CHAPTER XV
TheTrelawneys spent their honeymoon in Paris; and since June, they had been stopping at a little village on the coast of Normandy, which several of Jim’s artist friends had also chosen as headquarters.
Bridget was spending her holiday with them. A fortnight of it had passed already, when she and Helen spent one brilliant morning on the cliffs. The August sun blazed royally in a hot blue sky.
On a hill, above the coast, the little gray church of St. Marguerite overlooked the sea. Below it, clothing the hillside with a sheet of rose-pink and purple blossoms, a field of clover swept downwards towards a narrow cleft in the chalk cliffs, by which the shore was reached.
The sides of the gully were dazzling white in the hot sunshine. A line of scarlet poppies made a vivid fringe of color along its lip. From out its white walls great tufts of lavender-colored scabious sprang, and trails of lady’s-slipper flamed yellow in the sunlight. A drowsy humof innumerable bees amongst the clover filled the hot, still air, mingled with the shrill whirr of grasshoppers. Down far below the blue sea broke, sparkling and dimpling into millions of flashing gems.
Bridget had thrown herself among the clover blossoms at the edge of the cliff. Her shade hat lay beside her. A scarlet sunshade was spread above her head. At some little distance, under the shade of a straggling elder bush Helen sat, reading. Bridget lay very still, listening half unconsciously to the whirr of wings, feeling the hot sunshine wrapping her round, her eyes fixed on the intense blue sky above the cliffs opposite, where the swallows were darting, wheeling, skimming in airy dance. In one hand she held a letter. This she presently drew noiselessly from its envelope. She had read and re-read it a hundred times; but now she read it once more with careful deliberation. It was dated the day after her walk with Carey in the Bushberry woods. She knew by heart the words with which it began.
“... Because I love you,” it went on, “I will not bring more trouble into your life, rashly, passionately, as, selfish devil that I am, I long to do. You shall be free to think—free to realize what it means if we decide to take this step. I start for Spain to-morrow. I will noteven see you again. Idarenot see you again. I will not write to you. It shall be as though I don’t exist for you—for three months. Dear, think well. I love you as I never yet loved a woman; but though I shudder at the mere idea of life without you, I will bear it somehow,—I must bear it, unless you can come to me without a single fear of consequence. I would gladly die to save you from pain. Think well; but (I feel a brute to say it, for it sounds as though I urge it as a plea, yet I cannot leave it unsaid) oh, Bridget! think also that I am wild for love of you!”
“... Because I love you,” it went on, “I will not bring more trouble into your life, rashly, passionately, as, selfish devil that I am, I long to do. You shall be free to think—free to realize what it means if we decide to take this step. I start for Spain to-morrow. I will noteven see you again. Idarenot see you again. I will not write to you. It shall be as though I don’t exist for you—for three months. Dear, think well. I love you as I never yet loved a woman; but though I shudder at the mere idea of life without you, I will bear it somehow,—I must bear it, unless you can come to me without a single fear of consequence. I would gladly die to save you from pain. Think well; but (I feel a brute to say it, for it sounds as though I urge it as a plea, yet I cannot leave it unsaid) oh, Bridget! think also that I am wild for love of you!”
She read the words slowly, then she raised the letter to her lips before she replaced it in its envelope. For a moment longer she lay motionless. Then she rose, gathered up her sunshade and hat deliberately, and crossed the grass towards her friend. She slipped down beside her, in the shade, and laid her hand across the open page of her book.
Helen looked up with a start, and their eyes met.
“Bid?” she whispered, and paused. Her face had grown suddenly white.
“Yes,” said Bridget, slowly, “I have decided.”
There was a long silence. The shrill, insistent whirr of the grasshoppers, mingled with the hum of bees, was the only sound in the stillness.
Helen bent her head over the book on her lap. On the open page Bridget presently saw heavy tears falling. She raised herself to herknees, and put her arms round her friend, and rested her cheek caressingly against her fair hair.
“Helen,” she said softly, “listen! I want to try to explain. You have been so good,” she faltered. “You have never worried me. It was so like you not to harass me,—to let me have it out with myself! But now I want to tell you. I want to try and make you understand. Helen, you know I haven’t come to this decision lightly, without thought?” There was a touch of pained reproach in the last words, for Helen was still silent.
She turned to her at last.
“Bid,” she whispered brokenly, “you know I trust you. You know what I think of you! Only—only—I amafraid—afraid of the years to come. Oh, Bid, laws are terrible things to disobey! One suffers—”
“Yes. One suffers. I don’t expect to escape suffering,” Bridget answered steadily. “I don’t think I even want to.”
“You—you are thinking of your mother?” Mrs. Trelawney hesitated.
Bridget moved restlessly, and frowned. She plucked up a handful of grass with nervous fingers, looked at it absently, a moment, then threw it from her, with an impatient gesture.
“Yes. Mother, of course!” she returned,raising her head with a jerk; “but I have thought it all out, Helen! Mother mustn’t spoil my life. I have Larry to think of—and myself. It sounds horrible—hateful, I know!” she went on hastily; “but what am I to do? I realize at last that it’s hopeless to expect that mother will ever understand. I must take my own path in spite of her, if I don’t want my life spoiled—incomplete—of no use to me or any one else!” There was silence. “I dread to tell her,” Bridget said at last. She stirred again restlessly, and the frown on her face deepened. There was a note of half reckless defiance in her tone that Helen did not understand.
“You see,” she went on after a pause, and her face cleared, “I have at least no religious scruples to overcome. Dear!” she broke off earnestly, putting out her hand towards her friend with a deprecatory movement. “You understand how I say this? I know what you believe, and I’m glad you believe it, if it makes you happier. I don’t say it arrogantly, Helen, but simply as a fact. I won’t even pretend to be sure thereisa God, and so—”
Helen raised her head, as if to speak.
“Ah, yes. I know what you are going to say!” Bridget exclaimed, “that from my standpoint life is too terrible—too full of despair!It may be. But because one feels that to be true, must one necessarily believe?Ican’t. We’ve talked of this often before. It is only one other awful fact in this life of ours which holds so much that is terrible. But,” she added immediately, with a smile, “I won’t abuse life, or the world. Itisawful; but it’s beautiful too.”
She paused. Her eyes travelled over the sea of sweet-scented flowers, up to the little gray church on the hill, and beyond it to the burning blue of the sky.
“It is a beautiful world,” she repeated, “and life holds possibilities of joy too. But we are afraid; we hesitate; we haven’t the courage to take our happiness! I don’tknowthat there is any life but just this one. Why should I starve my nature? Why should I refuse the chance of a great happiness? I don’t say the certainty, you see, but the chance, even! If I don’t take it I shall be forever in a gray land, tortured with the thought that it’s my own fault, my doing, my cowardice, perhaps. If I do—”
“Yes—if you do?” Helen repeated.
“I don’t say we shall not both suffer,” Bridget answered slowly. “I can’t say that. One says contemptuously, ‘Mere prejudice,’ ‘stupid conventions,’ and the rest; but I know enoughby experience—of the actual living of a life—to tell me that theories are of no value beside practice. Oh! I know; but I accept the risk.”
“For him too?” Helen murmured.
“No. He must accept or refuse it for himself, as I do for myself,” Bridget replied quickly. “How can one human being accept or refuse a risk for another? We stand, each of us, alone. We have not rushed blindly into this, Helen. He left me absolutely free, to make my own decision. He wouldn’t even see me again for fear he should urge me.” Her voice shook, “Helen, if you only knew what his gentleness and tenderness are to me! I don’t think you can realize it till you have had to endure the other sort of love.Love!—I mean the mere selfish passion.”
The last words were almost inaudible. She held her hands tightly clasped on her lap; but Helen saw they were shaking.
“My dear, I do, I do!” she said tenderly. “Bid, you know I only want your happiness. If this—this will give it to you, then take it. You have thought, you have struggled—and you areBridget!” she ended, with a burst of proud confidence.
There was a moment’s silence.
“Bid, have you considered,” Helen began again hesitatingly, “that there may be otherlives for which youwillbe responsible? Perhaps you are right about Mr. Carey. You are two grown-up reasonable, beings; you have a right to judge for yourselves. But your children?”
“Yes, I have thought of that,” she said gravely.
“Well?”
“If we have children,” she went on in a low voice, “they will be born into a world which is slowly freeing itself from the chains of prejudice, and of hateful, perverted morality. By the time they are old enough to understand, there will be still more free men and women than there are now, who dare to face realities.Theywill be their friends. But in any case,” she raised her big eyes, and looked full at her friend, “I can’t help believing, Helen, that his children and mine, would rather be born of a man and woman who love each other, than of a legal marriage where contempt was the strongest feeling, on one side, at least! Would you care to see me with a child, the child of a father I could only pray it might never love? If I have a child now, it will have no legal right to its father’s name, certainly; but I shall not bear it with shame, with self-reproach, with terrible pity for the burden of life I have laid upon it!” Her face was flushed with vivid color.
“If he—if Mr. Travers—divorces you, shall you—?” Helen faltered.
“Marry? No. What will be the use?” Bridget answered. “Haven’t we agreed a thousand times that marriageisonly a marriage so long as there is love and tenderness on both sides? So long as Larry’s love and tenderness lasts for me, I shall be his wife,” she added softly.
“And—if it fails?”
“Well, if it fails, will it be any comfort, any compensation to me that I am his legal wife? On the contrary, how awful—how terrible to think that he hates the bond; chafes under it. Oh, I know, Iknow! I’m not saying that doing away with marriage is any cure for the sorrows which may come. It will happen a thousand times, of course, that love lasts on one side and not on the other. But that is the tragedy of life,—terrible, but inevitable. And how does the legal bond which holds two people chained together, when one loves and the other hates, mend matters? I know if I loved my husband, but he wished to be free, though it killed me, I would say—go. Wouldn’t it be better to endure separation, once for all, than to bear the daily, hourly agony of seeing his indifference, his impatience, or, worse still, of watching him trying to disguise it?”
There was a long silence. Helen turned to her at last. Her eyes were wet with tears, but she smiled.
“I’ve been trying to put myself in your place,” she said gently. “From your point of view I think you are right. I,” she hesitated, “Irecognize a higher law; you don’t. Oh, Bid, understand me! I know yours is no cheap, unthinking unbelief. You can’t help it. Perhaps, after all, belief or unbelief is a matter of temperament. Anyhow, I understand, I sympathize. You are doing what you believe to be right. If only,” she faltered, “I knew you were going to be happy! But, as you say, we must leave that. In any case, God bless you, dear!” she whispered huskily.
They walked home through the sunny fields, where the poppies and daisies were shed broadcast in sheets of white and scarlet. The larks sang madly in the dazzling blue, and the steady pulsing of the sea made a deep, slow music. They reached the little pine-surrounded café where they were staying, and strolled slowly up the garden, in which the grass grew long and rank, and purple and red zinnias blazed in the overgrown flower-beds.
Madame Leroux came to the door, with a letter in her hand.
“Pour Madame!” she said, with her large smile, giving it to Bridget.
She glanced at the envelope. “I think I will read it out here,” she said, turning to Helen. Her voice was calm, but there was an undercurrent of excitement in it. She turned back a few steps to a vine-shaded arbor, where there was a wooden table and some forms. Breakfast was usually served out of doors at the Café des Sapins.
Helen went into the house. As she was crossing the flagged passage leading to the salon, ten minutes later, Bridget stood on the threshold. She held the letter clasped in one hand.
“He is coming to-morrow,” she said, as she passed her friend on the way upstairs. Helen had a glimpse of her happy eyes, and turned aside into the garden, with a half smile and a sigh.
After they had gone upstairs that night, Mrs. Trelawney knocked at Bridget’s bedroom door.
“Come in,” she called, turning as the door opened. She was sitting at the toilet-table, in a little white wrapper, with her hair all loose about her face.
“You look like a little girl again, with your hair down,” Helen said, seating herself on the bed, and watching her as she brushed and arranged it.
“I’ve been thinking of myself as I was, as a little girl, to-night,” she answered, pausing, brush in hand, to glance at herself in the glass. Her face was grave.
“Helen, when this is settled I want to be quiet and peaceful for a little while,” she said wistfully. “We shall live abroad a great deal, I think. I wonder if I evershallbe peaceful and content,” she went on musingly. “I’m afraid not. What an awful thing it is to have so many moods, and to want fresh things and people to appeal to them! Why, in some of my moods lately, I’ve even wanted the type of person I used to hate and despise so intensely, just as an antidote to the simple life I was wild to lead, when I hadn’t the chance of doing it!” She laughed a little. “Poor Larry!” she murmured, half laughing, half in earnest. “Will he put up with me, I wonder?”
“You’re an aggravating person, but most people put up with you,” Helen returned.
“Yes, it’s a charming way they have; I love them for it! It’s—it’s—rather a tremendous thing to have come to this point in one’s life, isn’t it?” she went on presently. She rested one elbow upon the table, and pushed back her thick hair with the other hand. “I’ve found myself going over all my past life to-night, as they say you do when you’re dying,you know. It seems to me that I’ve always been rebellious, always struggling against something,—kicking against the pricks, in fact. When I left school, I used to lie awake night after night, and listen to the shouts of drunken men outside, divided between an agony of shame that we had anything to do with their drunkenness, and contempt of myself for hating my father’s business. That was bad to bear. Then the next rebellion was against the dreary, loveless teacher life; after that, followed revolt against the degrading existence of a woman who doesn’t love her husband, but is forced to be his slave. Now, I am up in arms against social prejudice, which makes two people suffer a lifetime (perhaps their only lifetime) for a mistake which one of them has made! When will it end, Helen?”
“Never, while you are alive, with that restless mind of yours,” Helen said, a little sadly. “You, and women like you, are born into the wrong age for peaceful happiness, I’m afraid. A transition age is surely the most difficult one for a woman to live in, well,—worthily. There’s only one thing that comforts me, Bid,” she added after a pause, “a great thing. Youlovethis man,—I see it, I know it. You have never loved any man before.”
“The only good that comes out of what ispast, as far as I can see,” Bridget replied, turning her shining eyes upon her friend, “is that I can compare it with this new feeling—and trust myself. But”—she smiled with quivering lips—“I always was an extravagant person. My experiences, even, cost more than most people’s!”
When Helen left her, she went to the window and drew back the curtains. The moon hung like a great white flower in the clear sky; she fancied the sweet scent which came floating into the room, as she pushed open the casement, streamed from its shining heart. There were mystic silver pathways through the pine woods round the house, and between the black motionless trees the distant sea shone like a lake enchanted. The silver radiance of the night held her spellbound. She covered her eyes with both hands at last, and shut out the white glitter of the moonlight. She was intoxicated with the beauty of the world, with the joy at her heart,—alive, clamorous, insistent. The cup of life, brimming and honey sweet, was at her lips at last. “At last!” she repeated, whispering to herself in ecstasy, “this is my moment—this—and to-morrow. And I thought life had cheated me,—that it held nothing I had dreamt of!—that I should die without—” She sank on her knees before the window,and hid her happy, smiling eyes against her folded arms.
A moment or two later, the breathless stillness, which seemed to encircle her, and hold her delight at its heart, was broken. Somewhere in the distance, the silence was cut by the sudden hoarse barking of a dog. She raised her head slowly, with a long sigh, to find the room in shadow. A cloud had floated across the moon. There was a glint of silver on the distant sea, but the glamour had gone from the landscape. In a moment’s space it had grown gray and dim. The mysterious, silver pierced wood, was just a clump of pine-trees, overhanging the darkening sea.
She felt a sudden, inexplicable contraction of the heart. Her exalted mood was evaporating, escaping, melting away from her. It was as though a cloud had passed also over her mind. She wondered vaguely why she had felt so deliriously happy a moment since. There were troubles,—there was suffering in store, of course. She had said so to Helen that very day. There was her mother, for instance. She paused. Her forehead contracted into a frown. She had thought out this question so many times, why need she go through it all again? She shrugged her shoulders impatiently. Why couldn’t she have even one perfect hour, unspoilt by misgivings,by self-torturing scruples? She had decided. The thing was settled. Why couldn’t she give herself up to her joy? She was possessed by an impatient, impotent sense of anger at her inability to recapture the mood of ten minutes ago. It evaded her; it was gone. Instead, unrest, a vague troubled sense that she was considering the question for the first time, filled her mind. The first time!—when she had gone through it all, reasoned with herself every day for months, and had finally made her decision!
With a sigh she turned away from the window at last, from the sight of the darkened wood, and the slowly lessening streak of silver on the sea.
The noise of barking was renewed; it was answered presently by the voice of Zut, the dog belonging to the café. Bridget paused to listen as she unbuttoned her dressing-jacket. Zut’s clamor increased; he was barking furiously, and she fancied she heard a step along the road. There was a stir, and the sound of subdued voices overhead, and presently some one went softly down the creaking stairs outside her door, just as the garden gate slammed. There was a whispered colloquy below, and then a retreating step on the gravel path. A moment later, there was a gentle tap at her door.
Bridget drew her dressing-jacket on to her shoulders again, in surprise, and softly crossed the room and opened it.
Madame Leroux, in wrapper and bedroom slippers, was standing outside. There was an envelope in her hand.
“For Madame,” she explained—“a telegram. There had been an error, a wrong address. It had gone to Veules; but a telegram perhaps was important? Monsieur Grouet’s Alphonse, who slept at St. Marguerite’s, had brought it therefore, at this late hour.”
Bridget took it from her outstretched hand, and slowly shut the door, her eyes fixed on the envelope. She crossed to the bed, and sat down. Her heart began to beat violently, and then stood still with nameless fear.
“If Larry—” she opened it slowly. A moment later, the paper fluttered out of her hand to the floor. For a long time she sat motionless, looking straight in front of her towards the open window. Then she rose noiselessly. She crossed the room to the chair she had left beside it. She was careful not to let her dress make the slightest rustle as she sat down. (When people were dead, you were always quiet.) She rested her elbows on the sill presently, still holding her breath lest she should make the smallest sound. There was a stunned,dazed look in her eyes. She noticed that all but a thin streak of silver was gone from the sea. Heavy clouds were drifting over the sky, and the air was close and oppressive.
Bridget wondered idly whether the storm would come in the night, or next day. “To-morrow, I should think,” she murmured vaguely; “to-morrow, perhaps.”