Part 17

Olivia walked softly to her husband. “May I see the letter?” she said, her eyes full of tears. “I may read the letter, Charles?”

“Yes. I wish you to read it.”

“There it is,” said Stukeley, handing it to her. “What did you two asses make such a fuss for?” He sat down, helped himself to wine, and lighted a roll of tobacco-leaf, a kind of primitive cigar. Between the puffs, he glanced at the two men, and at Olivia’s face. Something in Olivia’s face attracted him: the eyes seemed to burn; the eyes seemed to be her intelligence, now starting outward. He looked at Margaret, wondering if he had done rightly to give the letter; but Margaret stood there, grave, courteous, self-controlled, his face a mask. Olivia read the letter, turned the sheet to see if a postscript had been added, then read it through a second time, turning very white.

“I don’t understand,” she said slowly. “Have you read this, Tom?”

“No, Livy. Let’s see it.”

“I suppose I may show it to Tom, Charles?”

“Yes, Olivia.”

“You’ve read the letter, Charles?”

“Yes, Olivia.”

“Well. I don’t understand. What is Uncle Nestor thinking, Tom?”

Stukeley read the letter, with a desire to have Margaret’s throat in his hands, squeezing the life out of him. He looked savagely at Margaret. “You swine, to let me in for this,” he thought. Then he became conscious that Olivia was closely watching him.

“Strange,” he said, puckering his brows. He took a gulp of wine and looked at Margaret. “Hadn’t we better go aboard?” he added. “It’s not a thing we can discuss here. Old Howard might come in.”

“But we can’t go aboard, Tom. The ship is sailing.”

“All our things are on board.”

“Yes. But we must get them. We must go home. You see that, Tom, don’t you? We must go home to clear our names.”

“We can’t go, Livy, for the reason I told you before.”

“They’re saying these things about us, though.”

“Who is? Some tea-drinking old maids who’ve got at your uncle Nestor. He doesn’t like me, as you know, so naturally he believes them.”

“But, Tom, what could have started the old maids, as you call them?”

“Our hurried leaving, of course. What else?”

“Ah,” she said, turning very pale, as though a bitter thought had come to her. “Charles, Charles. Oh, why did not Uncle Nestor write to me, instead of you? He need not have told you the scandal.”

Margaret, who had gone to the window with Perrin, to look out over the darkened harbour, while the husband and wife talked together, now turned gravely towards her, too sad to answer.

“I didn’t mean that, Charles.” She looked from one face to another, searching for a key to the puzzle, for a way back to the peace of ten minutes ago.

“What were you doing, Charles, when I came in just now?”

“We were struggling for the letter, Olivia.”

“You had snatched the letter, Tom?”

“From me,” said Perrin.

“I did not wish your husband to read it, Olivia,” Margaret added.

“He told me it concerned me,” said Stukeley, “and naturally, in a playful way, I snatched it. In a playful way.”

“I told you no such thing,” said Margaret.

“And yet, Charles, you say you did not wish Tom, my husband, to read it?”

“I did not wish it.”

“And you could hand it on to Edward?”

“Yes.”

“But I don’t understand. And you wished me to read it?”

“Yes, Olivia. I wished you to read it.”

“We can’t discuss it here, Livy,” Stukeley said. “Old Howard may come in. Let’s go on board.”

“Tom, we can’t go on board. I can’t enter that ship again. They’ve been calling us that for three months. Do think what it means, dear.”

“Only cackle,” he answered sullenly. “I’m not going to alter my plans for a little old wives’ cackle.”

“You think it’s only that, Tom?”

“Good luck. Yes.”

“But let’s go home and put an end to it. If we don’t it may grow. It may----”

The door opened. Howard entered. He looked round them with his air of weary boredom.

“Captain Margaret,” he said coldly, “your boat is waiting. Your captain is anxious not to lose the tide.”

“Well, we’ll go on board then. Edward, fetch Olivia’s wraps.”

“No,” Olivia said. “No. Not that. We’re not going, Charles. We’re going home. Oh, this letter is like a fire.”

“Come, Edward,” said Margaret, “we’ll be getting our cloaks.”

“I’ll get Olivia’s things,” Stukeley said.

“Tom,” she cried, “you aren’t going to run away like this, letting them think you guilty? You can’t, Tom. Go back. No. No. I can’t let you. Dear, we must face this. We must go home and face this.”

Margaret was at the door again, hooking the heavy silver cloak-clasp at his throat. He looked at her pitifully, saying nothing. He wished that he could help her, for the sake of her little one; but the letter had struck a jangle in him, and Stukeley had made him lose his temper. He thought that he had gone too far now, that he had shown Stukeley to be guilty. He could not bring himself to speak. He was worn out with the long anxiety of love. He was tired. Stukeley must fight his own battles, tell his own lies, maintain his own deceptions. He was too weary of it all to be sad, even when, after shaking the Governor’s hand and thanking him for his kindness, he turned to Olivia, with his hand outstretched.

“Well, Olivia,” he said.

“Well,” she said. “What d’you want, Charles?”

“Are you going home?” he asked bluntly.

“Of course I’m going home. Do you think that. Do you think I could live longer in that ship, eating, and lying down, and watching the sea, with this being said of me?”

“Yes,” said Stukeley, “I think you could. Put on your wraps, Livy, and come on.”

“Tom. Tom, dear.”

“I would go, Mrs. Stukeley, if I were you,” said the Governor. “You couldn’t leave the colony here much before November.”

“I am very sorry,” she answered. “But I don’t think you know the circumstances.”

“I’ve discussed them with Captain Margaret,” he answered.

“You discussed them, Charles?”

“Yes,” Margaret said. “Howard gives good advice, Olivia.”

“I don’t think my wife wants your advice,” said Stukeley. “Come, Livy. Here are your wraps. Come on. Don’t let’s have a scene.”

“Tom,” she said, holding out her hands, swaying a little, her eyes blind with tears. “Tom, I beseech you, let’s go home. What is your pledged word to--to what they are saying?”

“I’m going to keep my word,” he answered brutally. “Good-bye, Howard. Thanks for the pie-crust. I hope, next time I see you, you’ll have some decent wine. Your port is---- So long.” He turned to the other men. “Come on, Pilly. Come, Maggy.” As he walked to the door, he looked again at Howard. “So long, me lord,” he said.

“Good-bye, Mr. Stukeley,” said Howard.

“Shake hands.”

“No, thank you.”

Stukeley looked at him with some amusement.

“Oxford man. Eh!” he said, and passed out. Olivia stood swaying, looking after him, calling to him, through her tears.

“Will you come, Olivia?” Margaret asked her gently.

“Come with you, Charles? With you? You believe Tom guilty.”

“Olivia,” Perrin said, “this goes round your throat, doesn’t it? Then, here’s your glove. You mustn’t forget your glove.” He helped her with her things, evidently deeply pained.

“Thank you, dear,” she said, speaking as one stunned.

“Take my arm,” Perrin whispered. “Let’s get into the fresh air.”

She took a stumbling step forward, her hand on Perrin’s arm, then paused, and faced Margaret. “You think, Charles. You think, because. Because I’m not very happy. That I shall not notice. But I see. Oh, I see so well. You wish to poison me against Tom. You wish me to think. That. That. Him guilty.”

“Quiet, Margaret,” said Howard. “Mrs. Stukeley, it’s my duty to tell you that your husband is guilty. Better now than later,” he added to Margaret in a low voice. “She can’t have two scenes like this. It’d kill her. It is true, Mrs. Stukeley,” he continued. “If he returns to England, he will be hanged. Now you two, take her out. She’s stunned. Take her out before the flunkies notice. Get to sea. Don’t wait. Into the boat with her. Get to sea. Get to the devil.”

The two men supported the dazed creature to the boat. Howard watched them from his pleasaunce, with an air of weary boredom. “Like clubbing a kitten,” he said to himself. “But nervous women are. They are.”

He watched them pass away into the night, the oars grunting through the darkness, the voice of the coxswain sounding very clear. He noted it as a sign of rain. Afterwards he heard the feet tramping round the capstan, amid yells and screams and pistol-shots. “There are the men of war. The buccaneers,” he said cynically. “My reputation’s gone. I forgot them.” He stood amid his flowers, watching the fireflies, waiting for the end. He saw dimly the jib of the great ship cloaking a star. Then among the screams of many drunken men, with laughter, and shots, and oaths, the topsails jolted up, the parrels groaning, to a ditty about a girl in Paradise Street. The roaring chorus woke the ships in harbour. The crews answered, cheering, beating their bells. The bell of the _Broken Heart_ was rung like the alarm of fire. He smiled to hear them, repeating the phrases he had planned for his official report. “She stole away, unnoticed, in the night,” he repeated. “So that I could not give effect to the Honourable Board’s command.” “It’s getting chilly,” he said. “I must go in. She’s gone. She’s out of sight.” From very far away came the words of a chorus, the cat-fall chorus, sung by men so drunk that they had to take the cat-fall to the capstan:--

Blow, my bullies, blow For Springer’s Key, ay O. There’s plenty of gold, So I’ve been told, On the banks of the Rio Diablo.

It was the last of her farewells. Howard went indoors, to his game of cribbage with Mrs. Prinsep. “They have gone to found an empire,” he said to himself. “That song is an imperial hymn. Men of the Breed. Eh?”

X. THE LANDFALL

“We are arrived among the blessed islands, Where every wind that rises blows perfumes, And every breath of air is like an incense; The treasure of the sun dwells here.” _The Island Princess._

“This new come Captain Hath both a ship and men.” _The Sea Voyage._

The _Broken Heart_ made a poor passage. The eighteen hundred miles of sea between the Capes and the Samballoes were dragged through wearily, in calms, in light airs, in head winds, during six weeks of torment. Through the Florida Channel, across a sea of brass; through the Yucatan Channel, hugging the Cuban side; then launching out, past Grand Cayman, past Providence, she rolled and drove, foul with her months at sea. Her gilt was battered off, her paint peeled; her once white decks were crossed with tar marks, where the seam-tar, sticking to shoes, had been impressed crosswise as the seamen walked. An awning was over her poop. Her boys splashed her decks continually with salt water. The men about decks did their work languidly. At night they lay among the booms, sheltered from the dew, sleeping in their watches, their eyes covered lest the moon should blast them.

A ship driving to the south, with all her sails set, her side a little bowed, whitening a line along her fo’c’s’le, is beautiful to see, noble, an image of wonder. She should be allowed to pass, swaying her beauty in a rhythm; for beauty is enough; one should not question beauty. If one question, then in that stately ship may be found a hell. Men mutinous, officers overdriven, boys in misery, the captain drunk; wasted men forward, flying from justice; broken men aft, carrying their incompetence to other lands, to breed it there unchecked; the rigging rotten, the sails threadbare, all the hull of the ship in outcry, a decay, a fraud; down in the hold a fire smouldering, a little red glow, a fireball, not flame yet, waiting, charring the beams, blackening in the bales, till the wind fan it to a crackling triumph, to a blaze, a mastery, amid the screams of men, amid death. Even such a ship was the _Broken Heart_, as she drove on to the south, her sails slatting. Within her were many tortured hearts, each heart a chamber in hell, in the hell of the wicked or the weak, where the prisoned soul atoned, or added to the account to be paid later. At the galley door, waiting for the cook to let them light their pipes, their one pleasure, the seamen watched the gentry, envying them, talking bitterly of them, angry at the world’s injustice to themselves, angry at the ease which they would lack, though they lived to be old men, always working hard.

Of all the ship’s company, Olivia was the most to be pitied, for she was in the worst hell. Her soul had been bruised in the stalk; all that made life for her had been taken from her violently. She could not think. When she rose up an image rose up with her. If she shut her eyes, it was there; if she looked out over the sea, it was there still: the image of the room ashore; the fruit plates, the smell of wine, the men standing guiltily, the sheet of creased letter, with its fine, tremulous writing. All of it she saw. It was always with her. When she lay down it was there; when she slept it was heavy upon her, like the trance of a sick man. Sometimes, in spite of her will, against her nature, it played itself over to her in her mind, like a farce, a stupid farce, ending in tragedy, in one stunning blow, crushing out sense, as it had crushed her in life. Her husband would be there, rude and common--rude to her, common before all those men--stripping away the cloaks her love had wrapped about him. Her husband, the flaming young love, the man she had chosen, was before her, acting as she had once seen a drunken man act when dragged by his wife out of a beer-shop. She had loved that, given herself to that. Then Howard’s words, clubbing home the meaning of her husband’s rudeness. That horrible flash of insight, of intuition, which made the guilt apparent; that was harder to bear than Howard’s words, more terrible, now that it returned to her. All along the memories of her married life were headlands, promontories, projecting blacknesses, unexplained, irritating; the unanswered questions which had puzzled her. Thus and thus her husband had acted in the past, queerly, she had thought, even then, not as she would have had him act, not as a knight would have acted, not as the men she had known would have acted. The acts had puzzled her, they had frightened her; but she had explained them, she had told herself that men were different, and that she loved this man. Now there came a light, a sudden meteor. The black capes and headlands glared out upon her, lit up, one after the other, in a baleful vista, a marching, illuminated army of witnesses, glaring out his guilt, one after the other, day after day, night after night, a sleepless company. They seemed to shout to her, tossing the words one from the other, in her disordered mind, “If he returns to England, he will be hanged.” He had said that he had loved her; but that seemed ages ago; and he had tricked her into this, deceived her at every turn, lied to her, cajoled others into lying to her, all the time amusing himself, laughing, pretending, a common thing, a man with a mind like a footman’s. At first, nerving herself, she had tried to talk with him, willing to forgive, only asking, for her own part, an explanation. She would have been content with that. She would have been almost happy had he come to her like an erring boy, asking her to count him merely that. She had spoken to him in her cabin that night, pleading with him, kneeling to him, while the drunkards on deck made sail. Her whole world had lain in ruins; she had thought that nothing more could hurt her; but when she spoke the ruins flew about her, wounding her, cutting her to the quick. He had answered her brutally. His answer had come, as it were, set to the music of the drunkards above. It would not out of her head. All her nerves shook with it, as though the blow struck her in her face. He had sworn at her, jeered at her, called her a lump of cold batter, told her to get to the devil, told her that he was sick of the sight of her, that he had married her for her money, that if she gave him any more of her canting preaching he’d hit her one that she’d remember. Later in the night, as she lay crying at his side, he bade her for God’s sake to stop snivelling, so that he might get to sleep. As she could not stop, he had arisen, telling her that she might cry herself sick, but that he was going to Mrs. Inigo, a woman who wasn’t quite such a cold poultice. She had not stopped him. She could not stop him. He had gone from her; leaving her life too empty for her to wish even to kill herself.

Another dreadful thing, still dreadful, although so much was numbed in her, was the meeting with her husband the next day. She had thought him some common stranger; that had been the dreadful thing. He had seemed vulgar to her; a person out of her circle; she could not bring herself to speak to him. All that she could do was to glance at his neck continually. It had a horrible fascination for her, this neck that the rope was laid for. She did not hate him. He was dead to her; that was all; the worst horror was when she remembered her love-days, seeing him now as he was. She bore her lot alone, shut up in her cabin, seldom venturing out. At times she would lie back, in a nervous crisis, clenching her fingers into her palms, shaking with the hate of Captain Margaret. He might, she thought, have spared her that scene at the Governor’s. But no; it was all his plan; all; from the very first; his plan to have her near him. That was his love for her, to have her near him, to poison her against her husband, to tempt her husband with another woman, to heap all these indignities, all these torments, so that he, the lover, might triumph. All the voyage he had been at it. Little things came back to her now; little tender, insinuating acts. They came over her in a shock of shame. She hated him, she hated him. And yet, for all her hate of him, she could not think of leaving the ship, nor of what her future was to be; that was all dead and blank to her. England was dead and blank to her. She could not go back to England, save as some wounded hare, with the blood glazing on her fur, limping to her form to die. She was stunned; she could not think. Her death in life would go on for a little; perhaps for a long while; it did not matter how. Then it would stop; all that she could ask would be that it might soon stop. Perrin was the only person whom she could bear to see, or to speak with. It was through him, she guessed, that her husband was removed from her sight. He was living now, Perrin told her, in the ’tween-decks, having his meals in the wardroom. Perrin, Margaret, and Cammock had taken to living in their cabins, so that she might not be oppressed with company. She filled in the unsaid portion of Perrin’s speech with “living with Mrs. Inigo”; and she knew from Perrin’s face that he understood her thought, and that she was right. She liked Perrin more and more as the days passed. She understood him now, she thought. The world had gentled him by some such blow as had crushed her. She could never think of him as the thoroughly foolish man he was. She only thought of him as a poor hurt waif, almost a woman in many ways, who felt for her keenly enough to know that he must not show his feeling. She liked his shy way of coming into the cabin in the late afternoon, when the steward served the chocolate. He would enter shyly, speaking with a false air of jocularity, to propose chess, poetry, a game at cards, or a little music. The time would pass quietly. He would lose that false air of his; they would talk together almost like sisters, until the change of the watch at six o’clock. He helped her through her worst days, nor did she ever know that the tales he told her, the little jokes in his conversation, were repeated from the talk of the man she hated; as the hated man had planned, in his blind love for her.

Captain Margaret had his little hell about him; the days were bitter to him. All day long, and through the night, he had the image of his dishonour with him. All the weeks of deceit, all the acts of deceit, all the long strain of pretence; they were all over. They had ended in her hating and suspecting him. He would lie awake in the night, and the memory of his deceit would eat into him like acid, burning. He would blush, lying there in his bunk, at the thought of his baseness; it stuck in his throat, now that he could see things clearly. He had eaten dirt in a vile cause; all honest men must loathe him, he thought. Then came another memory, the memory of Olivia, her beauty, her paleness, her voice, her sorrow. It was bitter to him to feel that he was the bitterest part of her sorrow, and that he could not help her, nor comfort her, but only prompt Perrin to help her. He tried to tell himself that her beauty was an excuse for him. His love had been noble enough; it had not been selfish; he had had little joy of the ignoble things he had done for her sake. He wished that some spirit would surround his tortured head with heavenly essence, so that he might see clearly, as God sees, all the moral value of his acts, all the right and the wrong, in fiery letters, easy to read. She was very beautiful, and still young. Meanwhile he had his life to live, and his task to do. It was not going to be an easy task. He was coming to it broken. His only comfort in these days was the knowledge that Stukeley had lied when he had said that Olivia was going to have a child. That horror was removed for ever. Stukeley had lied. He prayed that some day the patient fates would take Stukeley, and show him, for an instant, before death, the image of himself. He needed not to have prayed. To most of us the patient fates come, holding up that image. Besides, Margaret knew well that Stukeley had had his image spoiled for him by the accident of his birth. The man loved animals; was truly kind and thoughtful with them. He should have been a groom, a hunt groom, with an alehouse and ostlers for his evenings. Margaret could see Stukeley holding up his hands, when his image came to him, saying that it was not his own work, but the work of the drunken fox-hunter his father, who came home bloody from the mangling of a fox, to give his little son drink, and to egg him on to kiss the maids.