If a philosopher were set to describe the best and the worst of life, he would certainly have a considerable choice before him. But amongst the best he would have to set down love, and amongst the worst he would have to set down love’s disillusion. The curse of age is indifference. With the increase of the years you come to a time when nothing matters. Anything which helps hearty youth this way is harmful. In ninety cases in a hundred age is a crime against the hopes of the world, and nothing ages like cynicism. This is the beginning of senile decay. And what is a man to do who has lavished his heart, and has always found that the woman has played counters of affectation against the sincere gold of his soul? Obviously he turns cynic, despising himself and his too cheap emotions; and to cheapen one’s own emotions is to play the very devil. It was written from of old that a house divided against itself cannot stand, and a man who has learned to loathe one half of his own nature is not stable. Even that he has a perfect right to do it does not help him.
May Gold had fooled Paul Armstrong. Claudia Belmont had carried on the game. So had Annette, and so had Gertrude. It was a wise man who wrote that the net is spread in vain in the sight of any bird, but he wrote nonsense, all the same. The capturing net is the one to which we are most accustomed.
So with a heart filled with distrust, and misliking half the world, Paul travelled across the Atlantic, and sauntered about the United States. The money question was settled for the time being, if not definitely, and for a year or two he would have no occasion to think of ways and means. He got away into the prairies and the mountains, camped out, shooting and hunting, learned to sit a horse, learned to handle a gun, to build a tent, and to cook.
Then he went back into civilization, and travelled on to San Francisco, and the western parts of Canada. And one day at Victoria, having nothing better before him, he wandered on board a vessel which in four-and-twenty hours from that time was bound to sail for Japan. He took lunch with the proprietors and officers of this boat, and, almost before he knew it, had booked his passage for Yokohama. Why not see the world?
There were ladies aboard, and they flirted with the stranger because he was young and already famous, and more than average good-looking. They flirted demurely, and they flirted fiercely, and they flirted in all the ways which are known to women; but for once in feminine experience they met a man who was proof against all their charms, charmed they never so wisely. To be dangerous to man’s peace of mind a woman must inspire belief, and in Paul’s heart belief was dead.
The ship went on to New Zealand, her port of call Dunedin. Why not New Zealand? Why not see the world? More flirts aboard, and more flirtations, but still the hitherto so susceptible heart unmoved. The next port of call Hobart Town, then Melbourne. Still, why not see the world? More flirts and more flirtations, as if there were nothing but the rustle of a petticoat which is worth taking notice of on the surface of the planet. But observe that the young man is spoiled, at least for the time being.
Possum and kangaroo shooting make good sport. Rabbits swarm in literal millions. We grow very handy with the gun, very handy at building a shelter of any sort, or at cooking a dinner.
Then back to New Zealand, and here the beginning of a new life.
New Year’s Eve, as it happens, and the exile’s mind not unnaturally filled with thoughts of home. And tucked away in the further corner of the dining-room of the Grand Hotel the familiar figure of an English comedian! who, when Paul last saw him, was playing in a piece written far himself and Darco.
‘Hillo, Paul! Can’t I get into any blooming corner of the world but some old pal is bound to root me out?’ ‘How’s trade?’ said Paul. ‘Going strong?’ ‘Bad, dear boy,’ the comedian answered. ‘Bad as bad can be. Do me a turn, old fellow. Write me a play. I’ve brought out three, and they’re all rotten failures. Ask the press, and they’ll tell you I’m coining money. Ask me, and I’ll tell you I’m dropping it by the barrelful. Been here long—eh?’
Paul was at the theatre again that night, for the first time since he had left England, two years ago. Two years ago! Such a distance had been placed between him and Gertrude—between him and Annette!
A dreary farce in three acts greeted him, and ambitions awoke anew. The cheery comedian asked:
‘Why not try it on the dog? Give us a bit of human nature, dear child. Run it round these far outlying provinces. No harm to you if you make a failure; loads of minted money if you make a hit. What I always say, dear boy: minimize the risk of failure—eh?’
Paul took fire. He knew his man, and could fit him like a glove.
‘Where are you in ten weeks’ time?’ he asked ‘Ten weeks? said the comedian. ‘Auckland.’ ‘Good!’ said Paul. ‘We meet in Auckland.’ ‘Right you are,’ said the comedian; and then they parted, and never met again for years.
But the talk set Paul at work again, and he laboured like a Trojan on the shores of Lake Te Anau, with heath and sky and mountains for his comrades and inspirers, and when his play was finished he went back to civilization to discover that his comedian was well on his way to England. That mattered little enough. He sent a copy of the piece to Darco, and wandered hither and thither about the southern island until by hazard he tumbled against a new fate in the person of a new comedian.
‘And you don’t happen to have a play in your pocket, Mr. Armstrong? said he, in the first hour of their acquaintanceship.
‘As it happens,’ said Paul, ‘I have. You may read it this afternoon.’
There was a business chaffer, and the affair was virtually settled. Paul was to read the play to the company of the travelling comedian on the morrow.
He presented himself at the theatre at the appointed hour, and the manager kept him waiting for a minute or two whilst he harangued the baggage-man.
‘You’ll know her by this portrait: she’s small; she’s very ordinary-looking; she wears her hair in a topknot, with a hat stuck over it about so high’—he held his arms abroad. ‘Excuse me, Mr. Armstrong, we are all ready for you with the exception of a lady who will be here in half an hour. I wired for her a week ago to Australia The boat was signalled two hours since. Since we must wait, you won’t mind my utilizing the half-hour?’
‘Pray go on,’ said Paul; and, seating himself upon a rolled-up bale of carpet, surrendered his mind to ennui.
In due time the lady for whose help the company waited appeared. The play was read, the characters were apportioned, and the date of the first production was fixed Paul took no special note of the new arrival, and, indeed, she did not seem specially notable. She was little more than a child, with a child’s stature but a woman’s figure. She had brown eyes and brown hair, and she wore a dress of brown velvet. She was strange to the crowd about her, so it seemed; for she was introduced to every member of it, and she scrutinized everybody with a childlike mixture of frankness and reticence.
‘Like a little brown mouse,’ said Paul to himself, ‘peeping out of her cranny at an assemblage of cats, without quite knowing the cat’s proclivity.’
Beyond this she was Miss Madge Hampton, an amateur of some small private means, and he thought no more about her. Rehearsal in an insignificant part displayed her as capable and willing to be taught.
The company never stayed more than a week in any one town, and for a considerable part of the time went bushwhacking from place to place, taking one-night stands! and crawling by sleepy railways amongst some of the most exquisite scenery of the land. Paul had nothing better to do—had, indeed, nothing else to do—and found a pleasure in this revival of old experiences. It reminded him of the ancient days with Darco, which now looked so far away, and he surrendered himself, as he had always done, to the interests of the moment and the hour. A fair proportion of the working day was spent in travel, and sometimes, as they crossed the exquisite plain of flowering green, with the snowcapped mountains in the distance, the ladies of the company would cry out at sight of some especial bank of wild flowers, and the conductor would stop the leisurely train to let them go out and cull bouquets. At some such excursions Paul assisted, and, whether by hazard or goodwill, he found himself oftener by the side of Miss Madge Hampton than elsewhere. He had himself been born to the inheritance of a most inordinate mouthful of provincial accent, and since he had studied and learned to speak almost every dialect known to the little islands which are the centre of our Empire, his ear had grown nice and critical. The ladies and gentlemen of the company, with the exception of the famous and admirable comedian who led them, were all of colonial education, and they all spoke with the accent the existence of which our colonial brethren and sisters so strenuously deny. It was, of course, the language of fashion, as they knew it, but it was, as it still is, perilously near the English of Mile End, and the ear of the Englishman, grown critical through many studies, used to ache at it. The leader of the troupe talked the English of the stage, which, after all, is perhaps not quite the English of the cultured Englishman, but was not altogether intolerable. But, by some accident, Miss Hampton had no trace of the accent which disfigured the speech of her companions, and this little fact of itself accounted for something in the very gradual intimacy which grew up between herself and Paul.
The train was sauntering along in its customary easy-going fashion, when it came to a halt at the signal of a man in corduroy trousers, a flannel shirt which had once been scarlet, and a felt hat of no colour. The signaller sat upon a fence and wanted a chat with the driver, who was quite willing, in the course of his leisurely progress, to spare him half an hour or so.
‘If you ladies,’ said the conductor, ‘would like to stretch yourselves, there’s any amount of flowers to be got here, and there’s time to waste. There’s no run back except on a Saturday, and an hour or two in the time of arrival won’t make no difference.’
So the ladies got down and went flower-hunting, whilst the driver and the stoker and the guard sat on the fence together and talked politics and the latest mail from England.
Paul went out with the rest, and the party chanced upon a marshy piece of land where a species of purple iris grew in great profusion. There was a cry of delight at the sunlit patch of colour, and everybody charged down upon it, with the result that half of the travellers were bogged to the knees, and there was a good deal of pully-hauley business gone through before the last adventuress was extricated. Miss Madge Hampton fell to Paul’s share by accident of mere neighbourhood, and she stretched out her little brown-kid-gloved hand to him with an air of timid appeal. He pulled stanchly, but the ground gave way beneath him, and before he knew it she was in his arms. There was a laugh all round, and a blush on both sides, but the lady was on firm earth again, and in a minute or two the drawling call of the conductor brought the party back to the train. The journey was renewed, and the incident forgotten by everybody save the dramatist, who sat coiled in his corner, with his eyes fixed upon a book which he might as well have held upside-down. The women of the company, five in number, were chattering like a nest of starlings, shrilling high against the slow rumble of the wheels. Miss Hampton alone was silent amongst them. Their talk was of matrimony, and the leading lady sparkled out with an engaging inquiry which embraced the whole carriageful.
‘And what about Miss Hampton?’
‘Oh,’ said the little brown lady demurely, ‘I shall die an old maid!’
It was at this instant that a singular and yet accustomed pang assailed the dramatist’s heart. He ought to have known it well enough, in all conscience, for he had already had an opportunity of studying it four times over. May Gold had taught it, and Claudia had taught it, and Annette for a fleeting instant, and Gertrude through a heavy year or two. He looked at the smiling little face before him, and it took a new sweetness in his eyes. If he had had his absolute will at that moment, he would have taken its owner in his arms, and have cried ‘No!’ to her protestation. But, then, it is difficult to do these things in the presence of a whole carriageful of people who make a profession of comedy, and he restrained himself, wondering a little why such an impulse should have assailed him. Yet from that time forward he began to watch and to listen for the monitions of his own heart, which of itself is a dangerous thing for any susceptible young man to do, and he began to find charms in Miss Hampton which were quite separate from the exceptional delicacy of her English speech. He knew very well that he had no right to fall in love with any woman; he was bound to Annette; he was tied to her so long as she should live. But being newly awakened to a sense of the weakness which had pursued him through his life so far, he became afraid, and watched his own emotions with a jealous care.
The man who is born to fall in love will do it, whatever happens; but there are, of course, ways and ways of doing it, and this particular way of keeping guard over the emotions is perhaps as swift as any.
He held the figure at arm’s length, as it were, and critically surveyed it. Why, he asked himself repeatedly, should this simple little personality appeal to him so strongly? To say the most and the least of it, it was feminine, and he had made up his mind about the sex when he had quitted Gertrude. He had honestly despaired of finding a woman who was not either a coquette or a fool, and he had taught himself to use the whole sex after the manner of his conception; and now the cynic feeling into which he had conspired with circumstance to school himself was breaking up again, and, with all his knowledge of the world, he felt himself helpless.
There never was a tale of this sort which came to a definite end without the aid of circumstances which were not planned by either party to the coming contract. It befell that the only married woman of the corps, who travelled with a child of seven, took cold, and had to be left behind. The child, playing, neglected, about the hotel, sustained some injury in the lift which plied between the upper and the lower stories. The company was only twenty miles away, and Paul, learning the news, bought grapes and jellies for the younger invalid and wines for the elder, and chartered a carriage to the town where they were staying. Half a mile before him was a hooded vehicle, which kept its relative place, more or less, throughout the journey. It was full in sight until the outlying streets of the town were reached, and it came into view again when he arrived at his destination—drawn up before the hotel door, and empty. A moment’s interview with the manageress gave him the right to mount the stairs, and, when he tapped at the door of the room in which the invalids reposed, a voice he had not expected to hear bade him come in. There was Miss Hampton, of whom he had been thinking a good deal too much of late, sitting with the child upon her knees, and holding a grape above his lips. The child pouted for it, and he and the mother and the visitor were all laughing together.
‘I beg your pardon,’ said the intruder clumsily; ‘I had expected to find you alone. I have driven over with these little odds and ends in the way of medical comforts for the boy.’
He stood confused, and laid his burden on the table which stood in the centre of the room.
‘Didn’t you guess,’ laughed the little mother from the couch on which she lay, ‘that Miss Hampton would be here before you?’
‘No,’ said Paul. ‘If I had guessed, I should not have intruded. You’ll take these things for the little fellow, won’t you?’
‘You’re not going yet, Mr. Armstrong?’ said the lady on the couch. ‘You and Miss Hampton will have a nice little ride back together.’
‘I should not dream,’ said Paul, ‘of intruding on Miss Hampton, and I must go back at once.’
He had no business in front of him, but he dreaded himself, and he was afraid of atête-à-têtewith the plain little woman with the brown eyes.
‘But,’ said mamma, lifting her head from the arm of the sofa, and casting upon him the look ofingenuearchness which was almost her sole fortune on the boards, ‘Miss Hampton’s horse has cast a shoe, and the shoeing-smith is miles away. Did you ride or drive, Mr. Armstrong? I’m sure you couldn’t have ridden with all those nice things you’ve been so kind to bring me. You must have driven, and you must drive Miss Hampton home again. Isn’t it kind of her to have come over to see me from such a distance ‘Just look and see: I’m actually smothered in wine and grapes and jelly and flowers. And wasn’t it kind of you, too, Mr. Armstrong, to think of me just at the same moment! And wasn’t it kind of Miss Hampton’s horse to cast a shoe so that you would be obliged to go back together, whether you meant it or no?’
Miss Hampton was bending over the boy, and her face was hidden; but one blushing cheek gave warranty for the rest, and it was evident to Paul that she was as embarrassed as himself. She spoke icily: ‘Mr. Armstrong was not aware that I was coming here. I must go at once. I have no doubt the landlord will be able to find me another driver.’
‘Now, why on earth,’ asked the little actress from her sofa, ‘should two people who know each other as well as you do take two carriages to drive along the self-same road? Now, when you come to think of it, isn’t that absurd! And such a chance for a spoon, too, all along that quiet road!’
‘Good-afternoon, dear,’ said Miss Hampton, setting down the child, and offering an Arctic kiss to the reclining lady; ‘I must go.’
With that she swept from the room with an air of dignity and confusion, and Paul shook hands with the invalid and followed her.
There are just as many different ways of falling in love as there are characters and temperaments, and even the same man—unless he be a fellow of no originality—will not fall in love twice in the same fashion. As to the wisdom or righteousness or the mere everyday question of plain honour involved in the permission which Paul Armstrong gave himself to fall in love at all, under the conditions in which he stood, there seemed room for no illusion. He should by this time have been something of a man of the world, and might reasonably be supposed to be acting with his eyes open to consequences. He had his compunctions by the hundred, his hoverings by the way, and turnings back from it. But many delicate signs which would have been invisible to him had he been less interested persuaded him that love lay ready for him, and after all the follies of his slaveries here and there, he persuaded himself that if he could but accept it, it was of a kind to atone for all that had gone before. And why, he asked himself, if this were true, should he stand for ever in loneliness? It was in him to be constant if only truth were met with truth. He could have been faithful to Claudia. He could have been faithful to Annette. He could have been faithful to Gertrude. And though no man whose sense of the humour of life does not leave him wholly blind to the comedy of his own existence could fail to see the bitter jest that lay here against himself, he urged the point seriously. Hehadbeen true in each case until faith had grown into blind folly, and bare respect for an old idol had become impossible. The one crime of his life had been acted against himself. He had believed Annette, and in the mere feebleness of acquiescence he had hung a weight about his neck which he was doomed to carry as long as her life should last.
And now, had he the right to redress the wrong he had inflicted upon himself? Feeble always, always a drifter, a good deal of a coward in his way of shrinking from avoidable pain, but never deliberately cruel or selfish. And now, was he to do a deliberately cruel and selfish thing? Or was as much mischief as might well be done wrought already?
For months had gone by, and the drifting policy had brought him plainly to the question, Was this quiet, sweet little girl in love with him? No blame to her if it were so. He had signalled her from the first for attention and companionship, and she knew nothing of his history. She had no guess as to the fatal bond which held him. Every day he knew her better. Her mind and heart opened out before him like twin flowers, full of purity and sweet odour.
She was courage incarnate, and her hatred of cruelty was a passion. A hulking blackguard of a teamster was cruelly flogging an overladen horse one day, and Madge, at the risk of her life, was in amongst the traffic of the street in a flash, and stood between the beast and his dumb victim voiceless and pale with rage, her little figure at its height and her eyes blazing. Paul’s chance presence and the neighbourhood of a policeman were probably answerable for the peaceful solution of this episode, for the girl had snatched the whip from the bully’s hand, and he was in an attitude which threatened violence when Paul intervened.
‘My dear child!’ said Paul in a tone of remonstrance as he conducted her from the scene.
‘Oh,’ she broke in, with her little teeth clenched, ‘I couldn’t bear it!’
He saw the folly of reproof and held his tongue, and when they came in sight of the theatre she ran indoors and escaped him.
He had fallen into a habit of walking home with her when the night’s work was over, and saying good-bye to her at the door of her lodgings. This fact made her mightily unpopular with the ladies of the company, who saw no reason why she should be thus distinguished, and the snubs she took disposed him to be more attentive to her.
They drifted closer, but no confidences were exchanged between them.
The company made for Australia, and there were six days of travel aboard a well-found steamer, and this gave more than ample time for the position to solidify. There were long promenades on deck by moonlight and starlight, and the two found a perch in the bows out of the way of all observation and regard, and there exchanged all manner of confidences. The girl’s simple life unrolled itself—its hopes, its ambitions! its home affections. She talked of her reading, of her music, of all the little intimacies of home-life. Before the brief voyage was over he seemed, to his own apprehension, to know his companion more completely than he had ever known man or woman, and he was hourly more and more in love with her. He was feather-headed and irresponsible enough to be happy in the circumstances for hours at a time, but when he was alone, and his heart was no longer flattered by the worship she so innocently offered, the skeleton he carried about with him came out of its cupboard and seemed to mop and mow before him in derision. He was bound hand and foot to his fate, and the bonds were not to be severed There was Annette in far-away London and Paris dragging out a miserable and ignominious life, which was likely to last as long as his own, and he could see no hope of freedom. With every passing day he felt more clearly that he was bent upon an inexcusable wrong, and yet, so strangely fashioned is the conscience of a man who is without the power of will, all his self-reproaches did but add to the tenderness and fervour of his desire.
The steamer reached its destination late upon a Saturday, and Sunday was a holiday. Paul and Madge spent the day together, wandering on a long stretch of sandy coast which lay between the port and the bright green waters of the sea; and all the time there was a growing sense of inevitability in his mind. He knew that he was going to ask for happiness, and that he was prepared to pay his self-respect and manhood for it. The talk was of trifles in the morning until they strolled home to luncheon; it was of trifles again in the afternoon until they strolled home to dinner, and it was of trifles still when they set out in the yellow sunset to saunter once more in a scene which had already grown strangely memorable and familiar. There were no sunset clouds, but the pageant of the dying day had a sort of sullen and pathetic beauty. The blazing sun dropped behind the far-off sea-line, and a great band of saffron rimmed the whole horizon, fading into palest green as it spread upward, and this in turn melted into a blue which at the zenith looked unfathomable. A full moon, which had until now been invisible, looked down from the very centre of the sky. There was none of the lingering twilight of more temperate climates. The change from broad daylight, in which every outline and detail of the landscape was accented strongly, to the dim, mystic and diffused radiance of the moon and stars was like an episode in a transformation-scene at the theatre. A mere ten minutes had sufficed to change the whole character and sentiment of the scene. It was like walking out of one world into another, and a rude chorus of voices, accompanied by the sounds of a banjo and a concertina, came from some body of merrymakers beyond a distant island in the bay. It moved away farther and farther into the distance until the harshness was softened to an almost spiritual melody, and after awhile it reached the ear only at uncertain intervals.
They came to a place at which they had rested in the afternoon. Some high tide of long ago had deposited here a great wreath of wrack, a hundred yards inland, and piled up in places to a height of some twelve feet. There were scores of cushiony resting-places here like great luxurious arm-chairs, and the wrack when disturbed by a touch gave out dry and stinging odours of sea-salt and iodine.
Paul, with a mere motion of the hand to his companion, threw himself into one of the hollows, and she took a seat at a little distance from him. He lay, the brim of his hat sheltering his eyes from the moonlight, and stared at the spangled vault above him, where the stars seemed to hang from threads of gold and silver as if they were upheld by an actual tangible roof. He knew that his hour had come, but he obeyed the impulse which controlled him with an infinite self-accusation.
‘Madge,’ he said, rolling over where he lay and stretching out his hand towards her. It fell upon her own, and she made no motion to evade him. It was the first caress he had ever offered her, and her tacit acceptance of it hurried him into passion. ‘Madge,’ he said again; ‘dear little Madge!’
She glanced at him for an instant only, and in the moonlight her eyes glinted with sudden tears.
‘I have no right,’ he said, ‘to speak to you like this. I have had no right to claim your companionship as I have done since we first began to know each other.’
She was quite silent; but under his light caress he felt her hand tremble, and she glanced at him once more and looked away again.
‘I have not had a happy life,’ he went on, ‘but that ought to dispose me to do what I can to keep unhappiness out of the lives of other people. If I tell you that I am very conscious of having deceived you, of having left you in the dark about myself in respect to things you have a right to know, what shall you say to me? What will you think of me?’
Again she turned to look at him, and this time her glance rested on him, but still she made no answer.
Paul withdrew his hand, sat upright, and began mechanically to charge his pipe and to smoke.
‘I met an utterly worthless woman many years ago,’ he began, after a long pause, ‘and I threw my life away upon her. We were married, and she is still alive. She is likely to live for many years to come; and, indeed, there is no probability of escape from her. It is not likely that she and I will ever see each other any more; but I am legally bound to her so long as she shall live. I ought to have told you this months ago.’
He rose and began to pace up and down the sands before her. He looked up at her from time to time, and her eyes followed him as he moved. Not a sound escaped her lips, but her fast-flowing tears glittered on her cheeks like rain.
‘I should have told you,’ he cried, writhing between self-accusation and self-excuse, ‘but I had not the courage to put an end to a time which has been so lull of sweetness, so full of a mad kind of hope which I should never have admitted to my heart I know,’ he went on, pausing desperately before her, ‘what must be in your mind. I know that you are asking how I dared to draw you on to such a friendship as ours has been through an acted lie, and how I have dared at last to tell the truth I have postponed so long. You have a right to be wounded; you have a right to be angry. You will do yourself the merest justice if you teach yourself to despise and hate me; and if you tell me to go away at once and darken your life no further, I will do it But let me say just this one thing: whatever my cowardly silence may seem to prove, I have never had a thought of you that has not been full of the profoundest respect and reverence. You know now the truth about me, and you know that in spite of it I have made love to you for months past. I can’t tell what a high-minded and pure-hearted woman may feel in such a case. I can’t guess if such a woman could find it in her nature to accept the lifelong worship and affection of a man who is circumstanced as I am, if she could find the courage and self-sacrifice to join her destinies with a broken life like mine. Oh, if it were possible!’ he cried, ‘and oh, if it were possible that I could nourish such a hope in fancy, and not know in my inmost heart that only a scoundrel could be guilty of it! There, Madge, it is all said now. It had to be said, but I shall never forgive myself for having said it.’
The accusations he brought against himself were just as real as the passion and despair which urged him on.
The Solitary, in his smoke-clouded mountain eyrie, surveyed all this, as he had surveyed the varied experiences of life which had passed before it in clear vision through his mind, and still the passion and despair and the self-accusing, self-excusing thoughts were as real to him as they had been at the moment he recalled. He accepted that reality as a proof, scarcely needed, of the already established shallowness of his own nature—a brawling stream always ready to rave round any little impediment in its path; a mere miniature of the torrent, with no resolute strength or purpose in it, but full of a fussy vivacity and self-importance which he could most heartily and bitterly despise. All his life long the same futile story repeated: the same headlong impetuosity, the same want of steadfast force, the same absence of control. And yet, even in the depth of self-reproach, he could not deny to himself some hint of purpose which had an honest meaning in his mind, and, looking back, he saw that he had found an entrance to a purer and better life than he had known before. Had he been worthy of the trust he asked for, he would have blamed himself less for asking. Tears were hot and harsh in his throat as the scene unrolled itself before him.
Paul Armstrong—the Paul Armstrong of those irrevocable bygone years—was striking up and down the sand, and the girl was still weeping without a sound, when the Exile’s thought flew back to them. It was as if a curtain had descended for an instant only, and had risen again to reveal the same actors in the same scene.
‘I had better leave you now, Madge,’ said Paul, half maddened by the sight of the uncomplaining grief he had awakened. ‘I will watch you home as soon as you care to go, but I won’t intrude upon you any longer.’
The slight figure rose from its seat upon the wrack, and stood before him with downcast and averted head, but he could still see the tears falling like diamond-drops in the clear moonlight. He turned irresolutely away, but he had made only a single step before he was vividly back again with an impulsive and imploring hand upon her shoulder.
‘Tell me,’ he said, ‘that you forgive me. Tell me that you will be able to think of me when I am gone with something—some feeling that will not be all contempt. You won’t always despise me, will you, Madge?’
‘I shall never despise you,’ she answered, in a voice she could barely control; ‘I shall always remember this time.’
‘And you don’t hate me for having spoken?’
She looked up at him with a strange smile, which was so tender and so full of pity that he caught his breath at the sight of it.
‘No,’ she said, ‘I shall never hate you. I must be as truthful as you have been. I must tell you that I had heard something of what you have told me before we left New Zealand. I didn’t know if it were true, and I did not even wish to ask.’
He stood still with that unconscious hand upon her shoulder, and his heart gave a leap as he asked:
‘You knew I loved you, Madge—you knew I loved you?’
‘I was quite sure of that,’ she answered ‘I have believed it for a long time.’
‘Madge,’ he said, ‘are you strong enough—are you brave enough—can you put such faith in me? Can you believe that I will lay a life’s unfailing devotion at your feet—that the very fact that there can be no legal tie between us will make me always all the truer to you? I swear to you that if you trust yourself to me, my whole life shall be one act of gratitude for your faith and courage, and that no act or word of mine shall ever cause you to regret the compact.’
Her tears had ceased to fall, and when she next looked at him her face was grave, and looked in the moonlight as pale as snow.
‘If I were alone,’ she answered, ‘you should have my answer now, but I have others to consider.’
‘Oh, who,’ he cried, ‘can come between us?’
‘Let us go home,’ she answered simply and bravely. ‘I must have time to think. Please say no more to me to-night.’ She moved away, and Paul, taking his place beside her, walked in silence ‘There is no one,’ she said, when they had traversed a hundred yards or more, ‘who has a right to dictate what my life shall be; but I have never done anything without my mother’s knowledge and consent, and I never shall.’
Paul had passed from despair almost to certainty, but this chilled him suddenly.
‘Ah,’ he said, with a gasping breath, ‘is there any mother in the world who would consent to such a scheme?’
‘You must write to me,’ she answered, ‘such a letter as I can send to her. I will write, too, and I will ask her not to answer until she has seen us both.’
‘That rings a death-knell,’ said Paul ‘I have no hope of consent in such a case.’
‘I can’t tell,’ she answered simply, ‘but there is no other way.’
‘And yet you love me, Madge?’ said Paul. She made no answer, and he drew nearer to her, and put an arm about her shoulder. ‘You love me, little Madge?’ he urged her.
She gave a sigh of acquiescence, a half-breathed ‘Yes.’
‘And you could deny your own heart and mine? You could let me go away alone, and live alone yourself, with an empty heartache?’
Her answer came, like an echo of a former tone, just the same half-breathed token of assent. There was a quiet resolution in it, for all it was so softly spoken, which bound him to silence for a time.
There was more strength of resolution, more power and purpose, expressed thus simply than he had ever been conscious of himself, and he recognised that fact quite clearly.
They walked from this time forth in silence, until at the outskirts of the town they reached the small and retired hotel at which the girl had taken lodgings, and there they parted formally enough.
‘You will write?’ she asked, holding out her hand to him in token of dismissal.
‘I will write,’ he answered, taking her hand, and bowing over it.
There were some Sabbath loiterers in the street, and it was necessary that the two should part undemonstratively.
Paul, as he walked to his own more pretentious hostel, recognised the fact that for good or evil he had shot his bolt There was nothing at that hour of which he was more certain than that his present destiny and the destiny of Madge lay in the hands of a woman he had never seen, and he did not even attempt to disguise from himself the overwhelming probability against an affirmative answer to his hopes. He was very miserably certain that he had no right to hope, and that accusing conscience of his which never permitted him to stray without rebuke, and yet had never been worth a farthing to him in his whole career, worried him without ceasing. But he knew enough of himself already to have learned that the fault of character which had wrecked him was half made up of reluctance to add pain to pain. It is not always the wholly selfish wrongdoer who is answerable for the greater sorrows of life. It is assuredly not he who suffers in his own person; but, worse than that, the tender-hearted, conscience-worried man of feeble will is always afraid of causing a slight grief by retracing a mistaken step, and so goes on inevitably to the creation of troubles which appal him when he comes to contemplate them in after-hours. And to have a full theoretical knowledge of this fact enforced by years of experience is to be gifted with no safeguard. ‘To be weak’—there is no wiser saying among the utterances of the wise—‘to be weak is to be miserable.’ To be a fool and to know it is the extreme of misery, and this extreme does not fall to the lot of those who are extremest in folly.
What Paul wrote that night is barely worth chronicling, and may be fairly constructed by anyone who has so far pursued his story. But the Exile, sitting over the embers of the fire at which he had cooked his coarse mid-day meal, threw himself backward on the trodden grass, and, groping behind the flap of the tent, dragged his brown canvas bag towards him, and having made a search among its contents, found a heap of stained, crumpled and disordered papers, one of which he smoothed out upon his knee and read. It had been given to him in that first unspeakably tranquil and happy year which Madge and he had spent together in Europe. It was the first blotted draft of the letter to her mother with which she had accompanied his own, and it ran thus:
‘My darling Mother,
‘I am putting this into a separate envelope, and on the envelope I am writing to ask you to read Mr. Armstrong’s letter to me before you read my own. He has explained everything there, and now I must make my appeal to you. I have promised that I will do nothing without your consent, and I am not very hopeful that I shall secure it. You know that I am not light-minded, or in the habit of saying what I do not mean, and I shall only tell you this: I love him with my whole heart and mind, and if you decide that we are to part I shall accept your decision, but I shall never know a happy day again. Paul is not only a great man but a good one.’
(The reader had faced this blow so often that he was ready for it, but he had no guard against it, and it struck home so heavily that he groaned aloud.)
‘I know now, partly from what I have lately learned from other people, partly from what he told me last night, but mainly from the letter you have read, the story of his life, and I know how profoundly unhappy it has been. I want to comfort and sustain him, and I am not afraid to face all the difficulties which lie before me. I can hear a clear call to duty, and I am sure that his love and mine will strengthen me to do it. You have never known me to be frivolous or foolish in my thoughts about such things as these, and until we can all three meet together, you must have patience with me. It would be wrong and cruel on my side to throw everything upon you, and I shall not ask you to make yourself responsible for what you may think my wrong-doing. There are a hundred thousand things in my heart which I cannot say, and amongst them all there is the dreadful fear that I may have lost your respect. But you ought to know the truth, and the whole truth. I have not lost my own, and I cannot believe that I shall ever have the right to be ashamed.’
There was much more than this. There were half-articulate expressions of affection and fear of an agony of regret for a possible severance. And through it all there beamed like a star, steadfast and unobscured in tempest, the loyal heart, the uncountable soul which, in whatsoever error, knows love and fealty as its only guides.
By far the greater part of the theoretical wisdom of the world comes to us in the shape of legacies bequeathed by fools. A fool is not a person without knowledge or understanding—that is an ignoramus. The true fool—the only fool worthy of a wise man’s contemplation—is the man who knows and understands, and habitually refrains from acting according to knowledge and understanding. It is the record of the follies of such people which has built up the world’s wisdom. From that record we have learned amongst many other things that the fool of understanding has one eternal refuge from himself which he seeks with a full knowledge of the fact that the shelter it affords is illusory, and that the path by which it leads him can only conduct him to greater dangers than those from which he is striving to escape. It is too late to go back now, quoth the fool; the business must be gone through to the end. Thus if this brief diagnosis be of any value, the root of folly is to be found in the decay of will. Few men had reason to hold this belief more firmly than Paul Armstrong, and yet even now, when whatever was best in his own nature was more seriously engaged than it had ever been before, he went on to the consummation of a most undoubted and most cruel wrong, on the poor pretence that every stage he passed towards it made the passage of the next stage inevitable.
If ever it had seemed clear to him that it was too late to retire it seemed clearer now, and indeed he had so involved himself that it became to him alike and equally criminal to retreat or to advance. But by-and-by a solace for his miseries brought a solution of perplexity. Since he had taken so tremendous a responsibility upon himself, since there was now no escape from it without an act of brutality at the mere thought of which his heart revolted, there grew up within him such a resolve and such a sense of protective tenderness as had been hitherto impossible for him. Poor little Madge was to be victimized, but thevia dolorosawhich she would tread unendingly should at least be strewn with flowers, and the victim herself should be beautifully garlanded. His life should be one act of worship in return for her self-sacrifice. His devotion should offer such a challenge to the censure of the world that all reproach should shrink away ashamed. There never had been so complete an atonement as he would offer.
The nauseous pill of self-reproach was so thickly sugared and gilded by this inspiration that in a while he was not only able to take it without making wry faces, but with an actual sense of relish and self-approval. This was naturally a good deal dashed by the coming interview with Madge’s mother, about whose unknown personality there began to cluster some self-contradictory ideas. That lady would be a most unnatural mother if she rejected the proposal he had to lay before her, and a most unnatural mother if she accepted it. In his reflections, according to his mood, he saw either horn of this dilemma so clearly that the other vanished from his mind, but it always assumed its proper reality again, and made its companion altogether visionary.
When at last the fatal hour for the interview arrived, he went to the rendezvous in a pitiable state of hope and fear. He had always his whole life through carried all his eggs in one basket, and had been incapable of undertaking more than one emotional enterprise at a time. To lose Madge now would be to lose everything, and his former experiences of the healing powers of time—which were possibly numerous and striking enough—were of no value to him. Obeying the directions he had received, he chartered a cab, and after a half-hour’s tumultuous journey found himself alighting before a pretty villa in Prahran, with a well-ordered garden in front of it full of English shrubs and flowers, amidst which were interspersed a number of sub-tropic plants and trees. He was shown with no delay into a shaded room, where he had some difficulty in making out the figure of a gray-haired lady who sat in an arm-chair to receive him, and who did not rise at his entrance. Madge was standing near her, and as the dazzling effect of the bright sunshine of the streets passed from his eyes he saw the sign of many tears in the two faces before him.
There was an embarrassing silence, which lasted for a full half-minute, and Paul stood there conscious of the mother’s scrutiny, and feeling like a criminal in the dock. The girl herself was the first who found courage and self-control to speak.
‘Mother dear,’ she said in an uncertain voice, ‘this is Mr. Armstrong.’
The elder lady nodded, and with a slight gesture of the hand motioned the visitor to a chair. Paul obeyed the gesture, and waited in silence.
‘You will understand,’ the lady of the house began, ‘how wretchedly sorry I am to see you.’ Paul bowed an assent to this, and could but acknowledge that the unpromising exordium was natural. ‘My daughter has never had a secret from me in her life until within the last few months. She has written of you in her letters from time to time, but never led me to fancy that you were making love to her. I believe you are a married man, Mr. Armstrong?’
‘I am married,’ Paul responded in a voice so strangled and unlike his own that it positively startled him.
‘I cannot help knowing,’ said Mrs. Hampton, ‘that I have made a very serious mistake in giving way to my daughter’s desire to go upon the stage. But I trusted her so completely that I had no fear at all of what has happened. You must know, Mr. Armstrong, that you have misbehaved yourself most cruelly.’
‘I have said so to myself a thousand times,’ said Paul, ‘and I have no defence to offer now.’
‘You have done a wicked and a cruel thing,’ pursued the mother. ‘You have brought my daughter into opposition with me for the first time in her life, and you have filled her head with ideas which can only lead to suffering and disgrace.’
‘Forgive me, Mrs. Hampton,’ Paul said. ‘I have acted precipitously and wrongly, and I am much to blame; but I have never striven for an instant to confuse Miss Hampton’s mind. If I have won her love, I have done it half unconsciously, and it began in friendship and esteem. I ought, I know now, to have told her of that miserable tie which binds me; but at first I did not think it necessary to speak a word about that. A man would have to be a rare coxcomb,’ he went on, ‘to think it needful that he should make public proclamation of a fact like that. My life has been ruined for years past, and I did not care to talk about it I did not dream of harm until harm was done.’
‘I can only say, Mr. Armstrong,’ the mother answered, ‘that there can be no discussion about this matter, and that I rely upon my daughter to do justice to herself. She will learn in a little while to know that you have done her a very serious wrong, and that will help her to live her trouble down.’
‘Madam,’ cried Paul, rising to his feet, and speaking with an impassioned swiftness, ‘I beseech you to listen to me for one minute only; if I try to justify myself in some small degree, you will understand my purpose. At an age when life is opening for most men I had tied myself to a hopeless burden. I found myself shut out from every chance of happiness; such a thing as home I dared not even dream of. The law can afford me no relief from the snare into which I have fallen; I am excluded from everything that makes life bright to other men. My experiences of woman’s friendship have not been happy, and I had come to the belief that I was condemned to go through life without companionship. I met your daughter; we found that our minds came together in whatever was best in both of us. I declare that I never spoke one word of love to her until the night on which she made me promise to write the letter which she sent to you. I must not—dare not—speak of scruples on your side. They are no scruples; they are stern and cruel facts which can only be surmounted by great courage. But they have been surmounted by others, and we believe—Madge and I both believe—that we have the courage and the constancy to face them. Madge tells me that without your consent our case is hopeless. I know how unlikely it is that it should be given; but if it should be given—if by any chance you should be brought to change your present mind—I promise you by everything that men hold sacred that I will honour and treasure her and cherish her as my true wife in the sight of God and men, and that the tie on my side will be not less binding, but beyond measure more sacred because her claim appeals only to honour and manhood, and is not enforced by law. I plead for myself, Mrs. Hampton, and you will tell me with perfect justice that you are not called upon in the remotest degree to consult my wishes or to sympathize with any grief I may have brought upon myself. But there is another side to the question, and your daughter will tell you if I am right in thinking it a million times stronger than my own. You have known her and have loved her tenderly all her life. I have known her for little more than half a year; but I am sure of this: her affections are not lightly engaged or easily cast away.’
She had raised her hand against him more than once as if to interrupt him, but he had not checked the impetuous torrent of his speech until he had poured out all he had to say. Now, with a forlorn outward gesture of the hands, and a lax dropping of them to either side, he stood awaiting judgment.
Madge broke silence for the second time.
‘There is no need for Mr. Armstrong to stay longer now. You and I must talk together, mother; and I will write to him to-night.’
Her face was of a striking pallor, except where the salt of tears had scalded it; but she spoke with an entire possession of herself, and Paul wondered at her steadfastness and courage.
‘There is one thing more,’ he said: ‘if you can be brought to sanction this union, sanctify it by coming with us both to Europe. Live with us, and help me to secure Madge’s happiness. Your presence there would silence every wicked tongue, and if we made no secret of the truth, but dared the world together, we should find, I know, that it would deal kindly with us.’
He stood for a moment, and, receiving no reply, bowed and walked blindly towards a door which communicated with another room. Madge called to him, ‘This way,’ and went out into the hall before him.
‘Is this to be our last parting, I wonder?’ he asked hoarsely.
She shook her head with a weary lifting of the fine arched brows as if to say she could find no answer, and then withdrew without word or sign, leaving him to quit the house unattended.
He fumbled half blindly until he found his hat and cane, and then he had to fumble for the door, for the whole place was heavily shadowed from the blazing sun outside, and his eyesight and his hands were each less serviceable to him than usual. At first the broad sunshine fell upon his eyes like a sudden vivid heat upon a wound, and in his agitation and half-blindness he found himself walking away from the quarter of the city to which he had meant to direct his steps. Correcting this error in a minute or two, he turned and made for his hotel with a mind so shaken and vacant that he seemed to have no thoughts at all. A man who has been passionately in love three times before he has begun to verge upon middle age may easily be thought too inflammable a subject to be deserving of much pity, but a man may be keenly in sympathy with himself without enlisting the sympathy of other people, and Paul was here as always heroically and tragically in earnest. Without seeking apologies for him too far afield, there is a kind of nature which burns intensely within itself, and will break out into violence of smoke and flame with the intrusion of any new emotional material, just as there is a nature not more intense which will burn equably and clearly whatever new supply of fuel may be heaped upon it.
There is no need to dwell upon the time of waiting, the miserable loiterings in bedroom, corridor and entrance-hall, the aimless perusal of newspapers which conveyed no meaning to the mind, the taking up and laying down of petty occupations, and all the other signs and tokens of suspense. Time and the hour wear out the roughest day, and as Paul lingered over the dessert of a barely tasted dinner, a note reached him in Madge’s handwriting. It contained these words only:
‘There is no change. I dare not hope, and I dare not despair. I may have news for you to-morrow, but what it may be I must not guess.
‘M.’
This was cold comfort, but he had not expected more, and he strolled away in sheer vacuity of heart and thought to the principal theatre of the city, where just then a bright comic opera was running. The lights, the gay music, the brilliantly-dressed crowd upon the stage, made no impression on his mind, and his saturnine and gloomy face was in such contrast to the loud hilarity of the audience that he felt himself a blot upon the house, and at the first fall of the curtain withdrew into the streets, where he wandered listlessly until midnight He was fatigued, and slept heavily for some hours, but he was awake again long before the household was astir, and suffered all the weariness and chagrin which assailed the unoccupied mind in hours of suspense and doubt. Another brief note reached him by the first post.
‘Mother has spoken a great deal to-night of my brother George, who, as you know, is already in London. I do not know what to think of this, and I can scarcely dare to fancy what I should so much like to believe. I shall not write again until I have something definite to tell you, but whether we ever meet again or no, you shall see my whole heart for once. I love you, and I know that I shall always love you. Is it unwomanly—is it too bold to tell you this so soon? Will you think that I am too easily persuaded about myself? I hope not. But whatever happens, even if I never see you or hear your voice again, I shall not change or forget anything that has happened in all this beautiful and dreadful time.
‘All yours, and always yours,
‘Madge.’
This had been brought to him as he sat dressed in his bedroom, wondering if any message would reach him, and he had locked his door to be alone with Fate before he had broken the seal of the wax, which bore a dove with an olive-branch, and the mottoEsperez. He read the tender message with its proclamation of unshakable fidelity thrice over, and then rising, began to pace up and down the room. A cry of self-accusation rose to his lips.
‘My God!’ he asked himself, ‘what have I done? WhathaveI done?’
There was no room for doubt in all his mind. There are some truths which manifest themselves so clearly to the heart that they are not to be resisted. He had found fidelity at last after all his foolish researches. It had seemed to him the priceless jewel of the world, and he had been willing to barter all his life for it. It was here at last, and he was so far beggared that he had no price to offer in payment for it which was worth a thousandth part its value. He was bankrupt and had sought to buy this treasure, and must now needs go through life as a swindler. Even if his hopes were granted, what had he to pay? He knew at this moment as clearly as if he had even then been enlightened by the events of later years that there were scores of women who would draw their skirts away in a real disdain of an association of which they were not worthy. And he knew also that if his own hopes failed him he had spoiled the one life in the whole world he would fain have done his best to gladden.
The next pause lasted long. Day after day went by and no message came. It is not more than justice to chronicle the fact that Paul Armstrong did grow for once in his life to feel more for another than for himself, and if he suffered anguish, as he did, it was on Madge’s account much rather than his own. The cry her confession had wrung from him was always in his mind: ‘What have I done? My God, whathaveI done?’
These days were a stern discipline, but they came to an end at last. A note reached him at the end of a week in which Mrs. Hampton presented her compliments to Mr. Armstrong, with a request that he would call that afternoon at five o’clock. This, of course, conveyed no certainty to him in either one direction or another, but it awoke an extraordinary tumult in his mind, and he found himself in the neighbourhood of the Prahran villa a full hour before the time appointed. He sauntered in the broiling heat and blinding light until he lost himself repeatedly in strange places and rang at the doors of strange houses to inquire his way back again, quite frenzied by the fear of missing his appointment In effect, he arrived at the instant, and was ushered into the room he had already visited. Mrs. Hampton sat there, looking very pale and stern, he thought, and she rose upon his entrance and offered him her hand. It seemed to him that this cost her a considerable effort, and she resumed her seat without a word. Madge was there also, but she exchanged no greeting with Paul, and did not even meet his glance. The hostess touched a bell upon the table which stood near her, and after a silent pause a trim parlourmaid brought in a tray upon which was set out the materials for afternoon tea. Mrs. Hampton began to busy herself about the tray, and Madge handed a cup of tea to Paul.
‘I may tell you, Mr. Armstrong,’ said Madge’s mother, ‘that, if you think it worth while to call it winning, you have won. You have very nearly broken an old woman’s heart in doing it, and you may break a girl’s heart into the bargain before you have done. But my son George is in London, and I have made up my mind to let Madge go home and join him there. Her sister will go with her and will be her companion on the voyage, and I shall follow so soon as I can dispose of my interests in this country. I am uprooting my household and leaving all my friends; and I am doing it, Mr. Armstrong, for a man of whom I know next to nothing. I am almost certain that I am not acting wisely, and I am not quite sure that I am not acting wickedly. I know out of my own experience of the world that marriage can make a woman miserable if it were blessed by all the parsons living, but you are taking a responsibility a great deal bigger than that of any husband, and I am taking such a responsibility as no mother ought to take. And now, Madge,’ she said, ‘I want to speak to Mr. Armstrong in private for one minute. Come back when I call you.’
Madge stole obediently away, and when the door had closed behind her, Mrs. Hampton leaned forward and spoke in a half-whisper, with her hand stretched out before the listener like a hovering bird.
‘I have my child’s promise,’ she said, ‘and I know that I can trust to it But I must have your undertaking that you will place her safely in her brother’s hands, and that you will treat her with as much respect as if she were engaged to be married to you.’
‘Madam,’ Paul broke out, ‘I pledge myself absolutely. I could hold no pledge so sacred.’
‘I shall follow,’ said Mrs. Hampton, ‘within two or three months. My child will have had another half-year in which to know you and to understand your intentions towards her. I have no fear of her; but if you violate your promise in the slightest, you will act like a scoundrel, and I have Madge’s undertaking that she will be candid with me. There is no more to be said now until we meet in England. I may tell you just this, Mr. Armstrong: we two have spent every night since I first saw you in each other’s arms in tears. I am giving you a proof that I think well of you on very slender grounds. If you are in the least worthy my good opinion, you will think sometimes of what I have just told you.’
He stooped and kissed her hand, and when she drew it away there was a single tear upon it.
‘I had rather get the wrench over,’ she said, ‘and have done with it. It will seem quite natural that I should go home and join my family in London, and I shall explain nothing beyond that.’ She rose and opened the door and called her daughter by name. ‘It is all over,’ she said, when Madge returned. ‘I have but one hope, and that is that you may never live to blame your mother’s weakness. I should have done for your father what you are doing if there had been any need for it, and I should have done it in the face of all the world. And now I want to be alone a little to—to’—her voice faltered suddenly, and her eyes brimmed with tears—‘to say my prayers, and, if I have done wrong, to beg God’s forgiveness. Go out into the garden, children, and leave me here.’
So into the wide garden, cooled with the shade of English fruit-trees—peach and pear and plum and apple—the two wandered, far too disturbed by happiness as yet to be content But in Paul’s heart a new well of tenderness began to open—a spring of tenderness and yearning which seemed to overflow every cranny of his nature. To pay for this, to scrape up from the bankrupt remnants of life something by way of thanks-offering, to devote himself heart and soul and mind and body to that one aim, to discipline himself to a lofty and unresting ambition for that one aim’s sake, to win a fortune, to win a solid renown in which his love should shine reflected and sit enshrined—all this was with him in one confused conglomerate of gratitude and hope and love.
‘No woman,’ he said, ‘ever showed a greater trust I shall never be worthy of it, but it shall be the one endless study of my life to be less unworthy.’
He took her, unresisting, to his arms. Their lips met for the first time, and two souls seemed to tremble into one.