her to come to me?"
"She isn"t," said Tarvrille, still with that arrested judicial note in his voice. "You had her letters?" he said.
"Two."
"Yes. Didn"t they speak?"
"I want to see her. d.a.m.n it, Tarvrille!" I cried with sudden tears in my smarting eyes. "Let _her_ send me away. This isn"t---- Not treating us like human beings."
"Women," said Tarvrille and looked at his boot toes, "are different from men. You see, Stratton----"
He paused. "You always strike me, Stratton, as not realizing that women are weak things. We"ve got to take _care_ of them. You don"t seem to feel that as I do. Their moods--fluctuate--more than ours do. If you hold "em to what they say in the same way you hold a man--it isn"t fair...."
He halted as though he awaited my a.s.sent to that proposition.
"If you were to meet Mary now, you see, and if you were to say to her, come--come and we"ll jump down Etna together, and you said it in the proper voice and with the proper force, she"d do it, Stratton. You know that. Any man knows a thing like that. And she wouldn"t _want_ to do it...."
"You mean that"s why I can"t see her."
"That"s why you can"t see her."
"Because we"d become--dramatic."
"Because you"d become--romantic and uncivilized."