Chapter 2

"Daughter--Certainly! I am writing to son-in-law telling him to quit London quick. I guess you've been too long there already. And while you are away you can draw on me yourself for as much as you please, for where it is a matter of money you must never let nobody walk over you.

Yours--&c."

The letter to my husband produced an immediate result. Within twenty-four hours, the telephone was at work with inquiries about trains and berths on steamers; and within a week we were on our way to Marseilles to join the ship that was to take us to Port Said.

Our state-rooms were on the promenade deck of the steamer with a passage-way between them. This admitted of entirely separate existences, which was well, for knowing or guessing my share in our altered arrangements, my husband had become even more morose than before, and no conversation could be sustained between us.

He spent the greater part of his time in his state-room, grumbling at the steward, abusing his valet, beating his bad-tempered terrier and cursing the luck that had brought him on this senseless voyage.

More than ever now I felt the gulf that divided us. I could not pass one single hour with him in comfort. My life was becoming as cold as an empty house, and I was beginning to regret the eagerness with which I had removed my husband from a scene in which he had at least lived the life of a rational creature, when an unexpected event brought me a thrill of passing pleasure.

Our seats in the saloon were at the top of the doctor's table, and the doctor himself was a young Irishman of three or four-and-twenty, as bright and breezy as a March morning and as racy of the soil as new-cut peat.

Hearing that I was from Ellan he started me by asking if by chance I knew Martin Conrad.

"Martin Conrad?" I repeated, feeling (I hardly knew why) as if a rosy veil were falling over my face and neck.

"Yes, Mart Conrad, as we call him. The young man who has gone out as doctor with Lieutenant ----'s expedition to the South Pole?"

A wave of tender feeling from my childhood came surging up to my throat and I said:

"He was the first of my boy friends--in fact the only one."

The young doctor's eyes sparkled and he looked as if he wanted to throw down his soup-spoon, jump up, and grasp me by both hands.

"God bless me, is that so?" he said.

It turned out that Martin and he had been friends at Dublin University. They had worked together, "roomed" together, and taken their degrees at the same time.

"So you know Mart? Lord alive, the way things come out!"

It was easy to see that Martin was not only his friend but his hero. He talked of him with a passionate love and admiration with which men, whatever they feel, rarely speak of each other.

Martin was the salt of the earth. He was the finest fellow and the staunchest friend and the bravest-hearted chap that walked under the stars of God.

"The greatest chum I have in the world, too, and by the holy Immaculate Mother I'm destroyed at being away from him."

It was like music to hear him speak. A flood of joy went sweeping through me at every word of praise he gave to Martin. And yet--I cannot explain why, unless it was the woman in me, the Irish-woman, or something like it--but I began to depreciate Martin, in order to "hoosh" him on, so that he might say more on the same subject.

"Then he _did_ take his degree," I said. "He was never very clever at his lessons, I remember, and I heard that he was only just able to scrape through his examinations."

The young doctor fell to my bait like a darling. With a flaming face and a nervous rush of racy words which made me think that if I closed my eyes I should be back on the steps of the church in Rome talking to Martin himself, he told me I was mistaken if I thought his friend was a numskull, for he had had "the biggest brain-pan in College Green," and the way he could learn things when he wanted to was wonderful.

He might be a bit shaky in his spelling, and perhaps he couldn't lick the world in Latin, but his heart was always in exploring, and the way he knew geography, especially the part of it they call the "Unknown," the Arctic, and the Antarctic, and what Charcot had done there, and Biscoe and Bellamy and D'Urville and Greely and Nansen and Shackleton and Peary, was enough to make the provost and professors look like fools of the earth by the side of him.

"Why, what do you think?" said the doctor. "When he went to London to apply for his billet, the Lieutenant said to him: 'You must have been down there before, young man.' 'No such luck,' said Martin. 'But you know as much about the Antarctic already as the whole boiling of us put together,' said the Lieutenant. Yes, by St. Patrick and St. Thomas, he's a geographer any way."

I admitted that much, and to encourage the doctor to go on I told him where I had seen Martin last, and what he had said of his expedition.

"In Rome you say?" said the doctor, with a note of jealousy. "You beat me there then. I saw him off from London, though. A few of us Dublin boys, being in town at the time, went down to Tilbury to see him sail, and when they were lifting anchor and the tug was hitching on, we stood on the pier--sixteen strong--and set up some of our college songs. 'Stop your noising, boys,' said he, 'the Lieutenant will be hearing you.' But not a bit of it. We sang away as long as we could see him going out with the tide, and then we went back in the train, smoking our pipes like so many Vauxhall chimneys, and narra a word out of the one of us. . . . Yes, yes, there are some men like that. They come like the stars of night and go like the light of heaven. Same as there are some women who walk the world like the sun, and leave the grass growing green wherever their feet have trod."

It was very ridiculous, I did not then understand why it should be so, but the tears came gushing into my eyes while the doctor spoke, and it was as much as I could do to preserve my composure.

What interpretation my husband put upon my emotion I do not know, but I saw that his face darkened, and when the doctor turned to him to ask if he also knew Martin he answered curtly and brusquely,

"Not I. No loss either, I should say."

"No loss?" said the doctor. "Show me the man under the stars of God that's fit to hold a candle to Martin Conrad, and by the angel Gabriel I'll go fifty miles out of my way to put a sight on him."

More than ever after this talk about Martin Conrad I was feeling defenceless, and at the mercy of my husband's wishes and whims, when something happened which seemed to change his character altogether.

The third day out, on a bright and quiet morning, we called at Malta, and while my husband went ashore to visit some friends in the garrison, I sat on deck watching the life of the little port and looking at the big warships anchored in the bay.

A Maltese woman came on board to sell souvenirs of the island, and picking out of her tray a tiny twisted thing in coral, I asked what it was.

"That's a charm, my lady," said the woman.

"A charm for what?"

"To make my lady's husband love her."

I felt my face becoming crimson, but my heart was sore, so in my simplicity I bought the charm and was smuggling it into my bag when I became aware that one of my fellow-passengers, a lady, was looking down at me.

She was a tall, singularly handsome woman, fashionably and (although on shipboard) almost sumptuously dressed. A look in her face was haunting me with a memory I could not fix when she stooped and said:

"Aren't you Mary O'Neill?"

The voice completed the identification, and I knew who it was. It was Alma Lier.

She was now about seven-and-twenty and in the prime of her young womanhood. Her beautiful auburn hair lay low over her broad forehead, almost descending to her long sable-coloured eyebrows. Her cheeks were very white, (rather beyond the whiteness of nature, I thought), and her lips were more than commonly red, with the upper one a little thin and the lower slightly set forward. But her eyes were still her distinguishing feature, being larger and blacker than before and having that vivid gaze that looked through and through you and made you feel that few women and no man in the world would have the power to resist her.

Her movements were almost noiseless, and as she sank into the chair by my side there was a certain over-sweetness in the soft succulent tones of the voice with which she began to tell me what had happened to her since I had seen her last.

It was a rather painful story. After two or three years in a girls' college in her own country she had set out with her mother for a long tour of the European capitals. In Berlin, at what was falsely called a Charity Ball, she had met a young Russian Count who was understood to be rich and related to one of the Grand Ducal families. Against the protests of her father (a shrewd American banker), she had married the Count, and they had returned to New York, where her mother had social ambitions.

There they had suffered a serious shock. It turned out that her husband had deceived them, and that he was really a poor and quite nameless person, only remotely related to the family he claimed to belong to.

Nevertheless Alma had "won out" at last. By digging deep into her father's treasury she got rid of her treacherous husband, and going "way out west," she had been able, in due time, to divorce him.

Since then she had resumed her family name, being known as Madame Lier, and now she was on her way to Egypt to spend the season at Cairo.

"And you?" she said. "You stayed long at the convent--yes?"

I answered that I had, and then in my fluttering voice (for some of the old spell of her presence had come sweeping back upon me) I replied one by one to the questions she asked about the Reverend Mother, the "Reverend Mother Mildred," Sister Angela and Father Giovanni, not to speak of myself, whom she had always thought of as "Margaret Mary" because I had looked so innocent and nun-like.

"And now you are married!" she said. "Married so splendidly, too! We heard all about it. Mother was so interested. What a lucky girl you are! Everybody says your husband is so handsome and charming. He is, isn't he?"

I was doing my utmost to put the best face upon my condition without betraying the facts or simulating sentiments which I could not feel, when a boat from the shore pulled up at the ship's side, and my husband stepped on to the deck.

In his usual morose manner he was about to pass without speaking on his way to his state-room, when his eyes fell on Alma sitting beside me. Then he stopped and looked at us, and, stepping up, he said, in a tone I had never heard from him before:

"Mary, my dear, will you not present me to your friend?"

I hesitated, and then with a quivering of the lips I did so. But something told me as I introduced my husband to Alma, and Alma to my husband, and they stood looking into each other's eyes and holding each other's hands (for Alma had risen and I was sitting between them), that this was the most momentous incident of my life thus far--that for good or ill my hour had struck and I could almost hear the bell.

FORTY-FIFTH CHAPTER

From that hour forward my husband was a changed man. His manner to me, so brusque before, became courteous, kind, almost affectionate. Every morning he would knock at the door of my state-room to ask if I had slept well, or if the movement of the steamer had disturbed me.

His manner to Alma was charming. He was up before breakfast every day, promenading the deck with her in the fresh salt air. I would slide back my window and hear their laughter as they passed, above the throb of the engines and the wash of the sea. Sometimes they would look in upon me and joke, and Alma would say:

"And how's Margaret Mary this morning?"

Our seats in the saloon had been changed. Now we sat with Alma at the Captain's table, and though I sorely missed the doctor's racy talk about Martin Conrad I was charmed by Alma's bright wit and the fund of her personal anecdotes. She seemed to know nearly everybody. My husband knew everybody also, and their conversation never flagged.

Something of the wonderful and worshipful feeling I had had for Alma at the Sacred Heart came back to me, and as for my husband it seemed to me that I was seeing him for the first time.

He persuaded the Captain to give a dance on our last night at sea, so the awnings were spread, the electric lights were turned on, and the deck of the ship became a scene of enchantment.

My husband and Alma led off. He danced beautifully and she was dressed to perfection. Not being a dancer myself I stood with the Captain in the darkness outside, looking in on them in the bright and dazzling circle, while the moon-rays were sweeping the waters like a silver fan and the little waves were beating the ship's side with friendly pats.

I was almost happy. In my simplicity I was feeling grateful to Alma for having wrought this extraordinary change, so that when, on our arrival at Port Said, my husband said,

"Your friend Madame Lier has made no arrangements for her rooms at Cairo--hadn't I better telegraph to our hotel, dear?" I answered, "Yes," and wondered why he had asked me.

Our hotel was an oriental building, situated on an island at the further side of the Nile. Formerly the palace of a dead Khedive, who had built it in honour of the visit of an Empress, it had a vast reception hall with a great staircase.

There, with separated rooms, as in London, we remained for three months. I was enthralled. Too young and inexperienced to be conscious of the darker side of the picture before me, I found everything beautiful. I was seeing fashionable life for the first time, and it was entrancing.

Lovely and richly-dressed ladies in silk, velvet, lace, and no limit of jewellery--the dark French women, the blonde German women, the stately English women, and the American women with their flexuous grace. And then the British soldiers in their various uniforms, the semi-Turks in their red tarbooshes, and the diplomats of all nationalities, Italian, Austrian, French, German--what a cosmopolitan world it was, what a meeting-place of all nations!

Every hour had its interest, but I liked best the hour of tea on the terrace, for that was the glorious hour of woman, when every condition invested her dress with added beauty and her smile with greater charm.

Such a blaze of colour in the sunshine! Such a sea of muslin, flowers, and feathers! Such lovely female figures in diaphanous clouds of toilettes, delicate as gossamer and varied as the colours in the rainbow! They were like a living bouquet, as they sat under the shade of the verandah, with the green lawns and the palm trees in front, the red-coated orchestra behind, and the noiseless forms of swarthy Bednouins and Nubians moving to and fro.

Although I had been brought up in such a different world altogether I could not help being carried away by all this beauty. My senses burgeoned out and my heart seemed to expand.

As for Alma and my husband, they seemed to belong to the scene of themselves. She would sit at one of the tea-tables, swishing away the buzzing flies with a little whip of cord and cowries, and making comments on the crowd in soft undertones which he alone seemed to catch. Her vivid and searching eyes, with their constant suggestion of laughter, seemed to be picking out absurdities on every side and finding nearly everybody funny.

She found me funny also. My innocence and my convent-bred ideas were a constant subject of jest with her.

"What does our dear little Margaret Mary think of that?" she would say with a significant smile, at sights that seemed to me quite harmless.

After a while I began to have a feeling of indefinable uneasiness about Alma. She was daily redoubling her cordiality, always calling me her "dearest sweetest girl," and "the oldest friend she had in the world." But little by little I became conscious of a certain commerce between her and my husband in which I had no part. Sometimes I saw her eyes seeking his, and occasionally I heard them exchange a few words about me in French, which (because I did not speak it, being uncertain of my accent) they thought I did not understand.

Perhaps this helped to sharpen my wits, for I began to see that I had gone the wrong way to work with my husband. Instead of trying to make myself fall in love with my husband, I should have tried to make my husband fall in love with me.

When I asked myself how this was to be done I found one obvious answer--I must become the sort of woman my husband admired and liked; in short I must imitate Alma.

I resolved to do this, and after all that has happened since I feel a little ashamed to tell of the efforts I made to play a part for which I was so ill-fitted by nature and education.

Some of them were silly enough perhaps, but some were almost pathetic, and I am not afraid that any good woman will laugh at the futile shifts I was put to, in my girlish ignorance, to make my husband love me.

"I must do it," I thought. "I must, I must!"

FORTY-SIXTH CHAPTER

Hitherto I had attended to myself, but now I determined to have a maid. I found one without much difficulty. Her name was Price. She was a very plain woman of thirty, with piercing black eyes; and when I engaged her she seemed anxious above all else to make me understand that she "never saw anything."

I soon discovered that she saw everything, especially the relations between myself and my husband, and that she put her own interpretation (not a very flattering one) on our separated apartments. She also saw the position of Alma, and putting her own interpretation upon that also, she tortured me with many pin-pricks.

Under the guidance of my maid I began to haunt the shops of the dressmakers, the milliners and the jewellers. It did not require the memory of my father's letter to make me spend his money--I spent it like water. Feeling ashamed of my quaker-cut costumes (Alma had a costume for every day of the week, and wore a large gold snake on her arm), I bought the most costly toilettes, and loaded myself with bracelets, rings and necklaces.

I was dressing for my husband, and for him I did many things I had never dreamt of doing before. For him I filed my nails, put cream on my skin, perfume on my handkerchief, and even rouge on my lips. Although I did not allow myself to think of it so, I was running a race with Alma.

My maid knew that before I did, and the first night she put me into one of my uncomfortable new gowns she stood off from me and said:

"His lordship must be a strange gentleman if he can resist you _now_."

I felt ashamed, yet pleased too, and went downstairs with a certain confidence.

The result was disappointing. My husband smiled rather condescendingly, and though Alma praised me beyond measure I saw that she was secretly laughing as she said:

"Our Margaret Mary is coming out, isn't she?"

Nevertheless I persevered. Without too much preparation for so perilous an enterprise, I threw myself into the gaieties of Cairo, attending polo matches, race-meetings, picnics at the Pyramids, dances at the different hotels, and on the island of Roda, where according to tradition, Pharaoh's daughter found Moses in the bulrushes.

I think I may say that I drew the eyes of other men upon me, particularly those of the colonel commanding on the Citadel, a fine type of Scotsman, who paid me the most worshipful attention. But I thought of nobody but my husband, being determined to make him forget Alma and fall in love with me.

It was a hopeless task, and I had some heart-breaking hours. One day, calling at a jeweller's to see a diamond necklace which I greatly coveted, I was told in confidence that my husband had been pricing it, but had had to give it up because it was a thousand francs too dear for him. I was foolish enough to pay the thousand francs myself, under a pledge of secrecy, and to tell the jeweller to send the necklace to my husband, feeling sure in my simplicity that it had been meant for me.

Next night I saw it on Alma's neck, and could have died of mortification and shame.

I daresay it was all very weak and very childish, but I really think my last attempt, if rather ridiculous, was also very pitiful.

Towards the end of our stay the proprietors of the hotel gave a Cotillon. As this was the event of the season, and nearly every woman was giving a dinner in honour of it, I resolved that I too would give one, inviting the gayest of the gay acquaintances I had made in Cairo.

Feeling that it would be my last battle, and that so much depended upon it, I dressed myself with feverish care, in a soft white satin gown, which was cut lower than I had ever worn before, with slippers to match, a tight band of pearls about my throat and another about my head.

When Price had finished dressing me she said:

"Well, if his lordship prefers anybody else in the world to-night I shan't know where he puts his eyes."

The compliment was a crude one, but I had no time to think of that, for my heart was fluttering with hopes and fears, and I think any woman would forgive me under the circumstances if I told myself, as I passed the tall mirrors on the stairs, that I too was beautiful.

The dining-room was crowded when I entered it with my guests, and seeing that we were much observed it flashed upon me that my husband and I had become a subject of gossip. Partly for that reason I strangled the ugly thing that was writhing in my bosom, and put Alma (who had flown to me with affectionate rapture) next to my husband, and the colonel commanding on the Citadel in the seat beside me.

Throughout the dinner, which was very long, I was very nervous, and though I did my best to keep up conversation with the colonel, I knew quite well that I was listening to what was being said at the other side of my big round table, and as often as any mention was made of "Margaret Mary" I heard it.

More than once Alma lifted her glass with a gracious nod and smile, crying, "Mary dearest!" and then in another moment gave my husband one of her knowing glances which seemed to me to say, "Look at that foolish little wife of yours!"

By the time we returned to the hall for coffee we were rather a noisy party, and even the eyes of the ladies betrayed the fact that they had dined. The talk, which had grown louder, was also a little more free, and God forgive me, I joined in it, being feverishly anxious to outdo Alma, and be looked upon as a woman of the world.

Towards eleven o'clock, the red-coated orchestra began to play a waltz, and then the whole variegated company of ladies, soldiers, and diplomats stood up to dance, and the colonel asked me to join him.

I was ashamed to tell him that I had never danced except with a schoolgirl, so I took his hand and started. But hardly had we begun, when I made mistakes, which I thought everybody saw (I am sure Alma saw them), and before we had taken many turns my partner had to stop, whereupon I retired to my seat with a forced laugh and a sense of confusion.

It was nearly twelve when they began the Cotillon, which Alma and my husband led with supreme self-possession. As one of the hostesses I sat in the front row of the square, and when I was taken out I made further mistakes, which also Alma saw and communicated by smiles to my husband.

Before the Cotillon came to an end the night was far spent and then the company, which had become very boisterous, began to look for some new excitement, no matter how foolish. One or other started "turkey trot" and "grizzly bear" and finally Alma, with memories of the winter sports at St. Moritz, proposed that they should toboggan down the great staircase.

The suggestion was welcomed with a shout, and a broad board was immediately laid on the first long flight of stairs for people to slide on.

Soldiers went first, and then there were calls for the ladies, when Alma took her turn, tucking her dress under her at the top and alighting safely on her feet at the bottom. Other ladies followed her example, with similar good fortune, and then Alma, who had been saying "Such fun! Such lots of fun!" set up a cry of "Margaret Mary."

I refused at first, feeling ashamed of even looking at such unwomanly folly, but something Alma said to my husband and something that was conveyed by my husband's glance at me set my heart afire and, poor feverish and entangled fool that I was, I determined to defy them.

So running up to the top and seating myself on the toboggan I set it in motion. But hardly had I done so when it swayed, reeled, twisted and threw me off, with the result that I rolled downstairs to the bottom.

Of course there were shrieks of laughter, and if I had been in the spirit of the time and place I suppose I should have laughed too, and there would have been an end of the matter. But I had been playing a part, a tragic part, and feeling that I had failed and covered myself with ridicule, I was overwhelmed with confusion.

I thought my husband would be angry with me, and feel compromised by my foolishness, but he was not; he was amused, and when at last I saw his face it was running in rivulets from the laughter he could not restrain.

That was the end of all things, and when Alma came up to me, saying everything that was affectionate and insincere, about her "poor dear unfortunate Margaret Mary" (only women know how to wound each other so), I brushed her aside, went off to my bedroom, and lay face down on the sofa, feeling that I was utterly beaten and could fight no more.

Half an hour afterwards my husband came in, and though I did not look up I heard him say, in a tone of indulgent sympathy that cut me to the quick:

"You've been playing the wrong part, my child. A Madonna, yes, but a Venus, no! It's not your _métier_."

"What's the good? What's the good? What's the good?" I asked myself.

I thought my heart was broken.

FORTY-SEVENTH CHAPTER

With inexpressible relief I heard the following day that we were to leave for Rome immediately.

Alma was to go with us, but that did not matter to me in the least. Outside the atmosphere of this place, so artificial, so unrelated to nature, her power over my husband would be gone. Once in the Holy City everything would be different. Alma would be different, I should be different, above all my husband would be different. I should take him to the churches and basilicas; I should show him the shrines and papal processions, and he would see me in my true "part" at last!

But what a deep disappointment awaited me!

On reaching Rome we put up at a fashionable hotel in the new quarter of the Ludovisi, and although that was only a few hundred yards from the spot on which I had spent nine happy years it seemed to belong to another world altogether. Instead of the church domes and the monastery bells, there were the harsh clang of electric trams, the thrum and throb of automobiles, the rattle of cars and the tramp of soldiers.

Then I realised that there were two Romes--an old Rome and a new one, and that the Rome we had come to hardly differed from the Cairo we had left behind.

There was the same varied company of people of all nations, English, Americans, French, German; the same nomad tribes of the rich and dissolute, pitching their tents season by season in the sunny resorts of Europe; the same aimless society, the same debauch of fashion, the same callous and wicked luxury, the same thirst for selfish pleasures, the same busy idleness, the same corruption of character and sex.

This made me very unhappy, but from first to last Alma was in the highest spirits. Everybody seemed to be in Rome that spring, and everybody seemed to be known either to her or to my husband. For Alma's sake we were invited everywhere, and thus we saw not only the life of the foreign people of the hotels but that of a part (not the better part) of the Roman aristocracy.

Alma was a great success. She had the homage of all the men, and being understood to be rich, and having the gift of making every man believe he was her special favourite, she was rarely without a group of Italian noblemen about her chair.

With sharper eyes the Italian women saw that her real reckoning lay with my husband, but they seemed to think no worse of her for that. They seemed to think no worse of him either. It was nothing against him that, having married me (as everybody appeared to know) for the settlement of his financial difficulties, he had transferred his attentions, even on his honeymoon, to this brilliant and alluring creature.

As for me, I was made to realise that I was a person of a different class altogether. When people wished to be kind they called me _spirituelle_, and when they were tempted to be the reverse they voted me insipid.

As a result I became very miserable in this company, and I can well believe that I may have seemed awkward and shy and stupid when I was in some of their grey old palaces full of tapestry and bronze, for I sometimes found the talk there so free (especially among the women) that the poisoned jokes went quivering through me.

Things I had been taught to think sacred were so often derided that I had to ask myself if it could be Rome, my holy and beloved Rome--this city of license and unbelief.

But Alma was entirely happy, especially when the talk turned on conjugal fidelity, and the faithful husband was held up to ridicule. This happened very often in one house we used to go to--that of a Countess of ancient family who was said to have her husband and her lover at either side of her when she sat down to dinner.

She was a large and handsome person of middle age, with a great mass of fair hair, and she gave me the feeling that in her case the body of a woman was inhabited by the soul of a man.

She christened me her little Irish _bambino_, meaning her child; and one night in her drawing-room, after dinner, before the men had joined us, she called me to her side on the couch, lit a cigarette, crossed her legs, and gave us with startling candour her views of the marriage bond.

"What can you expect, you women?" she said. "You run after the men for their titles--they've very little else, except debts, poor things--and what is the result? The first result is that though you have bought them you belong to them. Yes, your husband owns his beautiful woman, just as he owns his beautiful horse or his beautiful dog."

This was so pointed that I felt my face growing crimson, but Alma and the other women only laughed, so the Countess went on:

"What then? Once in a blue moon each goes his and her own way without sin. You agree to a sort of partnership for mutual advantage in which you live together in chastity under the same roof. What a life! What an ice-house!"

Again the other women laughed, but I felt myself blushing deeply.

"But in the majority of cases it is quite otherwise. The business purpose served, each is open to other emotions. The man becomes unfaithful, and the woman, if she has any spirit, pays him out tit for tat--and why shouldn't she?"

After that I could bear no more, and before I knew what I was saying I blurted out:

"But I find that wrong and wicked. Infidelity on the part of the man does not justify infidelity in the woman. The prayer-book says so."

Alma burst out laughing, and the Countess smiled and continued:

"Once in a hundred years there comes a great passion--Dante and Beatrice, Petrarch and Laura. The woman meets the right man too late. What a tragedy! What a daily and hourly crucifixion! Unless," said the Countess with emphasis, "she is prepared to renounce the law and reject society and live a life of complete emancipation. But in a Catholic country, where there is no divorce, what woman can afford to do that? Nobody in the higher classes can--especially if she has to sacrifice her title. So the wise woman avoids scandal, keeps her little affair with her lover to herself, and . . . and that's marriage, my dears."

A twitter of approval, led by Alma, came from the other women, but I was quivering with anger and I said:

"Then marriage is an hypocrisy and an imposture. If I found I loved somebody better than my husband, I should go to him in spite of the law, and society, and title and . . . and everything."

"Of course you would, my dear," said the Countess, smiling at me as at a child, "but that's because you are such a sweet, simple, innocent little Irish _bambino_."

It must have been a day or two after this that we were invited to the Roman Hunt. I had no wish to go, but Alma who had begun to use me in order to "save her face" in relation to my husband, induced me to drive them out in a motor-car to the place on the Campagna where they were to mount their horses.

"Dear sweet girl!" said Alma. "How could we possibly go without you?"

It was Sunday, and I sat between Alma in her riding habit and my husband in his riding breeches, while we ran through the Porta San Giovanni, and past the _osterie_ where the pleasure-loving Italian people were playing under the pergolas with their children, until we came to the meeting-ground of the Hunt, by the Trappist monastery of Tre Fontane.

A large company of the Roman aristocracy were gathered there with their horses and hounds, and they received Alma and my husband with great cordiality. What they thought of me I do not know, except that I was a childish and complacent wife; and when at the sound of the horn the hunt began, and my husband and Alma went prancing off with the rest, without once looking back, I asked myself in my shame and distress if I could bear my humiliation much longer.

But then came a moment of unexpected pleasure. A cheerful voice on the other side of the car said:

"Good morning, Lady Raa."

It was the young Irish doctor from the steamer. His ship had put into Naples for two days, and, like Martin Conrad before my marriage, he had run up to look at Rome.

"But have you heard the news?" he cried.

"What news?"

"About the South Pole Expedition--they're on their way home."

"So soon?"

"Yes, they reached New Zealand on Saturday was a week."

"And . . . and . . . and Martin Conrad?"

"He's well, and what's better, he has distinguished himself."

"I . . . I . . . I knew he would."

"So did I! The way I was never fearing that if they gave Mart half a chance he would come out top! Do or die--that was his watch-word."

"I know! I know!"

His eyes were sparkling and so I suppose were mine, while with a joyous rush of racy words, (punctuated by me with "Yes," "Yes," "Yes") he told of a long despatch from the Lieutenant published by one of the London papers, in which Martin had been specially mentioned--how he had been put in command of some difficult and perilous expedition, and had worked wonders.

"How splendid! How glorious! How perfectly magnificent!" I said.

"Isn't it?" said the doctor, and for a few moments more we bandied quick questions and replies like children playing at battledore and shuttlecock. Then he said:

"But I'm after thinking it's mortal strange I never heard him mention you. There was only one chum at home he used to talk about and that was a man--a boy, I mean. Mally he was calling him--that's short for Maloney, I suppose."

"For Mary," I said.

"Mary, is it? Why, by the saints, so it is! Where in the name of St. Patrick has been the Irish head at me that I never thought of that before? And you were . . . Yes? Well, by the powers, ye've a right to be proud of him, for he was thinking pearls and diamonds of you. I was mortal jealous of Mally, I remember. 'Mally's a stunner,' he used to say. 'Follow you anywhere, if you wanted it, in spite of the devil and hell.'"

The sparkling eyes were growing misty by this time but the woman in me made me say--I couldn't help it--

"I dare say he's had many girl friends since my time, though?"

"Narra a one. The girls used to be putting a glime on him in Dublin--they're the queens of the world too, those Dublin girls--but never a skute of the eye was he giving to the one of them. I used to think it was work, but maybe it wasn't . . . maybe it was. . . ."

I dare not let him finish what I saw he was going to say--I didn't know what would happen to me if he did--so I jumped in by telling him that, if he would step into the car, I would drive him back to Rome.

He did so, and all the way he talked of Martin, his courage and resource and the hardships he had gone through, until (with backward thoughts of Alma and my husband riding away over the Campagna) my heart, which had been leaping like a lamb, began to ache and ache.

We returned by the Old Appian Way, where the birds were building their nests among the crumbling tombs, through the Porta San Paolo, and past the grave of the "young English poet" of whom I have always thought it was not so sad that he died of consumption as in the bitterness of a broken heart.

All this time I was so much at home with the young Irish doctor, who was Martin's friend, that it was not until I was putting him down at his hotel that I remembered I did not even know his name.

It was O'Sullivan.

FORTY-EIGHTH CHAPTER

Every day during our visit to Rome I had reminded myself of the Reverend Mother's invitation to call on her, and a sense of moral taint had prevented me, but now I determined to see her at least by going to Benediction at her Convent church the very next day.

It happened, however, that this was the time when the Artists' Club of Rome were giving a Veglione (a kind of fancy-dress ball), and as Alma and my husband desired to go to it, and were still in the way of using me to keep themselves in countenance, I consented to accompany them on condition that I did not dress or dance, and that they would go with me to Benediction the following day.

"Dear sweet girl!" said Alma. "We'll do whatever you like. Of course we will."

I wore my soft satin without any ornaments, and my husband merely put scarlet facings on the lapels of his evening coat, but Alma was clad in a gorgeous dress of old gold, with Oriental skirts which showed her limbs in front but had a long train behind, and made her look like a great vampire bat.

It was eleven o'clock before we reached the theatre, but already the auditorium was full, and so well had the artists done their work of decoration, making the air alive with floating specks of many-coloured lights, like the fire-flies at Nemi, that the scene was one of enchantment.

It was difficult to believe that on the other side of the walls was the street, with the clanging electric bells and people hurrying by with their collars up, for the night was cold, and it had begun to rain as we came in, and one poor woman, with a child under her shawl, was standing by the entrance trying to sell evening papers.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Smile, Signorina!"

"Not so serious, Mademoiselle!"

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

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

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

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

I gave her no encouragement, yet she continued.

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

Still I said nothing, yet she went on:

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

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

* * * * *

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

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

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

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

"_Ave maris stella Dei Mater Alma--_"

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

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

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

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

FORTY-NINTH CHAPTER

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The door was locked.

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

Nobody was there except my husband.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

FIFTIETH CHAPTER

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Mary, is it you?"

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

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

"My goodness, this is stunning!"

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

"I'm so glad, so glad!"

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

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

"When did you arrive?"

I told him, and he said:

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

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

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

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

"And great successes?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Dr. O'Sullivan?"

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

"Don't go yet," I said.

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

"Then you must go."

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

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

"How long are you staying in London?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I tore it up and went in to breakfast.

FOURTH PART

I FALL IN LOVE

FIFTY-FIRST CHAPTER

During our first day in London my husband had many visitors, including Mr. Eastcliff and Mr. Vivian, who had much to tell and arrange about.

I dare say a great many events had happened during our six months' absence from England; but the only thing I heard of was that Mr. Eastcliff had married his dancing-girl, that she had retired from the stage, and that her public appearances were now confined to the box-seat of a four-in-hand coach, which he drove from London to Brighton.

This expensive toy he proposed to bring round to the hotel the following day, which chanced to be Derby Day, when a party was to be made up for the races.

In the preparations for the party, Alma, who, as usual, attracted universal admiration, was of course included, but I did not observe that any provision was made for me, though that circumstance did not distress me in the least, because I was waiting for Martin's message.

It came early next morning in the person of Martin himself, who, running into our sitting-room like a breath of wind from the sea, said his fellow officers were separating that day, each going to his own home, and their commander had invited me to lunch with them on their ship, which was lying off Tilbury.

It did not escape me that my husband looked relieved at this news, and that Alma's face brightened as she said in her most succulent tones:

"I should go if I were you, Mary. The breeze on the river will do you a world of good, dear."

I was nothing loath to take them at their word, so I let them go off in their four-in-hand coach, a big and bustling party, while with a fast-beating heart I made ready to spend the day with Martin, having, as I thought, so much and such serious things to say to him.

A steam launch from the ship was waiting for us at the Westminster Pier, and from the moment I stepped into it I felt like another woman. It was a radiant day in May, when the climate of our much-maligned London is the brightest and best, and the biggest city in the world is also the most beautiful.

How I loved it that day! The sunlight, the moving river, the soft air of early summer, the passing panorama of buildings, old and new--what a joy it was to me I sat on a side seat, dipping my hand over the gunwale into the cool water, while Martin, with a rush of racy words, was pointing out and naming everything.

St. Paul's was soon past, with the sun glistening off the golden cross on its dome; then London Bridge; then the Tower, with its Traitors' Gate; then the new Thames Bridge; and then we were in the region of the barges and wharfs and warehouses, with their colliers and coasting traders, and with the scum of coal and refuse floating on the surface of the stream.

After that came uglier things still, which we did not mind, and then the great docks with the hammering of rivets and the cranking noise of the lightermen's donkey engines, loading and unloading the big steamers and sailing ships; and then the broad reaches of the river where the great liners, looking so high as we steamed under them, lay at anchor to their rusty cable-chains, with their port-holes gleaming in the sun like rows of eyes, as Martin said, in the bodies of gigantic fish.

At last we came out in a fresh breadth of water, with marshes on either side and a far view of the sea, and there, heaving a little to the flowing tide, and with a sea-gull floating over her mizzen mast, lay Martin's ship.

She was a wooden schooner, once a Dundee whaler called the _Mary_ but now re-christened the _Scotia_, and it would be silly to say how my eyes filled at sight of her, just because she had taken Martin down into the deep Antarctic and brought him safely back again.

"She's a beauty, isn't she?" said Martin.

"Isn't she?" I answered, and in spite of all my troubles I felt entirely happy.

We had steamed down against a strong tide, so we were half an hour late for luncheon, and the officers had gone down to the saloon, but it was worth being a little after time to see the way they all leapt up and received me like a queen--making me feel, as I never felt before, the difference between the politeness of the fashionable idlers and the manners of the men who do things.

"Holloa!" they cried.

"Excuse us, won't you? We thought something had happened and perhaps you were not coming," said the commander, and then he put me to sit between himself and Martin.

The strange thing was that I was at home in that company in a moment, and if anybody imagines that I must have been embarrassed because I was the only member of my sex among so many men he does not know the heart of a woman.

They were such big, bronzed manly fellows with the note of health and the sense of space about them--large space--as if they had come out of the heroic youth of the world, that they set my blood a-tingling to look at them.

They were very nice to me too, though I knew that I only stood for the womankind that each had got at home and was soon to go back to, but none the less it was delightful to feel as if I were taking the first fruits of their love for them.

So it came to pass that within a few minutes I, who had been called insipid and was supposed to have no conversation, was chattering away softly and happily, making remarks about the things around me and asking all sorts of questions.

Of course I asked many foolish ones, which made the men laugh very much; but their laughter did not hurt me the least bit in the world, because everybody laughed on that ship, even the sailors who served the dishes, and especially one grizzly old salt, a cockney from Wapping, who for some unexplained reason was called Treacle.

It made me happy to see how they all deferred to Martin, saying: "Isn't that so, Doctor?" or "Don't you agree, Doctor?" and though it was strange and new to hear Martin (my "Mart of Spitzbergen") called "Doctor," it was also very charming.

After luncheon was over, and while coffee was being served, the commander sent Treacle to his cabin for a photograph of all hands which had been taken when they were at the foot of Mount Erebus; and when it came I was called upon to identify one by one, the shaggy, tousled, unkempt, bearded, middle-aged men in the picture with the smart, clean-shaven young officers who sat round me at the table.

Naturally I made shockingly bad shots, and the worst of them was when I associated Treacle with the commander, which made the latter rock in his seat and the former shake and shout so much that he spilled the coffee.

"But what about the fourth man in the front row from the left?" asked the commander.

"Oh, I should recognise him if I were blindfolded," I answered.

"By what?"

"By his eyes," I said, and after this truly Irish and feminine answer the men shrieked with laughter.

"She's got you there, doc," cried somebody.

"She has sure," said Martin, who had said very little down to that moment, but was looking supremely happy.

At length the time came for the men to go, and I went up on deck to see them off by the launch, and then nobody was left on the ship except Martin and myself, with the cook, the cabin-boy and a few of the crew, including Treacle.

I knew that that was the right time to speak, but I was too greedy of every moment of happiness to break in on it with the story of my troubles, so when Martin proposed to show me over the ship, away I went with him to look at the theodolites and chronometers and sextants, and sledges and skis, and the aeronautic outfit and the captive balloon, and the double-barrelled guns, and the place where they kept the petroleum and the gun cotton for blasting the ice, and the hold forward for the men's provisions in hermetically-sealed tins, and the hold aft for the dried fish and biscuit that were the food for the Siberian dogs, and the empty cage for the dogs themselves, which had just been sent up to the Zoo to be taken care of.

Last of all he showed me his own cabin, which interested me more than anything else, being such a snug little place (though I thought I should like to tidy it up a bit), with his medical outfit, his books, his bed like a shelf, and one pretty photograph of his mother's cottage with the roses growing over it, that I almost felt as if I would not mind going to the Antarctic myself if I could live in such comfortable quarters.

Two hours passed in this way, though they had flown like five minutes, when the cabin-boy came to say that tea was served in the saloon, and then I skipped down to it as if the ship belonged to me. And no sooner had I screwed myself into the commander's chair, which was fixed to the floor at the head of the narrow table, and found the tea-tray almost on my lap, than a wave of memory from our childhood came sweeping back on me, and I could not help giving way to the coquetry which lies hidden in every girl's heart so as to find out how much Martin had been thinking of me.

"I'll bet you anything," I said, (I had caught Martin's style) "you can't remember where you and I first saw each other."

He could--it was in the little dimity-white room in his mother's house with its sweet-smelling "scraas" under the sloping thatch.

"Well, you don't remember what you were doing when we held our first conversation?"

He did--he was standing on his hands with his feet against the wall and his inverted head close to the carpet.

"But you've forgotten what happened next?"

He hadn't--I had invited William Rufus and himself into bed, and they had sat up on either side of me.

Poor William Rufus! I heard at last what had become of him. He had died of distemper soon after I was sent to school. His master had buried him in the back-garden, and, thinking I should be as sorry as he was for the loss of our comrade, he had set up a stone with an inscription in our joint names--all of his own inditing. It ran--he spelled it out to me--

"HERE LICE WILYAM ROOFUS WRECKTED BY IZ OLE FRENS MARTIN CONRAD AND MARY O'NEILL."

Two big blinding beads came into my eyes at that story, but they were soon dashed away by Martin who saw them coming and broke into the vernacular. I broke into it, too, (hardly knowing that the well of my native speech was still there until I began to tap it), and we talked of Tommy the Mate and his "starboard eye," called each other "bogh mulish," said things were "middling," spoke of the "threes" (trees) and the "tunder" (thunder), and remembered that "our Big Woman was a wicked devil and we wouldn't trust but she'd burn in hell."

How we laughed! We laughed at everything; we laughed at nothing; we laughed until we cried; but I have often thought since that this was partly because we knew in our secret hearts that we were always hovering on the edge of tragic things.

Martin never once mentioned my husband or my marriage, or his letters to my father, the Bishop and Father Dan, which had turned out so terribly true; but we had our serious moments for all that, and one of them was when we were bending over a large chart which he had spread out on the table to show me the course of the ship through the Great Unknown, leaning shoulder to shoulder, so close that our heads almost touched, and I could see myself in his eyes as he turned to speak to me.

"You were a little under the weather yesterday, shipmate--what was the cause of it?" he asked.

"Oh, we . . . we can talk of that another time, can't we?" I answered, and then we both laughed again, goodness knows why, unless it was because we felt we were on the verge of unlocking the doors of each other's souls.

Oh that joyful, wonderful, heart-swelling day! But no day ever passed so quickly. At half-past six Martin said we must be going back, or I should be late for dinner, and a few minutes afterwards we were in the launch, which had returned to fetch us.

I had had such a happy time on the ship that as we were steaming off I kissed my hand to her, whereupon Treacle, who was standing at the top of the companion, taking the compliment to himself, returned the salute with affectionate interest, which sent Martin and me into our last wild shriek of laughter.

The return trip was just as delightful as the coming out had been, everything looking different the other way round, for the sunset was like a great celestial fire which had been lighted in the western sky, and the big darkening city seemed to have turned its face to it.

Martin talked all the way back about a scheme he had afoot for going down to the region of the Pole again in order to set up some machinery that was to save life and otherwise serve humanity, and while I sat close up to him, looking into his flashing eyes--they were still as blue as the bluest sea--I said, again and again: "How splendid! How glorious! What a great, great thing it will be for the world."

"Won't it?" he said, and his eyes sparkled like a boy's.

Thus the time passed without our being aware how it was going, and we were back at Westminster Pier before I bethought me that of the sad and serious subject I had intended to speak about I had said nothing at all.

But all London seemed to have been taking holiday that day, for as we drove in a taxi up Parliament Street streams of vehicles full of happy people were returning from the Derby, including costers' donkey carts in which the girls were carrying huge boughs of May blossom, and the boys were wearing the girls' feathery hats, and at the top of their lusty lungs they were waking the echoes of the stately avenue with the "Honeysuckle and the Bee."

"_Yew aw the enny, Oi em ther bee, Oi'd like ter sip ther enny from those red lips, yew see_."

As we came near our hotel we saw a rather showy four-in-hand coach, called the "Phoebus," drawing up at the covered way in front of it, and a lady on top, in a motor veil, waving her hand to us.

It was Alma, with my husband's and Mr. Eastcliff's party back from the races, and as soon as we met on the pavement she began to pay me high compliments on my improved appearance.

"Didn't I say the river air would do you good, dearest?" she said, and then she added something else, which would have been very sweet if it had been meant sweetly, about there being no surer way to make a girl beautiful than to make her happy.

There was some talk of our dining together that night, but I excused myself, and taking leave of Martin, who gave my hand a gentle pressure, I ran upstairs without waiting for the lift, being anxious to get to my own room that I might be alone and go over everything in my mind.

I did so, ever so many times, recalling all that had been said and done by the commander and his comrades, and even by Treacle, but above all by Martin, and laughing softly to myself as I lived my day over again in a world of dream.

My maid came in once or twice, with accounts of the gorgeous Derby dinner that was going on downstairs, but that did not matter to me in the least, and as soon as I had swallowed a little food I went to bed early--partly in order to get rid of Price that I might go over everything again and yet again.

I must have done so far into the night, and even when the wings of my memory were weary of their fluttering and I was dropping off at last, I thought I heard Martin calling "shipmate," and I said "Yes," quite loud, as if he had been with me still in that vague and beautiful shadow-land which lies on the frontier of sleep.

How mysterious, how magical, how wonderful!

Looking back I cannot but think it strange that even down to that moment I did not really know what was happening to me, being only conscious of a great flood of joy. I cannot but think it strange that, though Nature had been whispering to me for months, I did not know what it had been saying. I cannot but think it strange that, though I had been looking for love so long without finding it, I did not recognise it immediately when it had come to me of itself.

But when I awoke early in the morning, very early, while the sunrise was filling my bedroom with a rosy flush, and the thought of Martin was the first that was springing from the mists of sleep to my conscious mind, and I was asking myself how it happened that I was feeling so glad, while I had so many causes for grief, then suddenly--suddenly as the sun streams through the cloud-scud over the sea--I knew that what had long been predestined had happened, that the wondrous new birth, the great revelation, the joyous mystery which comes to every happy woman in the world had come at last to me.

I was in love.

I was in love with Martin Conrad.

FIFTY-SECOND CHAPTER

My joy was short-lived. No sooner had I become aware that I loved Martin Conrad, than my conscience told me I had no right to do so. I was married, and to love another than my husband was sin.

It would be impossible to say with what terror this thought possessed me. It took all the sunlight out of my sky, which a moment before had seemed so bright. It came on me like a storm of thunder and lightning, sweeping my happiness into the abyss.

All my religion, everything I had been taught about the sanctity of the sacrament of marriage seemed to rise up and accuse me. It was not that I was conscious of any sin against my husband. I was thinking only of my sin against God.

The first effect was to make me realise that it was no longer possible for me to speak to Martin about my husband and Alma. To do this now that I knew I loved him would be deceitful, mean, almost treacherous.

The next effect was to make me see that all thought of a separation must now be given up. How could I accuse my husband when I was myself in the same position? If he loved another woman, I loved another man.

In my distress and fright I saw only one means of escape either from the filthy burden to which I was bound or the consciousness of a sinful heart, and that was to cure myself of my passion. I determined to do so. I determined to fight against my love for Martin Conrad, to conquer it and to crush it.

My first attempt to do this was feeble enough. It was an effort to keep myself out of the reach of temptation by refusing to see Martin alone.

For three or four days I did my best to carry out this purpose, making one poor excuse after another, when (as happened several times a day) he came down to see me--that I was just going out or had just come in, or was tired or unwell.

It was tearing my heart out to deny myself so, but I think I could have borne the pain if I had not realised that I was causing pain to him also.

My maid, whose head was always running on Martin, would come hack to my room, after delivering one of my lying excuses, and say:

"You should have seen his face, when I told him you were ill. It was just as if I'd driven a knife into him."

Everybody seemed to be in a conspiracy to push me into Martin's arms--Alma above all others. Being a woman she read my secret, and I could see from the first that she wished to justify her own conduct in relation to my husband by putting me into the same position with Martin.

"Seen Mr. Conrad to-day?" she would ask.

"Not to-day," I would answer.

"Really? And you such old friends! And staying in the same hotel, too!"

When she saw that I was struggling hard she reminded my husband of his intention of asking Martin to dinner, and thereupon a night was fixed and a party invited.

Martin came, and I was only too happy to meet him in company, though the pain and humiliation of the contrast between him and my husband and his friends, and the difference of the atmosphere in which he lived from that to which I thought I was doomed for ever, was almost more than I could bear.

I think they must have felt it themselves, for though their usual conversation was of horses and dogs and race-meetings, I noticed they were silent while Martin in his rugged, racy poetic way (for all explorers are poets) talked of the beauty of the great Polar night, the cloudless Polar day, the midnight calm and the moonlight on the glaciers, which was the loveliest, weirdest, most desolate, yet most entrancing light the world could show.

"I wonder you don't think of going back to the Antarctic, if it's so fascinating," said Alma.

"I do. Bet your life I do," said Martin, and then he told them what he had told me on the launch, but more fully and even more rapturously--the story of his great scheme for saving life and otherwise benefiting humanity.

For hundreds of years man, prompted merely by the love of adventure, the praise of achievement, and the desire to know the globe he lived on, had been shouldering his way to the hitherto inviolable regions of the Poles; but now the time had come to turn his knowledge to account.

"How?" said my husband.

"By putting himself into such a position," said Martin, "that he will be able to predict, six, eight, ten days ahead, the weather of a vast part of the navigable and habitable world--by establishing installations of wireless telegraphy as near as possible to the long ice-barrier about the Pole from which ice-floes and icebergs and blizzards come, so that we can say in ten minutes from the side of Mount Erebus to half the southern hemisphere, 'Look out. It's coming down,' and thus save millions of lives from shipwreck, and hundreds of millions of money."

"Splendid, by Jove!" said Mr. Eastcliff.

"Yes, ripping, by jingo!" said Mr. Vivian.

"A ridiculous dream!" muttered my husband, but not until Martin had gone, and then Alma, seeing that I was all aglow, said:

"What a lovely man! I wonder you don't see more of him, Mary, my love. He'll be going to the ends of the earth soon, and then you'll be sorry you missed the chance."

Her words hurt me like the sting of a wasp, but I could not resist them, and when some days later Martin called to take me to the Geographical Society, where his commander, Lieutenant ---- was to give an account of their expedition, I could not find it in my heart to refuse to go.

Oh, the difference of this world from that in which I had been living for the past six months! All that was best in England seemed to be there, the men who were doing the work of the world, and the women who were their wives and partners.

The theatre was like the inside of a dish, and I sat by Martin's side on the bottom row of seats, just in front of the platform and face to face with the commander.

His lecture, which was illustrated by many photographic lantern slides of the exploring party, (including the one that had been shown to me on the ship) was very interesting, but terribly pathetic; and when he described the hardships they had gone through in a prolonged blizzard on a high plateau, with food and fuel running low, and no certainty that they would ever see home again, I found myself feeling for Martin's hand to make sure that he was there.

Towards the end the commander spoke very modestly of himself, saying he could never have reached the 87th parallel if he had not had a crew of the finest comrades that ever sailed on a ship.

"And though they're all splendid fellows," he said, "there's one I can specially mention without doing any wrong to the rest, and that's the young doctor of our expedition--Martin Conrad. Martin has a scheme of his own for going down to the Antarctic again to make a great experiment in the interests of humanity, and if and when he goes I say, 'Good luck to him and God bless him!'"

At these generous words there was much applause, during which Martin sat blushing like a big boy when he is introduced to the girl friends of his sister.

As for me I did not think any speech could have been so beautiful, and I felt as if I could have cried for joy.

When I got back to the hotel I _did_ cry, but it was for another reason. I was thinking of my father and wondering why he did not wait.

"Why, why, why?" I asked myself.

FIFTY-THIRD CHAPTER

Next day, Martin came rushing down to my sitting-room with a sheaf of letters in his hand, saying:

"That was jolly good of the boss, but look what he has let me in for?"

They were requests from various newspapers for portraits and interviews, and particularly from one great London journal for a special article to contain an account of the nature and object of the proposed experiment.

"What am I to do?" he said. "I'm all right for stringing gabble, but I couldn't _write_ anything to save my soul. Now, you could. I'm sure you could. You could write like Robinson Crusoe. Why shouldn't you write the article and I'll tell you what to put into it?"

There was no resisting that. And down at the bottom of my secret heart I was glad of the excuse to my conscience that I could not any longer run away from Martin because I was necessary to help him.

So we sat together all day long, and though it was like shooting the rapids to follow Martin's impetuous and imaginative speech, I did my best to translate his disconnected outbursts into more connected words, and when the article was written and read aloud to him he was delighted.

"Stunning! Didn't I say you could write like Robinson Crusoe?"

In due course it was published and made a deep impression, for wherever I went people were talking of it, and though some said "Fudge!" and others, like my husband, said "Dreams!" the practical result was that the great newspaper started a public subscription with the object of providing funds for the realisation of Martin's scheme.

This brought him an immense correspondence, so that every morning he came down with an armful of letters and piteous appeals to me to help him to reply to them.

I knew it would be dangerous to put myself in the way of so much temptation, but the end of it was that day after day we sat together in my sitting-room, answering the inquiries of the sceptical, the congratulations of the convinced, and the offers of assistance that came from people who wished to join in the expedition.

What a joy it was! It was like the dawn of a new life to me. But the highest happiness of all was to protect Martin against himself, to save him from his over-generous impulses--in a word, to mother him.

Many of the letters he received were mere mendicancy. He was not rich, yet he could not resist a pitiful appeal, especially if it came from a woman, and it was as much as I could do to restrain him from ruining himself.

Sometimes I would see him smuggle a letter into his side pocket, with--

"H'm! That will do later."

"What is it?" I would ask.

"Oh, nothing, nothing!" he would answer.

"Hand it out, sir," I would say, and then I would find a fierce delight in sending six freezing words of refusal to some impudent woman who was trying to play upon the tender side of my big-hearted boy.

Oh, it was delightful! My whole being seemed to be renewed. If only the dear sweet hours could go on and on for ever!

Sometimes my husband and Alma would look in upon us at our work, and then, while the colour mounted to my eyes, Martin would say:

"I'm fishing with another man's floats, you see."

"I see," my husband would reply, fixing his monocle and showing his front teeth in a painful grin.

"Just what dear Mary loves, though," Alma would say. "I do believe she would rather he sitting in this sunless room, writing letters for Mr. Conrad, than wearing her coronet at a King's coronation."

"Just so, ma'am; there _are_ women like that," Martin would answer, looking hard at her; and when she had gone, (laughing lightly but with the frightened look I had seen before) he would say, as if speaking to himself:

"I hate that woman. She's like a snake. I feel as if I want to put my foot on it."

At length the climax came. One day Martin rushed downstairs almost beside himself in his boyish joy, to say that all the money he needed had been subscribed, and that in honour of the maturing of the scheme the proprietor of the newspaper was to give a public luncheon at one of the hotels, and though no women were to be present at the "feed" a few ladies were to occupy seats in a gallery, and I was to be one of them.

I had played with my temptation too long by this time to shrink from the dangerous exaltation which I knew the occasion would cause, so when the day came I went to the hotel in a fever of pleasure and pride.

The luncheon was nearly over, the speeches were about to begin, and the ladies' gallery was buzzing like a hive of bees, when I took my seat in it. Two bright young American women sitting next to me were almost as excited as myself, and looking down at the men through a pair of opera-glasses they were asking each other which was Martin, whereupon my vanity, not to speak of my sense of possession, was so lifted up that I pointed him out to them, and then borrowed their glasses to look at the chairman.

He seemed to me to have that light of imagination in his eyes which was always blazing in Martin's, and when he began to speak I thought I caught the note of the same wild passion.

He said they were that day opening a new chapter in the wonderful book of man's story, and though the dangers of the great deep might never be entirely overcome, and the wind would continue to blow as it listed, yet the perils of the one and the movements of the other were going to be known to, and therefore checked by, the human family.

After that, and a beautiful tribute to Martin as a man, (that everybody who had met him had come to love him, and that there must be something in the great solitudes of the silent white world to make men simple and strong and great, as the sea made them staunch and true) he drank to the success of the expedition, and called on Martin to respond to the toast.

There was a great deal of cheering when Martin rose, but I was so nervous that I hardly heard it. He was nervous too, as I could plainly see, for after a few words of thanks, he began to fumble the sheets of a speech which he and I had prepared together, trying to read it, but losing his place and even dropping his papers.

Beads of perspiration were starting from my forehead and I knew I was making noises in my throat, when all at once Martin threw his papers on the table and said, in quite another voice:

"Ship-mates, I mean gentlemen, I never could write a speech in my life, and you see I can't read one, but I know what I want to say and if you'll take it as it comes here goes."

Then in the simple style of a sailor, not always even grammatical yet splendidly clear and bold and natural, blundering along as he used to do when he was a boy at school and could not learn his lessons, but with his blue eyes ablaze, he told of his aims and his expectations.

And when he came to the end he said:

"His lordship, the chairman, has said something about the good effects of the solitudes of Nature on a man's character. I can testify to that. And I tell you this--whatever you are when you're up here and have everything you want, it's wonderful strange the way you're asking the Lord to stretch out His hand and help you when you're down there, all alone and with an empty hungry stomach.

"I don't know where you were last Christmas Day, shipmates . . . I mean gentlemen, but I know where I was. I was in the 85th latitude, longitude 163, four miles south and thirty west of Mount Darwin. It was my own bit of an expedition that my commander has made too much of, and I believe in my heart my mates had had enough of it. When we got out of our sleeping bags that morning there was nothing in sight but miles and miles of rolling waves of snow, seven thousand feet up on a windy plateau, with glaciers full of crevasses shutting us off from the sea, and not a living thing in sight as far as the eye could reach.

"We were six in company and none of us were too good for Paradise, and one--he was an old Wapping sailor, we called him Treacle--had the name of being a shocking old rip ashore. But we remembered what day it was, and we wanted to feel that we weren't cut off entirely from the world of Christian men--our brothers and sisters who would be going to church at home. So I dug out my little prayer-book that my mother put in my kit going away, and we all stood round bare-headed in the snow--a shaggy old lot I can tell you, with chins that hadn't seen a razor for a month--and I read the prayers for the day, the first and second Vespers, and Laudate Dominum and then the De Profundis.

"I think we felt better doing that, but they say the comical and the tragical are always chasing each other, which can get in first, and it was so with us, for just as I had got to an end with the solemn words, 'Out of the depths we cry unto thee, O Lord, Lord hear our cry,' in jumps old Treacle in his thickest cockney, 'And Gawd bless our pore ole wives and sweethearts fur a-wye.'"

If Martin said any more nobody heard it. The men below were blowing their noses, and the women in the gallery were crying openly.

"Well, the man who can talk like that may open all my letters and telegrams," said one of the young American women, who was wiping her eyes without shame.

What I was doing, and what I was looking like, I did not know until the lady, who had lent me the opera-glasses leaned over to me and said:

"Excuse me, but are you his wife, may I ask?"

"Oh no, no," I said nervously and eagerly, but only God knows how the word went through and through me.

I had taken the wrong course, and I knew it. My pride, my joy, my happiness were all accusing me, and when I went to bed that night I felt as if I had been a guilty woman.

FIFTY-FOURTH CHAPTER

I tried to take refuge in religion. Every day and all day I humbly besought the pardon of heaven for the sin of loving Martin Conrad.

The little religious duties which I had neglected since my marriage (such as crossing myself at rising from the table) I began to observe afresh, and being reminded by Martin's story that I had promised my mother to say a De Profundis for her occasionally I now said one every day. I thought these exercises would bring me a certain relief, but they did not.

I searched my Missal for words that applied to my sinful state, and every night on going to bed I prayed to God to take from me all unholy thoughts, all earthly affections. But what was the use of my prayers when in the first dream of the first sleep I was rushing into Martin's arms?

It was true that my love for Martin was what the world would call a pure love; it had no alloy of any kind; but all the same I thought I was living in a condition of adultery--adultery of the heart.

Early every morning I went to mass, but the sense I used to have of returning from the divine sacrifice to the ordinary occupations of life with a new spirit and a clean heart I could feel no longer.

I went oftener to confession than I had done before--twice a week to begin with, then every other day, then every day. But the old joy, the sense of purity and cleansing, did not come. I thought at first the fault might be with my Confessor, for though I knew I was in the presence of God, the whispering voice behind the grating, which used to thrill me with a feeling of the supernatural, was that of a young man, and I asked myself what a young priest could know by experience of the deep temptations of human love.

This was at the new Cathedral at Westminster, so I changed to a little Catholic church in a kind of mews in Mayfair, and there my Confessor was an older man whose quivering voice seemed to search the very depths of my being. He was deeply alarmed at my condition and counselled me to pray to God night and day to strengthen me against temptation.

"The Evil One is besieging your soul, my child," he said. "Fight with him, my daughter."

I tried to follow my ghostly father's direction, but how hard it was to do so! Martin had only to take my hand and look into my eyes and all my good resolutions were gone in a moment.

As a result of the fierce struggle between my heart and my soul my health began to fail me. From necessity now, and not from design, I had to keep my room, but even there my love for Martin was always hanging like a threatening sword over my head.

My maid Price was for ever singing his praises. He was so bright, so cheerful, so strong, so manly; in fact, he was perfect, and any woman in the world might be forgiven if she fell in love with him.

Her words were like music in my ears, and sometimes I felt as if I wanted to throw my arms about her neck and kiss her. But at other moments I reproved her, telling her it was very wicked of her to think so much of the creature instead of fixing her mind on the Creator--a piece of counsel which made Price, who was all woman, open her sparkling black eyes in bewilderment.

Nearly every morning she brought me a bunch of flowers, which Martin had bought at Covent Garden, all glittering from the sunshine and damp with the dew. I loved to have them near me, but, finding they tempted me to think more tenderly of him who sent them, I always contrived by one excuse or another to send them into the sitting-room that they might be out of my sight at all events.

After a while Price, remembering my former artifice, began to believe that I was only pretending to be ill, in order to draw Martin on, and then taking a certain liberty with me, as with a child, she reproved me.

"If I were a lady I couldn't have the heart," she said, "I really couldn't. It's all very well for us women, but men don't understand such ways. They're only children, men are, when you come to know them."

I began to look upon poor Price as a honeyed fiend sent by Satan to seduce me, and to say the truth she sometimes acted up to the character. One day she said:

"If I was tied to a man I didn't love, and who didn't love me, and somebody else, worth ten of him was ready and waiting, I would take the sweet with the bitter, I would. We women must follow our hearts, and why shouldn't we?"

Then I scolded her dreadfully, asking if she had forgotten that she was speaking to her mistress, and a married woman; but all the while I knew that it was myself, not my maid, I was angry with, for she had only been giving voice to the thoughts that were secretly tormenting me.

I had been in bed about a week when Price came with a letter in her hand and a look of triumph in her black eyes and said:

"There, my lady! What did I tell you? You've had it all your own way and now you've driven him off. He has left the hotel and gone to live on his ship."

This frightened me terribly, and partly for that reason I ordered her out of the room, telling her she must leave me altogether if she ever took such liberties again. But I'm sure she saw me, as she was going through the door, take up Martin's letter, which I had thrown on to the table, and press it to my lips.

The letter was of no consequence, it was merely to tell me that he was going down to Tilbury for a few days, to take possession of his old ship in the name of his company, but it said in a postscript:

"If there's anything I can do for you, pass me the word and I'll come up like quick-sticks."

"What can I do? What can I do?" I thought. Everything my heart desired my soul condemned as sinful, and religion had done nothing to liberate me from the pains of my guilty passion.

All this time my husband and Alma were busy with the gaieties of the London season, which was then in full swing, with the houses in Mayfair being ablaze every night, the blinds up and the windows open to cool the overheated rooms in which men and women could be seen dancing in closely-packed crowds.

One night, after Alma and my husband had gone to a reception in Grosvenor Square, I had a sudden attack of heart-strain and had to be put to bed, whereupon Price, who had realised that I was really ill, told Hobson, my husband's valet, to go after his master and bring him back immediately.

"It'll be all as one, but I'll go if you like," said Hobson.

In half an hour he came back with my husband's answer. "Send for a doctor."

This put Price into a fever of mingled anger and perplexity, and not knowing what else to do she telegraphed to Martin on his ship, telling him that I was ill and asking what doctor she ought to call in to see me.

Inside an hour a reply came not from Tilbury but from Portsmouth saying:

"Call Doctor ---- of Brook Street. Am coming up at once."

All this I heard for the first time when Price, with another triumphant look, came into my bedroom flourishing Martin's telegram as something she had reason to be proud of.

"You don't mean to say that you telegraphed to Mr. Conrad?" I said.

"Why _not?_" said Price. "When a lady is ill and her husband pays no attention to her, and there's somebody else not far off who would give his two eyes to save her a pain in her little finger, what is a woman to do?"

I told her what she was _not_ to do. She was not to call the doctor under any circumstances, and when Martin came she was to make it plain to him that she had acted on her own responsibility.

Towards midnight he arrived, and Price brought him into my room in a long ulster covered with dust. I blushed and trembled at sight of him, for his face betrayed the strain and anxiety he had gone through on my account, and when he smiled at seeing that I was not as ill as he had thought, I was ashamed to the bottom of my heart.

"You'll be sorry you've made such a long journey now that you see there's so little amiss with me," I said.

"Sorry?" he said. "By the holy saints, I would take a longer one every night of my life to see you looking so well at the end of it."

His blue eyes were shining like the sun from behind a cloud, and the cruellest looks could not have hurt me more.

I tried to keep my face from expressing the emotion I desired to conceal, and asked if he had caught a train easily from Portsmouth, seeing he had arrived so early.

"No. Oh no, there was no train up until eleven o'clock," he said.

"Then how did you get here so soon?" I asked, and though he would not tell me at first I got it out of him at last--he had hired a motor-car and travelled the ninety miles to London in two hours and a half.

That crushed me. I could not speak. I thought I should have choked. Lying there with Martin at arm's length of me, I was afraid of myself, and did not know what I might do next. But at last, with a great effort to control myself, I took his hand and kissed it, and then turned my face to the wall.

FIFTY-FIFTH CHAPTER

That was the beginning of the end, and when, next day towards noon, my husband came with drowsy eyes to make a kind of ungracious apology, saying he supposed the doctor had been sent for, I said:

"James, I want you to take me home."

"Home? You mean . . . Castle Raa?"

"Y-es."

He hesitated, and I began to plead with him, earnestly and eagerly, not to deny me what I asked.

"Take me home, I beg, I pray."

At length, seeming to think I must be homesick, he said:

"Well, you know my views about that God-forsaken place, but the season's nearly at an end, and I don't mind going back on one condition--that you raise no objection to my inviting a few friends to liven it up a bit?"

"It is your house," I said. "You must do as you please in it."

"Very good; that's settled," he said, getting up to go. "And I dare say it will do you no harm to be out of the way of all this church-going and confessing to priests, who are always depressing people even when they're not making mischief."

Hardly had my husband left me when Alma came into my sitting-room in the most affectionate and insincere of her moods.

"My poor, dear sweet child," she said. "If I'd had the least idea you were feeling so badly I shouldn't have allowed Jimmy to stay another minute at that tiresome reception. But how good it was of Mr. Conrad to come all that way to see you! That's what I call being a friend now!"

Then came the real object of her visit--I saw it coming.

"I hear you're to have a house-party at Castle Raa. Jimmy's in his room writing piles of invitations. He has asked me and I should love to go, but of course I cannot do so without _you_ wish it. Do you?"

What could I say? What I _did_ say I scarcely know. I only know that at the next minute Alma's arms were round my neck, and she was saying:

"You dear, sweet, unselfish little soul! Come let me kiss you."

It was done. I had committed myself. After all what right had I to raise myself on a moral pinnacle now? And what did it matter, anyway? I was flying from the danger of my own infidelities, not to save my husband from his.

Price had been in the room during this interview and when it was over I was ashamed to look at her.

"I can't understand you, my lady; I really can't," she said.

Next day I wrote a little letter to Martin on the _Scotia_ telling him of our change of plans, but forbidding him to trouble to come up to say good-bye, yet half hoping he would disregard my injunction.

He did. Before I left my bedroom next morning I heard his voice in the sitting-room talking to Price, who with considerable emphasis was giving her views of Alma.

When I joined him I thought his face (which had grown to be very powerful) looked hard and strained; but his voice was as soft as ever while he said I was doing right in going home and that my native air must be good for me.

"But what's this Price tells me--that Madame is going with you?"

I tried to make light of that, but I broke down badly, for his eyes were on me, and I could see that he thought I was concealing the truth.

For some minutes he looked perplexed, as if trying to understand how it came to pass that sickening, as he believed I was, at the sight of my husband's infidelities I was yet carrying the provocative cause of them away with me, and then he said again:

"I hate that woman. She's like a snake. I feel as if I want to put my foot on it. I will, too, one of these days--bet your life I will."

It hurt me to hide anything from him, but how could I tell him that it was not from Alma I was flying but from himself?

When the day came for our departure I hoped I might get away without seeing Martin again. We did get out of the hotel and into the railway station, yet no sooner was I seated in the carriage than (in the cruel war that was going on within me) I felt dreadfully down that he was not there to see me off.

But at the very last moment, just as Alma with her spaniel under her arm, and my husband with his terrier on a strap, were about to step into the train, up came Martin like a gust of mountain wind.

"Helloa!" he cried. "I shall be seeing you soon. Everything's settled about the expedition. We're to sail the first week in September, so as to get the summer months in the Antarctic. But before that I must go over to the island to say good-bye to the old folks, and I'll see you at your father's I suppose."

Then Alma gave my husband a significant glance and said:

"But, Mary, my love, wouldn't it be better for Mr. Conrad to come to Castle Raa? You won't be able to go about very much. Remember your delicate condition, you know."

"Of course, why of course," said my husband. "That's quite true, and if Mr. Conrad will do me the honour to accept my hospitality for a few days. . . ."

It was what I wanted above everything on earth, and yet I said:

"No, no! It wouldn't be fair. Martin will be too busy at the last moment."

But Martin himself jumped in eagerly with:

"Certainly! Delighted! Greatest pleasure in the world."

And then, while Alma gave my husband a look of arch triumph to which he replied with a painful smile, Martin leaned over to me and whispered"

"Hush! I want to! I must!" though what he meant by that I never knew.

He continued to look at me with a tender expression until we said good-bye; but after the carriage door had been closed and the engine had throbbed, and the guard had whistled, I thought I had never seen his strong face so stern as when the train moved from the platform.

FIFTY-SIXTH CHAPTER

We reached Ellan towards the close of the following day. It was the height of the holiday season, and the island seemed to be ablaze with lights.

Two motor-cars were waiting for us at the pier, and in a little while we were driving out of Blackwater through congested masses of people who were rambling aimlessly through the principal streets.

Our way was across a stone bridge that crossed the harbour at its inner end, and then up a hill that led to a headland overlooking the sea. Within half an hour we drew up at a pair of large gate posts which were much decayed and leaning heavily out of the perpendicular.

The chauffeur of the first of our ears got down to open the gate, and after it had clashed to behind us, we began to ascend a very steep drive that was bordered by tall elm trees. It was now almost dark, and the rooks, which had not yet gone off to the mountains, were making their evening clamour.

"Well, my dear, you're at home at last, and much good may it do you," said my husband.

I made no answer to this ungracious speech, but Alma was all excitement.

"So this is Castle Raa! What a fascinating old place!" she said, and as we drove through the park she reached out of the car to catch a first glimpse of the broad terraces and winding ways to the sea which had been reflected in her memory since she was a child.

I felt no such anxiety. Never did a young bride approach the home of her husband with less curiosity, but as our motor-car toiled up the drive I could not help seeing the neglected condition of the land, with boughs of trees lying where they had fallen in the storms, as well as broken gates half off their hinges and swinging to the wind.

The house itself, when we came in sight of it, was a large castellated building with many lesser turrets and one lofty octagonal tower, covered entirely with ivy, which, being apparently unshorn for years, hung in long trailers down the walls, and gave the whole pile the appearance of a huge moss-covered rock of the sea planted on a promontory of the land.

As our car went thundering up to the great hall door nearly the whole of the servants and some of the tenant farmers (under the direction of the tall, sallow man who had been my husband's guardian in former days, and was now his steward) were waiting to welcome us, as well as Lady Margaret Anselm, who was still reserved and haughty in her manner, though pleasant enough with me.

My husband nodded to all, shook hands with some, presented Alma to his aunt as "one of Mary's old school friends," (a designation which, as I could see, had gone ahead of her) and then we passed into the house.

I found the inside corresponded with the outside in its appearance of neglect and decay, the big square hall having rusty and disjointed armour on its wainscotted walls and the mark of water on the floor, which had come from a glass dome over the well of the stairs, for it had rained while we were on the sea.

The drawing-room had faded curtains over the windows, faded velvet on the square sofa and stiff chairs, faded carpets, faded samplers, and faded embroidery on faded screens.

The dining-room (the sedate original of my father's rather garish copy) was a panelled chamber, hung round with rubicund portraits of the male O'Neills from the early ones of the family who had been Lords of Ellan down to the "bad Lord Raa," who had sworn at my grandmother on the high road.

I felt as if no woman could have made her home here for at least a hundred years, and I thought the general atmosphere of the house was that of the days when spendthrift noblemen, making the island a refuge from debt, spent their days in gambling and their nights in drinking bumpers from bowls of whiskey punch to the nameless beauties they had left "in town."

They were all gone, all dead as the wood of the worm-eaten wainscotting, but the sound of their noisy merry-making seemed to cling to the rafters still, and as I went up to my rooms the broad oaken staircase seemed to be creaking under their drunken footsteps.

My own apartments, to which Lady Margaret conducted me, were on the southern side of the house--a rather stuffy bedroom with walls covered by a kind of pleated chintz, and a boudoir with a stone balcony that had a flight of steps going down to a terrace of the garden, which overlooked a glen and had a far view of the sea.

On the opposite side of the landing outside (which was not immediately off the great staircase though open to the view of it) there was a similar suite of rooms which I thought might be my husband's, but I was told they were kept for a guest.

Being left alone I had taken off my outer things and was standing on my balcony, listening to the dull hum of the water in the glen, the rustle of the trees above it, the surge of the sea on the rocks below, the creaking of a rusty weathercock and the striking of a court-yard clock, when I also heard the toot and throb of another motor-car, and as soon as it came up I saw that it contained Aunt Bridget in the half-moon bonnet and Betsy Beauty, who was looking more than ever like a country belle.

When I went down to the drawing-room Lady Margaret was pouring out tea for them, and at sight of me Aunt Bridget cried,

"Sakes alive, here she is herself!"

"But how pale and pinched and thin!" said Betsy Beauty.

"Nonsense, girl, that's only natural," said my Aunt Bridget, with something like a wink; and then she went on to say that she had just been telling her ladyship that if I felt lonely and a little helpless on first coming home Betsy would be pleased to visit me.

Before I could reply my husband came in, followed shortly by Alma, who was presented as before, as "Mary's old school-fellow"; and then, while Betsy talked to Alma and my husband to his kinswoman, Aunt Bridget, in an undertone, addressed herself to me.

"You're that way, aren't you? . . . No? Goodness me, girl, your father _will_ be disappointed!"

Just then a third motor-car came throbbing up to the house, and Betsy who was standing by the window cried:

"It's Uncle Daniel with Mr. Curphy and Nessy."

"Nessy, of course," said Aunt Bridget grumpily, and then she told me in a confidential whisper that she was a much-injured woman in regard to "that ungrateful step-daughter," who was making her understand the words of Scripture about the pang that was sharper than a serpent's tooth.

As the new-comers entered I saw that Nessy had developed an old maid's idea of smartness, and that my father's lawyer was more than ever like an over-fatted fish; but my father himself (except that his hair was whiter) was the same man still, with the same heavy step, the same loud voice and the same tempestuous gaiety.

"All here? Good! Glad to be home, I guess! Strong and well and hearty, I suppose? . . . Yes, sir, yes! I'm middling myself, sir. Middling, sir, middling!"

During these rugged salutations I saw that Alma, with the bad manners of a certain type of society woman, looked on with a slightly impertinent air of amused superiority, until she encountered my father's masterful eyes, which nobody in the world could withstand.

After a moment my father addressed himself to me.

"Well, gel," he said, taking me by the shoulders, as he did in Rome, "you must have cut a dash in Egypt, I guess. Made the money fly, didn't you? No matter! My gold was as good as anybody else's, and I didn't grudge it. You'll clear me of that, anyway."

Then there was some general talk about our travels, about affairs on the island (Mr. Curphy saying, with a laugh and a glance in my direction, that things were going so well with my father that if all his schemes matured he would have no need to wait for a descendant to become the "uncrowned King of Ellan"), and finally about Martin Conrad, whose great exploits had become known even in his native country.

"Extraordinary! Extraordinary!" said my father. "I wouldn't have believed it of him. I wouldn't really. Just a neighbour lad without a penny at him. And now the world's trusting him with fifty thousand pounds, they're telling me!"

"Well, many are called but few are chosen," said Mr. Curphy with another laugh.

After that, and some broken conversation, Aunt Bridget expressed a desire to see the house, as the evening was closing in and they must soon be going back.

Lady Margaret thereupon took her, followed by the rest of us, over the principal rooms of the Castle; and it was interesting to see the awe with which she looked upon everything--her voice dropping to a whisper in the dining-room. I remember, as if the scene of carousing of the old roysterers had been a sort of sanctuary.

My father, less impressed, saw nothing but a house in bad repair, and turning to my husband, who had been obviously ill at ease, he said:

"Go on like this much longer, son-in-law, and you'll be charging two-pence a head to look at your ruins. Guess I must send my architect over to see what he can do for you."

Then taking me aside he made his loud voice as low as he could and said:

"What's this your Aunt Bridget tells me? Nine months married and no sign yet? Tut, tut! That won't do, gel, that won't do."

I tried to tell him not to spend money on the Castle if he intended to do so in expectation of an heir, but my heart was in my mouth and what I really said I do not know. I only know that my father looked at me for a moment as if perplexed, and then burst into laughter.

"I see! I see!" he said. "It's a doctor you want. I must send Conrad to put a sight on you. It'll be all right, gel, it'll be all right! Your mother was like that when you were coming."

As we returned to the hall Betsy Beauty whispered that she was surprised Mr. Eastcliff had married, but she heard from Madame that we were to have a house-party soon, and she hoped I would not forget her.

Then Aunt Bridget, who had been eyeing Alma darkly, asked me who and what she was and where she came from, whereupon I (trying to put the best face on things) explained that she was the daughter of a rich New York banker. After that Aunt Bridget's countenance cleared perceptibly and she said:

"Ah, yes, of course! I thought she had a quality toss with her."

The two motor-cars had been drawn up to the door, and the two parties had taken their seats in them when my father, looking about him, said to my husband:

"Your garden is as rough as a thornbush, son-in-law. I must send Tommy the Mate to smarten it up a bit. So long! So long!"

At the next moment they were gone, and I was looking longingly after them. God knows my father's house had never been more than a stepmother's home to me, but at that moment I yearned to return to it and felt like a child who was being left behind at school.

What had I gained, by running away from London? Nothing at all. Already I knew I had brought my hopeless passion with me.

And now I was alone.

FIFTY-SEVENTH CHAPTER

Next day Lady Margaret came to my room to say good-bye, telling me she had only stayed at Castle Raa to keep house and make ready for me, and must now return to her own home, which was in London.

I was sorry, for my heart had warmed to her, and when I stood at the door and saw her drive off with my husband to catch the afternoon steamer, I felt I had lost both sympathy and protection.

Alma's feelings were less troubled, and as we turned back into the house I could see that she was saying to herself:

"Thank goodness, _she's_ gone away."

A day or two later Doctor Conrad came, according to my father's instructions, and I was glad to see his close-cropped iron-grey head coming up the stairs towards my room.

Naturally our first conversation was about Martin, who had written to tell his parents of our meeting in London and to announce his intended visit. It was all very exciting, and now his mother was working morning and night at the old cottage, to prepare for the arrival of her son. Such scrubbing and scouring! Such taking up of carpets and laying them down again, as if the darling old thing were expecting a prince!

"It ought to be Sunny Lodge indeed before she's done with it," said the Doctor.

"I'm sure it will," I said. "It always was, and it always will be."

"And how are we ourselves," said the doctor. "A little below par, eh? Any sickness? No? Nausea? No? Headache and a feeling of lassitude, then? No?"

After other questions and tests, the old doctor was looking puzzled, when, not finding it in my heart to keep him in the dark any longer, I told him there was nothing amiss with my health, but I was unhappy and had been so since the time of my marriage.

"I see," he said. "It's your mind and not your body that is sick?"

"Yes."

"I'll speak to Father Dan," he said. "Good-bye! God bless you!"

Less than half an hour after he had gone, Alma came to me in her softest mode, saying the doctor had said I was suffering from extreme nervous exhaustion and ought to be kept from worries and anxieties of every kind.

"So if there's anything I can do while I'm here, dearest, . . . such as looking after the house and the servants. . . . No, no, don't deny me; it will be a pleasure, I assure you. . . . So we'll say that's settled, shall we? . . . You dear, sweet darling creature!"

I was too much out of heart to care what happened, but inside two days I realised that Alma had taken possession of the house, and was ordering and controlling everything.

Apparently this pleased such of the servants as had anything to gain by it--the housekeeper in particular--for Alma was no skinflint and she was making my husband's money flow like water, but it was less agreeable to my maid, who said:

"This is a nice place to be sure, where the mistress takes no interest in anything, and the guest walks over everybody. She'll walk over the mistress herself before long--mark my word but she will."

It would be about a week after our arrival at Castle Raa that Price came to my room to say that a priest was asking for me, and he was such a strange-looking thing that she was puzzled to know if his face was that of a child, a woman or a dear old man.

I knew in a moment it must be Father Dan, so I went flying downstairs and found him in the hall, wearing the same sack coat (or so it seemed) as when I was a child and made cupboards of its vertical pockets, carrying the same funny little bag which he had taken to Rome and used for his surplice at funerals, and mopping his forehead and flicking his boots with a red print handkerchief, for the day was hot and the roads were dusty.

He was as glad to see me as I to see him, and when I asked if he would have tea, he said Yes, for he had walked all the way from the Presbytery, after fasting the day before; and when I asked if he would not stay overnight he said Yes to that, too, "if it would not be troublesome and inconvenient."

So I took his bag and gave it to a maid, telling her to take it to the guest's room on my landing, and to bring tea to my boudoir immediately.

But hardly had I taken him upstairs and we had got seated in my private room, when the maid knocked at the door to say that the housekeeper wished to speak with me, and on going out, and closing the door behind me, I found her on the landing, a prim little flinty person with quick eyes, thin lips and an upward lift of her head.

"Sorry, my lady, but it won't be convenient for his reverence to stay in the house to-night," she said.

"Why so?" I said.

"Because Madame has ordered all the rooms to be got ready for the house-party, and this one," (pointing to the guest's room opposite) "is prepared for Mr. and Mrs. Eastcliff, and we don't know how soon they may arrive."

I felt myself flushing up to the eyes at the woman's impudence, and it added to my anger that Alma herself was standing at the head of the stairs, looking on and listening. So with a little spurt of injured pride I turned severely on the one while really speaking to the other, and said:

"Be good enough to make this room ready for his reverence without one moment's delay, and please remember for the future, that I am mistress in this house, and your duty is to obey me and nobody else whatever."

As I said this and turned back to my boudoir, I saw that Alma's deep eyes had a sullen look, and I felt that she meant to square accounts with me some day; but what she did was done at once, for going downstairs (as I afterwards heard from Price) she met my husband in the hall, where, woman-like, she opened her battery upon him at his weakest spot, saying:

"Oh, I didn't know your wife was priest-ridden."

"Priest-ridden?"

"Precisely," and then followed an explanation of what had happened, with astonishing embellishments which made my husband pale with fury.

Meantime I was alone with Father Dan in my room, and while I poured out his tea and served him with bread and butter, he talked first about Martin (as everybody seemed to do when speaking to me), saying:

"He was always my golden-headed boy, and it's a mighty proud man I am entirely to hear the good news of him."

More of the same kind there was, all music to my ears, and then Father Dan came to closer quarters, saying Doctor Conrad had dropped a hint that I was not very happy.

"Tell your old priest everything, my child, and if there is anything he can do. . . ."

Without waiting for more words I sank to my knees at his feet, and poured out all my troubles--telling him my marriage had been a failure; that the sanctifying grace which he had foretold as the result of the sacrament of holy wedlock had not come to pass; that not only did I not love my husband, but my husband loved another woman, who was living here with us in this very house.

Father Dan was dreadfully distressed. More than once while I was speaking he crossed himself and said, "Lord and His Holy Mother love us;" and when I came to an end he began to reproach himself for everything, saying that he ought to have known that our lad (meaning Martin) did not write those terrible letters without being certain they were true, and that from the first day my husband came to our parish the sun had been darkened by his shadow.

"But take care," he said. "I've told nobody about the compact we made with your husband--nobody but our Blessed Lady herself--and you mustn't think of that as a way out of your marriage. No, nor of any other way, no matter what, which the world, and the children of the world, may talk about."

"But I can't bear it, I can't bear it," I cried.

"Hush! Hush! Don't say that, my daughter. Think of it as one of the misfortunes of life which we all have to suffer. How many poor women have to bear the sickness and poverty, not to speak of the drunkenness and death, of their husbands! Do they think they have a right to run away from all that--to break the sacred vows of their marriage on account of it? No, my child, no, and neither must you. Some day it will all come right. You'll see it will. And meantime by the memory of your mother--that blessed saint whom the Lord has made one of his own. . . ."

"Then what can I do?"

"Pray, my child, pray for strength to bear your trials and to resist all temptation. Say a rosary for the Blessed Virgin every morning before breaking your fast. I'll say a rosary, too. You'll see yet this is only God's love for you, and you'll welcome His holy will."

While my dear father and friend was counselling me so I heard my husband speaking in his loud, grating tones on the landing outside, and before I could rise from my knees he had burst open the door and entered the room.

His face was deadly white and he was like a man out of his right mind.

"Mary," he said, looking down at me where I knelt with my hands crossed on my bosom, "when did I give you permission to introduce a priest into my house? Isn't it enough for a man to have a wife who is a Catholic without having the church and its ministers shunted into his home without his permission?"

I was so taken aback by this furious assault that at first I could not speak, but Father Dan interposed to defend me, saying with beautiful patience, that his visit had been quite unexpected on my part, and that I had asked him to stay overnight only because he was an old man, and had had a long walk from his parish.

"I'm much obliged to your reverence," said my husband, who was quivering with fury, "but my wife is perfectly capable of answering for herself without your assistance, and as for your parish you would have done better to stay there instead of coming to meddle in this one."

"Aren't you measuring me by your own yard, sir?" said Father Dan, and at that straight thrust my husband broke into ungovernable rage.

"Everybody knows what a Popish priest is," he said. "A meddlesome busybody who pokes his nose into other men's secrets. But priest or no priest, I'll have no man coming to my house to make mischief between husband and wife."

"Are you sure," said Father Dan, "that some woman isn't in your house already, making mischief between wife and husband?"

That thrust too went home. My husband looked at me with flashing eyes and then said:

"As I thought! You've been sent for to help my wife to make a great to-do of her imaginary grievances. You're to stay in the house too, and before long we'll have you setting up as master here and giving orders to my servants! But not if I know it! . . . Your reverence, if you have any respect for your penitent, you'll please be good enough to leave my wife to _my_ protection."

I saw that Father Dan had to gulp down his gathering anger, but he only said:

"Say no more, my lord. No true priest ever comes between a man and the wife whom God has given him. It's his business to unite people, not to put them apart. As for this dear child, I have loved her since she was an infant in arms, and never so much as at the present speaking, so I don't need to learn my duty from one who appears to care no more for her than for the rind of a lemon. I'll go, sir," said the old man, drawing himself up like a wounded lion, "but it's not to your protection I leave her--it's to that of God's blessed and holy love and will."

My husband had gone before the last words were spoken, but I think they must have followed him as he went lunging down the stairs.

During this humiliating scene a hot flush of shame had come to my cheeks and I wanted to tell Father Dan not to let it grieve him, but I could do nothing but stoop and kiss his hand.

Meantime two or three of the servants had gathered on the landing at the sound of my husband's voice, and among them was the flinty housekeeper holding the Father's little bag, and she gave it back to him as he passed her.

Then, all being over, the woman came into my room, with an expression of victorious mischief in her eyes and said:

"Your ladyship had better have listened to them as knows, you see."

I was too benumbed by that cruel stroke to reply, but Price said enough for both of us.

"If them as knows," she said, "don't get out of this room inside two seconds they'll get their ugly faces slapped."

* * * * *

I thought I had reached the end of my power of endurance, and that night, before going to bed, while my maid was taking down my hair, and I was thinking of Martin and asking myself if I should put up with my husband's brutalities any longer, I heard her say:

"If I were a lady married to the wrong man, I'd have the right one if I had to go through the divorce court for him."

Now that was so exactly the thought that was running riot in my own tormented mind, that I flew at her like a wild cat, asking her how she dared to say anything so abominably wicked, and telling her to take her notice there and then.

But hardly had she left the room, when my heart was in my mouth again, and I was trembling with fear lest she should take me at my word and then the last of my friends would be gone.

FIFTY-EIGHTH CHAPTER

Within the next few days the house-party arrived. There would be twenty of them at least, not counting valets and ladies' maids, so that large as Castle Raa was the house was full.

They were about equally divided as to sex and belonged chiefly to my husband's class, but they included Mr. Eastcliff's beautiful wife, Camilla, and Alma's mother, who, much to Alma's chagrin, had insisted upon being invited.

My husband required me to receive them, and I did so, though I was only their nominal hostess, and they knew it and treated me accordingly.

I should be ashamed to speak of the petty slights they put upon me, how they consulted Alma in my presence and otherwise wounded my pride as a woman by showing me that I had lost my own place in my husband's house.

I know there are people of the same class who are kind and considerate, guileless and pure, the true nobility of their country--women who are devoted to their homes and children, and men who spend their wealth and strength for the public good--but my husband's friends were not of that kind.

They were vain and proud, selfish, self-indulgent, thoroughly insincere, utterly ill-mannered, shockingly ill-informed, astonishingly ill-educated (capable of speaking several languages but incapable of saying a sensible word in any of them), living and flourishing in the world without religion, without morality, and (if it is not a cant phrase to use) without God.

What their conduct was when out shooting, picnicking, driving, riding, motoring, and yachting (for Mr. Eastcliff had arrived in his yacht, which was lying at anchor in the port below the glen), I do not know, for "doctor's orders" were Alma's excuse for not asking me to accompany them.

But at night they played bridge (their most innocent amusement), gambled and drank, banged the piano, danced "Grizzly Bears," sang duets from the latest musical comedies, and then ransacked the empty houses of their idle heads for other means of killing the one enemy of their existence--Time.

Sometimes they would give entertainments in honour of their dogs, when all the animals of all the guests (there seemed to be a whole kennel of them) would be dressed up in coats of silk and satin with pockets and pocket-handkerchiefs, and then led downstairs to the drawing-room, where Alma's wheezy spaniel and my husband's peevish terrier were supposed to receive them.

Sometimes they would give "freak dinners," when the guests themselves would be dressed up, the men in women's clothes, the women in men's, the male imitating the piping treble of the female voices, and the female the over-vowelled slang of the male, until, tiring of this foolishness, they would end up by flinging the food at the pictures on the walls, the usual pellet being softened bread and the favourite target the noses in the family portraits, which, hit and covered with a sprawling mess, looked so ridiculous as to provoke screams of laughter.

The talk at table was generally of horses and dogs, but sometimes it was of love, courtship and marriage, including conjugal fidelity, which was a favourite subject of ridicule, with both the women and the men.

Thus my husband would begin by saying (he often said it in my hearing) that once upon a time men took their wives as they took their horses, on trial for a year and a day, and "really with some women there was something to say for the old custom."

Then Mr. Vivian would remark that it was "a jolly good idea, by Jove," and if he "ever married, by the Lord that's just what he would do."

Then Mr. Eastcliff would say that it was a ridiculous superstition that a woman should have her husband all to herself, "as if he were a kind of toothbrush which she could not share with anybody else," and somebody would add that she might as reasonably want her dentist or her hairdresser to be kept for her own use only.

After that the ladies, not to be left behind, would join in the off-hand rattle, and one of them would give it as her opinion that a wife might have an incorrigibly unfaithful husband, and yet be well off.

"Ugh!" said Alma one night, shrugging her shoulders. "Think of a poor woman being tied for life to an entirely faithful husband!"

"I adore the kind of man who goes to the deuce for a woman--Parnell, and Gambetta and Boulanger and that sort," said a "smart" girl of three or four-and-twenty, whereupon Camilla Eastcliff (she was a Russian) cried:

"That's vhy the co-respondents in your divorce courts are so sharming. They're like the villayns in the plays--always so dee-lightfully vicked."

Oh, the sickening horror of it all! Whether it was really moral corruption or only affectation and pose, it seemed equally shocking, and though I bore as much of it as I could with a cheerful face, I escaped as often as possible to the clean atmosphere of my own room.

But even there I was not always allowed to be alone, for Alma's mother frequently followed me. She was a plump little person in a profuse ornamentation of diamond rings and brooches, with little or no education, and a reputation for saying risky things in blundering French whereof the principal humour lay in the uncertainty as to whether she knew their meaning or not.

Nevertheless she was the only good-hearted woman in the house, and I really believe she thought she was doing a kind act in keeping me company. But oh, how I suffered from her long accounts of her former "visits" to my house, whereby I learned, without wishing to, what her origin had been (the daughter of a London postman); what position she had held in Castle Raa in her winsome and reckless youth (one that need not be defined); how she had met her husband in New York and he had married her to save the reputation of his child; and finally how the American ladies of society had refused to receive her, and she had vowed to be revenged on them by marrying Alma to the highest title in Europe that could be bought with money.

"I was just like your father, my dear. I never did no manner of harm to those people. They used to think I thought myself better blood nor they were, but I never thought no such thing, I assure you. Only when they turned nasty after my marriage I made up my mind--just as your father did--as Alma should marry a bigger husband nor any of them, even if he wasn't worth a dime and 'adn't a 'air on 'is 'ead."

But even these revelations about herself were less humiliating than her sympathy with me, which implied that I was not fitted to be mistress of a noble house--how could it be expected of me?--whereas Alma was just as if she had been born to it, and therefore it was lucky for me that I had her there to show me how to do things.

"Alma's gotten such _ton!_ Such distangy manners!" she would say.

The effect of all this was to make me feel, as I had never felt before, the intolerable nature of the yoke I was living under. When I looked into the future and saw nothing before me but years of this ignoble bondage, I told myself that nothing--no sacrament or contract, no law of church or state--could make me endure it.

From day to day my maid came to me with insidious hints about Alma and my husband. I found myself listening to them. I also found myself refreshing my memory of the hideous scene in Paris, and wondering why I had condoned the offence by staying an hour longer under my husband's protection.

And then there was always another force at work within me--my own secret passion. Though sometimes I felt myself to be a wretched sinner and thought the burden I had to bear was heaven's punishment for my guilty love, at other times my whole soul rose in revolt, and I cried out not merely for separation from my husband but for absolute sundering.

Twice during the painful period of the house-party I heard from Martin. His first letter was full of accounts of the far-reaching work of his expedition--the engaging of engineers, electricians, geologists and masons, and the shipping of great stores of wireless apparatus--for his spirits seemed to be high, and life was full of good things for him.

His second letter told me that everything was finished, and he was to visit the island the next week, going first to "the old folks" and coming to me for a few days immediately before setting sail.

That brought matters to a head, and compelled me to take action.

It may have been weak of me, but not wanting a repetition of the scene with Father Dan, (knowing well that Martin would not bear it with the same patience) I sent the second letter to Alma, asking if the arrangement would be agreeable. She returned it with the endorsement (scribbled in pencil across the face), "Certainly; anything to please _you_, dear."

I submitted even to that. Perhaps I was a poor-spirited thing, wanting in proper pride, but I had a feeling that it was not worth while to waste myself in little squibs of temper, because an eruption was coming (I was sure of that) in which Martin would be concerned on my side, and then everybody and everything would be swept out of the path of my life for ever.

Martin came. In due course I read in the insular newspapers of his arrival on the island--how the people had turned out in crowds to cheer him at the pier, and how, on reaching our own village the neighbours (I knew the names of all of them) had met him at the railway station and taken him to his mother's house, and then lighted fires on the mountains for his welcome home.

It cut me to the heart's core to think of Martin amid thrilling scenes like those while I was here among degrading scenes like these. My love for Martin was now like a wound and I resolved that, come what might, before he reached Castle Raa I should liberate myself from the thraldom of my false position.

Father Dan's counsels had faded away by this time. Though I had prayed for strength to bear my burden there had been no result, and one morning, standing before the figure of the Virgin in my bedroom, I felt an impulse to blow out her lamp and never to light it again.

The end of it all was that I determined to see the Bishop and my father's advocate, Mr. Curphy, and perhaps my father himself, that I might know one way or the other where I was, and what was to become of me. But how to do this I could not see, having a houseful of people who were nominally my guests.

Fortune--ill-fortune--favoured me. News came that my father had suddenly fallen ill of some ailment that puzzled the doctors, and making this my reason and excuse I spoke to my husband, asking if I might go home for two or three days.

"Why not?" he said, in the tone of one who meant, "Who's keeping you?"

Then in my weakness I spoke to Alma, who answered:

"Certainly, my sweet girl. We shall miss you _dreadfully_, but it's your duty. And then you'll see that _dear_ Mr. . . . What d'ye callum?"

Finally, feeling myself a poor, pitiful hypocrite, I apologised for my going away to the guests also, and they looked as if they might say: "We'll survive it, perhaps."

The night before my departure my maid said:

"Perhaps your ladyship has forgotten that my time's up, but I'll stay until you return if you want me to."

I asked her if she would like to stay with me altogether and she said:

"Indeed I should, my lady. Any woman would like to stay with a good mistress, if she _is_ a little quick sometimes. And if you don't want me to go to your father's I may be of some use to you here before you come back again."

I saw that her mind was still running on divorce, but I did not reprove her now, for mine was turning in the same direction.

Next morning most of the guests came to the hail door to see me off, and they gave me a shower of indulgent smiles as the motor-car moved away.

FIFTY-NINTH CHAPTER

Before going to my father's house I went to the Bishop's. Bishop's Court is at the other side of the island, and it was noon before I drove under its tall elm trees, in which a vast concourse of crows seemed to be holding a sort of general congress.

The Bishop was then at his luncheon, and after luncheon (so his liveried servant told me) he usually took a siesta. I have always thought it was unfortunate for my interview that it came between his food and his sleep.

The little reception-room into which I was shown was luxuriously, not to say gorgeously, appointed, with easy chairs and sofas, a large portrait of the Pope, signed by the Holy Father himself, and a number of pictures of great people of all kinds--dukes, marquises, lords, counts--as well as photographs of fashionable ladies in low dress inscribed in several languages to "My dear Father in God the Lord Bishop of Ellan."

The Bishop came to me after a few minutes, smiling and apparently at peace with all the world. Except that he wore a biretta he was dressed--as in Rome--in his long black soutane with its innumerable buttons, his silver-buckled shoes, his heavy gold chain and jewelled cross.

He welcomed me in his smooth and suave manner, asking if he could offer me a little refreshment; but, too full of my mission to think of eating and drinking, I plunged immediately into the object of my visit.

"Monsignor," I said, "I am in great trouble. It is about my marriage."

The smile was smitten away from the Bishop's face by this announcement.

"I am sorry," he said. "Nothing serious, I trust?"

I told him it was very serious, and straightway I began on the spiritual part of my grievance--that my husband did not love me, that he loved another woman, that the sacred sacrament of my marriage. . . .

"Wait," said the Bishop, and he rose to close the window, for the clamour of the crows was deafening--a trial must have been going on in the trees. Returning to his seat he said:

"Dear lady, you must understand that there is one offence, and only one, which in all Christian countries and civilised communities is considered sufficient to constitute a real and tangible grievance. Have you any evidence of that?"

I knew what he meant and I felt myself colouring to the roots of my hair. But gulping down my shame I recounted the story of the scene in Paris and gave a report of my maid's charges and surmises.

"Humph!" said the Bishop, and I saw in a moment that he was going to belittle my proofs.

"Little or no evidence of your own, apparently. Chiefly that of your maid. And ladies' maids are notorious mischief-makers."

"But it's true," I said. "My husband will not deny it. He cannot."

"So far as I am able to observe what passes in the world," said the Bishop, "men in such circumstances always can and do deny it."

I felt my hands growing moist under my gloves. I thought the Bishop was trying to be blind to what he did not wish to see.

"But I'm right, I'm sure I'm right," I said.

"Well, assuming you _are_ right, what is it, dear lady, that you wish me to do?"

For some minutes I felt like a fool, but I stammered out at length that I had come for his direction and to learn what relief the Church could give me.

"H'm!" said the Bishop, and then crossing one leg over the other, and fumbling the silver buckle of his shoe, he said:

"The Church, dear lady, does indeed provide alleviation in cases of dire necessity. It provides the relief of separation--always deploring the necessity and hoping for ultimate reconciliation. But to sanction the separation of a wife from her husband because--pardon me, I do not say this is your case--she finds that he does not please her, or because--again I do not say this is your case--she fancies that somebody else pleases her better. . . ."

"Monsignor," I said, feeling hot and dizzy, "we need not discuss separation. I am thinking of something much more serious."

Never shall I forget the expression of the Bishop's face. He looked aghast.

"My good lady, surely you are not thinking of divorce?"

I think my head must have dropped as in silent assent, for in a peremptory and condemnatory manner the Bishop took me to task, asking if I did not know that the Catholic Church did not recognise divorce under any circumstances, and if I had forgotten what the Holy Father himself (pointing up to the portrait) had said to me--that when I entered into the solemn contract of holy matrimony I was to do so in the full consciousness that it could not be broken but by death.

"The love in which husband and wife contract to hold each other in holy wedlock is typified by the love of Christ for His Church, and as the one can never be broken, neither can the other."

"But my husband does not love me," I said. "Neither do I love him, and therefore the contract between us is broken already."

The Bishop was very severe with me for this, telling me that as a good child of the Church, I must never, never say that again, for though marriage was a contract it differed from all other contracts whatsoever.

"When you married your husband, dear lady, you were bound to him not by your own act alone, but by a mysterious power from which neither of you can ever free yourself. The power that united you was God, and whom God has joined together no man may put asunder."

I felt my head drooping. The Bishop was saying what I had always been taught, though in the torment of my trouble and the fierce fire of my temptation I had forgotten it.

"The civil law _might_ divorce you," continued the Bishop. "I don't know--I can say nothing about that. But it would have _no right_ to do so because the law can have no right to undo what God Himself has done."

Oh, it was cruel! I felt as if the future of my life were darkening before me--as if the iron bars of a prison were closing upon me, and fetters were being fixed on every limb.

"But even if the civil law _could_ and _would_ divorce you," said the Bishop, "think of the injury you would be inflicting on the Church. Yours was what is called a mixed marriage, and the Church does not favour such marriages, but it consented in this case, and why? Because it hoped to bring back an erring family in a second generation to the fold of the faith. Yet what would you be doing? Without waiting for a second generation you would he defeating its purpose."

A cold chill seemed to creep to my heart at these words. Was it the lost opportunity the Bishop was thinking of, instead of the suffering woman with her bruised and bleeding soul?

I rose to go. The Bishop rose with me, and began to counsel forgiveness.

"Even if you _have_ suffered injury, dear lady," he said--"I don't say you haven't--isn't it possible to forgive? Remember, forgiveness is a divine virtue, enjoined on us all, and especially on a woman towards the man she has married. Only think! How many women have to practise it--every day, all the world over!"

"Ah, well!" I said, and walked to the door.

The Bishop walked with me, urging me, as a good daughter of the Church, to live at peace with my husband, whatever his faults, and when my children came (as please God they would) to "instil into them the true faith with all a mother's art, a mother's tenderness," so that the object of my marriage might be fulfilled, and a good Catholic become the heir to Castle Raa.

"So the Church can do nothing for me?" I said.

"Nothing but pray, dear lady," said the Bishop.

When I left him my heart was in fierce rebellion; and, since the Church could do nothing, I determined to see if the law could do anything, so I ordered my chauffeur to drive to the house of my father's advocate at Holmtown.

The trial in the trees was over by this time, and a dead crow tumbled from one of the tall elms as we passed out of the grounds.

Holmtown is a little city on the face of our bleak west coast, dominated by a broad stretch of sea, and having the sound of the waves always rumbling over it. Mr. Curphy's house faced the shore and his office was an upper room plainly furnished with a writing desk, a deal table, laden with law books and foolscap papers, a stiff arm-chair, covered with American leather, three or four coloured engravings of judges in red and ermine, a photograph of the lawyer himself in wig and gown, an illuminated certificate of his membership of a legal society, and a number of lacquered tin boxes, each inscribed with the name of a client--the largest box bearing the name of "Daniel O'Neill."

My father's advocate received me with his usual bland smile, gave me his clammy fat hand, put me to sit in the arm-chair, hoped my unexpected visit did not presage worse news from the Big house, and finally asked me what he could do.

I told my story over again, omitting my sentimental grievances and coming quickly, and with less delicacy, to the grosser facts of my husband's infidelity.

The lawyer listened with his head aside, his eyes looking out on the sea and his white fingers combing his long brown beard, and before I had finished I could see that he too, like the Bishop, had determined to see nothing.

"You may be right," he began. . . .

"I _am_ right!" I answered.

"But even if you _are_, I am bound to tell you that adultery is not enough of itself as a ground for divorce."

"Not enough?"

"If you were a man it would be, but being a woman you must establish cruelty as well."

"Cruelty? Isn't it all cruelty?" I asked.

"In the human sense, yes; in the legal sense, no," answered the lawyer.

And then he proceeded to explain to me that in this country, unlike some others, before a woman could obtain a divorce from her husband she had to prove that he had not only been unfaithful to her, but that he had used violence to her, struck her in the face perhaps, threatened her or endangered her life or health.

"Your husband hasn't done that, has he? No? I thought not. After all he's a gentleman. Therefore there is only one other ground on which you could establish a right to divorce, namely desertion, and your husband is not likely to run away. In fact, he couldn't. It isn't to his interest. We've seen to all that--_here_," and smiling again, the lawyer patted the top of the lacquered box that bore my father's name.

I was dumbfounded. Even more degrading than the fetters whereby the Church bound me to my marriage were the terms on which the law would release me.

"But assuming that you _could_ obtain a divorce," said the lawyer, "what good would it do you? You would have to relinquish your title."

"I care nothing about my title," I replied.

"And your position."

"I care nothing about that either."

"Come, come," said the lawyer, patting my arm as if I had been an angry child on the verge of tears. "Don't let a fit of pique or spleen break up a marriage that is so suitable from the points of property and position. And then think of your good father. Why did he spend all that money in setting a ruined house on its legs again? That he might carry on his name in a noble family, and through your children, and your children's children. . . ."

"Then the law can do nothing for me?" I said, feeling sick and sore.

"Sorry, very sorry, but under present conditions, as far as I can yet see, nothing," said the lawyer.

"Good-day, sir," I said, and before he could have known what I was doing I had leapt up, left the room, and was hurrying downstairs.

My heart was in still fiercer rebellion now. I would go home. I would appeal to my father. Hard as he had always been with me he was at least a man, not a cold abstraction, like the Church and the law, without bowels of compassion or sense of human suffering.

SIXTIETH CHAPTER

Although I had sent word that I was coming home, there was no one to welcome me when I arrived.

Aunt Bridget was out shopping, and Betsy Beauty (in the sulks with me, as I afterwards heard, for not asking her to the house-party) had run upstairs on hearing our horn, so I went direct to my father's room.

Nessy MacLeod answered my knock, but instead of opening the door to let me in, she slid out like a cat and closed it behind her. Never had her ungainly figure, her irregular features, and her red head seemed to me so repugnant. I saw at once that she was giving herself the airs of housekeeper, and I noticed that she was wearing the bunch of keys which used to dangle from Aunt Bridget's waist when I was a child.

"Your father is ill," she said.

I told her I knew that, and it was one of the reasons I was there.

"Seriously ill," she said, standing with her back to the door. "The doctor says he is to be kept perfectly quiet."

Indignant at the effrontery of the woman who was trying to keep me out of my father's room, I said:

"Let me pass, please."

"S'sh! He has a temperature, and I don't choose that anybody shall disturb him to-day."

"Let me pass," I repeated, and I must have pitched my voice so high that my father heard it.

"Is that Mary?" came from the other side of the door, whereupon Nessy beat a retreat, and at the next moment I was in my father's room.

His massive and powerful head was propped up with pillows in the camp-bed which was all he ever slept on, and he was looking so ill and changed in so short a time that I was shocked, as well as ashamed at the selfishness of having thought only of myself all the morning.

But he would listen to no sympathy, protesting there was little or nothing the matter with him, that "Conrad was croaking about cancer," but the doctor was a fool.

"What about yourself, though?" he said. "Great doings at the Castle, they're telling me."

I thought this a favourable opportunity to speak about my own affairs, so I began on my story again, and though I found it harder to tell now that my listener was my father, I struggled on and on, as well as I could for the emotion that was choking me.

I thought he would pity me. I expected him to be angry. Although he was showing me some of the contemptuous tenderness which he had always assumed towards my mother, yet I was his daughter, and I felt sure that he would want to leap out of bed that he might take my husband by the throat and shake him as a terrier shakes a rat. But what happened was something quite different.

Hardly had I begun when he burst out laughing.

"God bless my soul," he cried, "you're never going to lose your stomach over a thing like that?"

I thought he had not understood me, so I tried to speak plainer.

"I see," he said. "Sweethearting some other woman, is he? Well, what of it? He isn't the first husband who has done the like, and I guess he won't be the last."

Still I thought I had not made myself clear, so I said my husband had been untrue to me, that his infidelities under my own roof had degraded me in my own eyes and everybody else's, that I could not bear to live such a life any longer and consequently. . . .

"Consequently," said my father, "you come to me to fight your battles for you. No, no, fight them yourself, gel. No father-in-law ought to interfere."

It was a man's point of view I suppose, but I was ready to cry with vexation and disappointment, and though I conquered the impulse to do that I could go no farther.

"Who's the woman?" he asked.

I told him it was one of our house-party.

"Then cut her out. I guess you're clever enough to do it, whoever she is. You've got the looks too, and I don't grudge you the money. Cut her out--that's the best advice I can give you. Make your husband see you're the better woman of the two. Cut her out, I'm saying, and don't come whining here like a cry-baby, who runs to her grandmother's apron-strings at the first scratch she gets outside."

He had been reaching forward, but he now fell back on his pillows, saying:

"I see how it is, though. Women without children are always vapouring about their husbands, as if married life ought to be a garden of Eden. One woman, one man, and all the rest of the balderdash. I sot your Aunt Bridget on you before, gel, and I'll have to do it again I'm thinking. But go away now. If I'm to get better I must have rest. Nessy!" (calling) "I've a mort o' things to do and most everything is on my shoulders. Nessy! My medicine! Nessy! Nessy! Where in the world has that girl gone to?"

"I'm here, Daniel," said Nessy MacLeod coming back to the room; and as I went out and passed down the corridor, with a crushed and broken spirit and the tears ready to gush from my eyes, I heard her coaxing him in her submissive and insincere tones, while he blamed and scolded her.

Half an hour afterwards Aunt Bridget came to me in my mother's room. Never in my life before had I been pleased to see her. She, at least, would see my situation with a woman's eyes. But I was doomed to another disappointment.

"Goodness me, girl," she cried, "what's this your father tells me? One of your own guests, is it? That one with the big eyes I'll go bail. Well, serve you right, I say, for bringing a woman like that into the house with your husband--so smart and such a quality toss with her. If you were lonely coming home why didn't you ask your aunt or your first cousin? There would have been no trouble with your husband then--not about me at all events. But what are you thinking of doing?"

"Getting a divorce," I answered, firmly, for my heart was now aflame.

If I had held a revolver in Aunt Bridget's face she could not have looked more shocked.

"Mary O'Neill, are you mad?" she cried. "Divorce indeed! No woman of our family has ever disgraced herself like that. What will your father say? What's to happen to Betsy Beauty? What are people going to think about me?"

I answered that I had not made my marriage, and those who had made it must take the consequences.

"What does that matter now? Hundreds of thousands of women have married the wrong man of their own free will, but if every woman who has made a rue-bargain were to try to get out of it your way where would the world be, I wonder? Perhaps you think you could marry somebody else, but you couldn't. What decent man wants to marry a divorced woman even if she _is_ the injured party?"

"Then you think I ought to submit--tamely submit to such infidelities?" I asked.

"Sakes alive," said Aunt Bridget, "what else can you do? Men are polygamous animals, and we women have to make up our minds to it. Goodness knows I had to when the old colonel used to go hanging around those English barmaids at the 'Cock and Hen.' Be a little blind, girl--that's what nine wives out of ten have to be every day and every night and all the world over."

"Will that make my husband any better?" I asked.

"I don't say it will," said Aunt Bridget. "It will make _you_ better, though. What the eye doesn't see the heart doesn't grieve for. That's something, isn't it?"

When I went to bed that night my whole soul was in revolt. The Church, the law, society, parental power, all the conventions and respectabilities seemed to be in a conspiracy to condone my husband's offence and to make me his scapegoat, doomed to a life of hypocrisy and therefore immorality and shame. I would die rather than endure it. Yes, I would die that very day rather than return to my husband's house and go through the same ordeal again.

But next morning when I thought of Martin, as I always did on first awakening, I told myself that I would live and be a clean woman in my own eyes _whatever the World might think of me_.

Martin was now my only refuge, so I would tell him everything. It would be hard to do that, but no matter, I would crush down my modesty and tell him everything. And then, whatever he told me to do I should do it.

I knew quite well what my resolution meant, what it implied and involved, but still I thought, "_Whatever he tells me to do I will do it_."

I remembered what the Countess in Rome had said about a life of "complete emancipation" as an escape from unhappy marriage, and even yet I thought "_Whatever he tells me to do I will do it_."

After coming to that conclusion I felt more at ease and got up to dress.

It was a beautiful morning, and I looked down into the orchard, where the apples were reddening under the sunshine and the gooseberries were ripening under their hanging boughs, when in the quiet summer air I heard a footstep approaching.

An elderly woman in an old-fashioned quakerish bonnet was coming up the drive. She carried a little bunch of red and white roses, and her face, which was very sweet and simple, wore the pathetic expression of a child in trouble.

It was Martin's mother. She was coming to see me, and at the first sight of her something told me that my brave resolution was about to be broken, and I was going to be shaken to the depths of my being.

I heard the bell of the front door ringing. After a moment a maid came up and said:

"Mrs. Doctor Conrad has called to see your ladyship."

"Bring her here," I answered.

My heart was in my mouth already.

SIXTY-FIRST CHAPTER

When Martin's mother came into the room she looked nervous and almost frightened, as if she had charged herself with a mission which she was afraid to fulfil. But I put her to sit in my mother's easy chair and sat on the arm of it myself, and then she seemed calmer and more comfortable.

In spite of the silver threads in the smooth hair under her poke bonnet her dear face was still the face of a child, and never before had it seemed to me so helpless and child-like.

After a moment we began to talk of Martin. I said it must be a great happiness to her to have him back after his long and perilous voyage; and she answered that it was, but his visit was so short, only four days altogether, although the doctor and she had looked forward to it so long.

"That's not Martin's fault, though," she said. "He's such a good son. I really, really think no mother ever had such a good son. But when children grow up they can't always be thinking of the old people, can they? That's why I say to the doctor, 'Doctor,' I say, 'perhaps we were the same ourselves when we were young and first loved each other.'"

Already I thought I saw vaguely what the dear soul had come to tell me, but I only said I supposed Martin was still with them.

She told me no, he had gone to King George's. That was his old school, and being prize-giving day the masters had asked him to the sports and to the dinner that was to be given that night before the breaking-up for the holidays.

"The boys will give him a cheer, I know they will," she said.

I said of course he would be back to-morrow, but again she said no; he had gone for good, and they had said good-bye to him. When he left King George's he was to go on to Castle Raa. Didn't I know that? He had said he would telegraph to me. But being from home perhaps I had not yet received his message. Oh yes, he was going on to the Castle to-morrow night and would stay there until it was time to leave the island.

"I'm so glad," I said, hardly knowing with what fervour I had said it, until I saw the same expression of fear come back to the sweet old face.

"Martin will be glad, too," she said, "and that's why I've come to see you."

"That?"

"You won't be cross with me, will you? But Martin is so fond of you. . . . He always has been fond of you, ever since he was a boy . . . but this time. . . ."

"Yes?"

"This time I thought . . . I really, really thought he was too fond of you."

I had to hold my breast to keep down the cry of joy that was rising to my throat, but the dear soul saw nothing.

"Not that he said so--not to say said so, but it's a mother to see things, isn't it? And he was talking and talking so much about Mary O'Neill that I was frightened--really frightened."

"Frightened?"

"He's so tender-hearted, you see. And then you . . . you're such a wonderful woman grown. Tommy the Mate says there hasn't been the like of you on this island since they laid your mother under the sod. It's truth enough, too--gospel truth. And Martin--Martin says there isn't your equal, no, not in London itself neither. So . . . so," she said, trembling and stammering, "I was thinking . . . I was thinking he was only flesh and blood like the rest of us, poor boy, and if he got to be _too_ fond of you . . . now that you're married and have a husband, you know. . . ."

The trembling and stammering stopped her for a moment.

"They're saying you are not very happy in your marriage neither. Times and times I've heard people saying he isn't kind to you, and they married you against your will. . . . So I was telling myself if that's so, and Martin and you came together now, and you encouraged him, and let him go on and anything came of it . . . any trouble or disgrace or the like of that . . . it would be such a terrible cruel shocking thing for the boy . . . just when everybody's talking about him and speaking so well too."

It was out at last. Her poor broken-hearted story was told. Being a married woman, unhappily married, too, I was a danger to her beloved son, and she had come to me in her sweet, unmindful, motherly selfishness to ask me to protect him _against myself_.

"Whiles and whiles I've been thinking of it," she said. "'What will I do?' I've been asking myself, and sometimes I've been thinking I would speak to Martin. I didn't dare do it, though. But when I heard last night that you had come home to see your father, I said: 'Doctor, I'll go over and speak to herself.' 'You'll never do that, Christian Ann,' said the doctor. 'Yes, I will,' I said. 'I'll speak to the young mistress herself. She may be a great lady now, but haven't I nursed her on my knee? She'll never do anything to harm my boy, if I ask her not to. No indeed she won't. Not Mary O'Neill. I'll never believe it of her. Never in this world.'"

The sweet old face was beaming but it was wet with tears, too, and while trying to get out her pocket-handkerchief, she was fumbling with the flowers which she was still holding and passing from hand to hand.

"Let me take the roses," I said as well as I could, for I could scarcely say anything.

"I brought them for you," she said, and then she laughed, a little confusedly, at her own forgetfulness.

"To be sure they're nothing to the green-house ones you'll have at the Castle, but I thought you'd like them for all that. They're from the tree outside the window of your own little room. We call it your room still--the one you slept in when you came in your little velvet frock and pinnie, singing carols to my door. 'Mary O'Neill's room,' Martin called it then, and it's been the same to us ever since."

This touched me so deeply that, before I knew what I was doing, I was putting my arm about her waist and asking her to tell me what she wished me to do and I would do it.

"Will you, though?" she said, and then one by one she propounded the artless little schemes she had concocted to cure Martin of what she conceived to be his love for me.

Her first thought was that I might make excuse of my father's illness to remain where I was until the time came for Martin to leave the island; but she repented of this almost immediately, remembering that Martin was set on seeing me, ('I _must_ see her,' he had said) and if he did not see me he would be so downhearted.

Then she thought I might praise up my husband to Martin, saying what a fine man he was to be sure, and how good he had been to me, and what a proud woman I was to be married to him; but she was ashamed of that almost as soon as she had said it, for it might not be true, and Martin might see I was pretending.

Finally, she suggested that in order to create a coolness between Martin and myself I might try not to be so nice to him, speaking short to him sometimes, and even harsh and angry; but no, that would be too cruel, especially from me, after all these years, just when he was going so far away, too, and only the Lord and the blessed saints knew what was to become of him.

It was Martin, Martin, always Martin. Still in her sweet motherly selfishness she could think of nobody else. Fondly as she loved me, it never occurred to her for a moment that if I did what she wished and sent Martin away from me, I too would suffer. But a harder heart than mine would have melted at the sight of her perplexity and distress, and when with a helpless look she said:

"I don't know what you are to do--I really, really don't," I comforted her (needing comfort so much myself), and told her I would find a way of my own to do what she desired.

"Will you, though?" she said.

"Indeed I will."

"And you won't send him away sore-hearted, either?"

"Indeed I won't."

"I knew you would say that. May the Lord and His holy Mother bless you!"

She was weeping tender, copious, blessed tears by this time, but there were smiles behind them.

"Not that there's another woman in the world I would rather give him to if things were as they used to be. But they're different now, are they not?" she asked.

"Yes, they're different now," I answered.

"But are you sure you're not cross with me for coming?"

"Oh, no, no," I said, and it was all I _could_ say for my voice was failing me.

She gave a sigh of inexpressible relief and then rose to go.

"I must be going now. The doctor is digging in the garden and he hasn't had his breakfast. But I put the pot on the _slouree_ to boil and it will be ready for the porridge."

She got as far as the door and then turned and said:

"I wish I had a photo of you--a right one, just as you are at this very minute. I'd hang it in your own room, and times and times in the day I'd be running upstairs to look at it. But it's all as one. I've got a photo of you here," (touching her breast) "and sometimes I can see it as plain as plain."

I could not speak after that, but I kissed her as she was going out, and she said:

"That's nice, now! Good-bye, _my chree!_ You'll not be going home until to-morrow, it's like, so perhaps I'll be putting another sight on you. Good-bye!"

I went to the window to watch her as she walked down the drive. She was wiping her eyes, but her head was up and I thought her step was light, and I was sure her face was shining.

God bless her! The dear sweet woman! Such women as she is, and my mother was--so humble and loving, so guileless and pure, never saying an unkind word or thinking an unkind thought--are the flowers of the world that make the earth smell sweet.

* * * * *

When she was gone and I remembered the promise I had made to her I asked myself what was to become of me. If I could neither divorce my husband under any circumstances without breaking a sacrament of the Church, nor love Martin and be loved by him without breaking the heart of his mother, where was I?

I intended to go home the following morning; I was to meet Martin the following night. What was I to say? What was I to do?

All day long these questions haunted me and I could find no answers. But towards evening I took my troubles where I had often taken them--to Father Dan.

SIXTY-SECOND CHAPTER

The door of the Presbytery was opened by Father Dan's Irish housekeeper, a good old soul whose attitude to her master was that of a "moithered" mother to a wilful child.

All the way up the narrow staircase to his room, she grumbled about his reverence. Unless he was sickening for the scarlet fever she didn't know in her seven sinses what was a-matter with him these days. He was as white as a ghost, and as thin as a shadder, and no wonder neither, for he didn't eat enough to keep body and soul together.

Yesterday itself she had cooked him a chicken as good as I could get at the Big House; "done to a turn, too, with a nice bit of Irish bacon on top, and a bowl of praties biled in their jackets and a basin of beautiful new buttermilk;" but no, never a taste nor a sup did he take of it.

"It's just timpting Providence his reverence is, and it'll be glory to God if you'll tell him so."

"What's that you're saying about his reverence, Mrs. Cassidy?" cried Father Dan from the upper landing.

"I'm saying you're destroying yourself with your fasting and praying and your midnight calls at mountain cabins, and never a ha'porth of anything in your stomach to do it on."

"Whisht then, Mrs. Cassidy, it's tay-time, isn't it? So just step back to your kitchen and put on your kittle, and bring up two of your best china cups and saucers, and a nice piece of buttered toast, not forgetting a thimbleful of something neat, and then it's the mighty proud woman ye'll be entoirely to be waiting for once on the first lady in the island. . . . Come in, my daughter, come in."

He was laughing as he let loose his Irish tongue, but I could see that his housekeeper had not been wrong and that he looked worn and troubled.

As soon as he had taken me into his cosy study and put me to sit in the big chair before the peat and wood fire, I would have begun on my errand, but not a word would he hear until the tea had come up and I had taken a cup of it.

Then stirring the peats for light as well as warmth, (for the room was dark with its lining of books, and the evening was closing in) he said:

"Now what is it? Something serious--I can see that much."

"It _is_ serious, Father Dan."

"Tell me then," he said, and as well as I could I told him my story.

I told him that since I had seen him last, during that violent scene at Castle Raa, my relations with my husband had become still more painful; I told him that, seeing I could not endure any longer the degradation of the life I was living, I had thought about divorce; I told him that going first to the Bishop and afterwards to my father's advocate I had learned that neither the Church nor the law, for their different reasons, could grant me the relief I required; and finally, in a faint voice (almost afraid to hear myself speak it), I told him my solemn and sacred secret--that whatever happened I could not continue to live where I was now living because I loved somebody else than my husband.

While I was speaking Father Dan was shuffling his feet and plucking at his shabby cassock, and as soon as I had finished he flashed out on me with an anger I had never seen in his face or heard in his voice before.

"I know who it is," he said. "It's Martin Conrad."

I was so startled by this that I was beginning to ask how he knew, when he cried:

"Never mind how I know. Perhaps you think an old priest has no eyes for anything but his breviary, eh? It's young Martin, isn't it?"

"Yes."

"The wretch, the rascal, the scoundrel! If he ever dares to come to this house again, I'll slam the door in his face."

I knew he loved Martin almost as much as I did, so I paid no heed to the names he was calling him, but I tried to say that I alone had been to blame, and that Martin had done nothing.

"Don't tell me he has done nothing," cried Father Dan. "I know what he has done He has told you he loves you, hasn't he?"

"No."

"He has been colloguing with you, then, and getting you to say things?"

"Never."

"Pitying and sympathising with you, anyway, in your relations with your husband?"

"Not for one moment."

"He had better not! Big man as he is in England now, I'll warm his jacket for him if he comes here making mischief with a child of mine. But thank the Lord and the holy saints he's going away soon, so you'll see no more of him."

"But he is coming to Castle Raa," I said, "and I am to see him to-morrow night."

"That too! The young scoundrel!"

I explained that my husband had invited him, being prompted to do so by the other woman.

"Worse and worse!" cried Father Dan. "Don't you see that they're laying a trap for you, and like two young fools you're walking directly into it. But no matter! You mustn't go."

I told him that I should be compelled to do so, for Martin was coming on my account only, and I could neither tell him the truth nor make an excuse that would not be a falsehood.

"Well, well, perhaps you're right there. It's not the best way to meet temptation to be always running away from it. That's Irish, but it's true enough, though. You must conquer this temptation, my child; you must fight it and overcome it."

"But I've tried and tried and I cannot," I said.

And then I told him the story of my struggle--how love had been no happiness to me but only a cruel warfare, how I had suffered and prayed and gone to mass and confession, yet all to no purpose, for my affection for Martin was like a blazing fire which nothing could put out.

Father Dan's hands and lips were trembling while I spoke and I could see that he was shuddering with pity for me, so I went on to say that if God had put this pure and holy love into my heart could it be wrong--

"Stop a minute," cried Father Dan. "Who says God put it there? And who informed you it was pure and holy? Let us see where we are. Come, now. You say the Bishop told you that you could never be divorced under any circumstances?"

"Yes."

"Yet you wish to leave your husband?"

"How can I help it? The life I have been living is too horrible."

"Never mind that now. You wish to leave your husband, don't you?"

"I . . . I must."

"And you want to go to this . . . this young . . . in short, you want to go to Martin Conrad? That's the plain truth, isn't it? Don't deny it. Very well, let us call things by their proper names. What is the fact? You are asking me--me, your spiritual Father--to allow you to live a life of open adultery. That's what it comes to. You know it is, and God and His holy Mother have mercy on your soul!"

I was so startled and shocked by his fierce assault, and by the cruel climax it had come to, that I flung up my hands to my face and kept them there, for I felt as if my brain had been stunned and my heart was bursting.

How long I sat like this, with my hidden face to the fire, I do not know; but after a long silence in which I heard nothing but my own heaving breath, I became aware that Father Dan had drawn one of my hands down to his knee and was smoothing it with his own.

"Don't be angry with your old priest for telling you the truth," he said. "It's hard to bear; I know it's hard; but it's as hard for him as for you, my child. Think--only think what he is trying to save you from. If you do what you wish to do, you will put yourself out of communion. If you put yourself out of communion, you will cease to be a Catholic. What will become of you then, my daughter? What will be left to replace the consolations of the Church--in sorrow, in suffering, in the hour of death? Have you never thought of that?"

I never had. It was thrilling through and through me.

"You say you cannot live any longer with your husband because he has broken the vow he made to you at your marriage. But think how many many thousands of poor women all the world over are doing it every day--living with adulterous husbands for the sake of their homes and children. And not for the sake of their homes and children only, but for the sake of their souls and their religion. Blessed, blessed martyrs, though we know nothing about them, holding society and the Church and the human family together."

I was trembling all over. I felt as if Father Dan were trying to take away from me the only sweet and precious thing in my life that was left.

"Then you think you cannot live without the one you love, because all your heart is full of him. But think of the holy women, the holy saints, who have gone through the same temptation--fighting against it with all the strength of their souls until the very wounds of our blessed Lord have been marked on their bodies."

He was creeping closer to my side. His voice was quivering at my ear. I was struggling hard, and still trembling all over.

"Hold fast by the Church, my child. It is your only refuge. Remember that God made your marriage and you cannot break it without forsaking your faith. Can anything be good that is bought at such a price? Nothing in this world! When you meet to-morrow night--you two children--tell him that. Tell him I told you to say so. . . . I love you both. Don't break your old priest's heart. He's in trouble enough for you already. Don't let him think that he must lose you altogether. And then remember your mother, too--that saint in heaven who suffered so long and was patient . . . Everything will depend upon you, my child. In matters of this kind the woman is the stronger vessel. Be strong for him also. Renounce your guilty love, my daughter--"

"But I cannot, I cannot," I said. "I love him, and I cannot give him up!"

"Let us ask God to help you," said Father Dan, and still holding my hand he drew me down to my knees and knelt beside me. The room was dark by this time, and only the sullen glow from the peat fire was on our faces.

Then in a low voice, so low that it was like his throbbing whisper before the altar, when he raised the Sacred host, Father Dan prayed for me (calling me his dear child whom God had committed to his care) that I might keep my marriage vow and be saved from the temptation to break it.

His beautiful prayer or his throbbing voice, or both together, had a great effect upon me, and when I rose to my feet, I felt stronger. Although Martin was as dear to me as ever, I thought I saw my way at last. If he loved me as I loved him, I had to be brave for both of us. I had to oppose to the carnal instinct of love the spiritual impulse of renunciation. Yes, yes, that was what I had to do.

Father Dan saw me to the door.

"Give my love to my boy," he said, "and don't forget what I told you to tell him."

"I'll tell him," I replied, for though I knew my heart was bleeding I felt calm and more courageous.

It was milking time and the cows were lowing in the byre when I crossed the fields and the farm-yard on my way back to my father's house.

Early next morning I left it for Castle Raa.

SIXTY-THIRD CHAPTER

Although it was mid-day before I reached the Castle, the gate to the park had not been opened, the drive was deserted and even the great door to the house itself was closed.

And when, in answer to my ringing, one of the maids came after a certain delay, wearing neither apron nor cap, I found the hall empty and no sign of life in the house, except a shrill chorus of laughter which came from the servants' quarters.

"What's the meaning of this?" I asked, but before the girl could reply, Price who had come down to take my wraps said:

"I'll tell your ladyship presently."

As we were going upstairs she told me that the entire house-party had that morning gone off on a cruise in Mr. Eastcliff's yacht, that they would be away several days, and that Madame had left a letter for me which was supposed to explain everything.

I found it on the mantelpiece in my boudoir under an open telegram which had been stuck into the edge of the bevelled glass. The telegram, which was addressed to me, was from Martin.

_"Expect to arrive to-morrow evening. Staying until Wednesday afternoon. If not convenient wire Principal's House, King George's College."_

"To-morrow'?"

"That means to-day," said Price. "The telegram came yesterday. Madame opened it and she told me to say--"

"Let me read her letter first," I said.

The letter ran as follows:

_"My Dearest Mary,

"You will be astonished to find the house empty and all your racketty guests gone. Let me explain, and if you are angry about what has happened you must lay all the blame on me.

"Well, you see, my dear, it was arranged nearly a month ago that before we left your delightful house we should make a little cruise round your charming island. But we had not expected that this would come off so soon, when suddenly and unexpectedly that silly Mr. Eastcliff, who has no more brains than a spring chicken, remembered that he had promised to visit a friend who has taken a shoot in Skye. Result--we had to make the cruise immediately or not at all, and yet behold! our hostess was away on an urgent call of sickness, and what in the world were we to do without her?

"Everybody was in a quandary--that wise Mr. Vivian saying it would be 'jolly bad form by Jove' to go without you, while Mr. Eastcliffs 'deelightfully vicked' little Camilla declared it would be 'vilaynous,' and your husband vowed that his Margaret Mary could not possibly be left behind.

"It was then that a certain friend of yours took the liberty of remembering that you did not like the sea, and that even if you had been here and had consented to go with us it would have been only out of the sweetness of your heart, which I've always known to be the tenderest and most unselfish in the world.

"This seemed to satisfy the whole house and everybody was at ease, when lo! down on us like a thunderbolt came the telegram from Mr. Conrad. Thinking it might require to be repeated, I took the liberty of opening it, and then we were in a plight, I assure you.

"What on earth was he to think of our leaving the house when he was on the point of arriving? And, above all, how were we to support the disappointment of missing him--some of us, the women especially, and myself in particular, being just crazy to see him again?

"This nearly broke down our plans altogether, but once more I came to the rescue by remembering that Mr. Conrad was not coming to see us but you, and that the very kindest thing we could do for a serious person of his kind would be to take our racketty presence out of the way.

"That contented everybody except my mother, who--would you believe it?--had gotten some prudish notions into her head about the impropriety of leaving you alone, and declared her intention of staying behind to keep you in countenance! We soon laughed her out of that, though, and now, to relieve you of her company, we are carrying her away with us--which will be lots of fun, for she's as fond of water as a cat and will fancy she is seasick all the time.

"Good-bye, dearest! We're just off. I envy you. You happy, happy girl! I am sure you will have such a good time. What a man! As natural as nature! I see, by the insular paper that your islanders adore him.

"Hope you found your father better. Another wonderful man! Such an original type, too! Good-bye, my dearest dear_, ALMA.

"_P.S. Have missed you so much, darling! Castle Raa wasn't the same place without you--I assure you it wasn't_."

While I was turning this letter over in my hand, wondering what the beautiful fiend had meant by it, my maid, who was standing by, was visibly burning with a desire to know its contents and give me the benefit of her own interpretation.

I told her in general what Alma had said and she burst into little screams of indignation.

"Well, the huzzy! The wicked huzzy! That's all she is, my lady, begging your pardon, and there's no other name for her. Arranged a month ago, indeed! It was never thought of until last night after Mr. Conrad's telegram came."

"Then what does it mean?"

"I can tell your ladyship what it means, if you'll promise not to fly out at me again. It means that Madame wants to stand in your shoes, and wouldn't mind going through the divorce court to do so. And seeing that you can't be tempted to divorce your husband because you are a Catholic, she thinks your husband, who isn't, might be tempted to divorce you. So she's setting a trap for you, and she expects you to fall into it while she's away, and if you do. . . ."

"Impossible!"

"Oh, trust _me_, your ladyship. I haven't been keeping my ears closed while your ladyship has been away, and if that chatterbox of a maid of hers hadn't been such a fool I suppose she would have been left behind to watch. But there's somebody else in the house who thinks she has a grievance against you, and if listening at keyholes will do anything . . . Hush!"

Price stopped suddenly with her finger to her lip, and then going on tiptoe to the door she opened it with a jerk, when the little housekeeper was to be seen rising to an upright position while pretending that she had slipped.

"I only came to ask if her ladyship had lunched?" she said.

I answered that I had not, and then told her (so as to give her no further excuse for hanging about me) that in future she was to take her orders from Price--an announcement which caused my maid to stand several inches taller in her shoes, and sent the housekeeper hopping downstairs with her beak in the air like an injured cockatoo.

All the afternoon I was in a state of the utmost agitation, sometimes wondering what Martin would think of the bad manners of my husband, who after inviting him had gone away just as he was about to arrive; sometimes asking myself, with a quiver of shame, if he would imagine that this was a scheme of my own contriving; but oftenest remembering my resolution of renunciation and thinking of the much fiercer fight that was before me now that I had to receive and part with him alone.

More than once I had half a mind to telegraph to Martin putting him off, and though I told myself that to do so would not be renunciation but merely flight from temptation, I always knew at the bottom of my heart that I really wanted him to come.

Nevertheless I vowed to my very soul that I should be strong--strong in every word and look--and if Alma was daring me I should defy her, and she would see that I should neither yield nor run away.

Thus I entrenched myself at last in a sort of bright strong faith in my power to resist temptation. But I must leave it to those who know better than I the way to read a woman's heart to say how it came to pass that towards five o'clock, when I heard the sound of wheels and going on to my balcony saw a jaunting-car at the front entrance, and then opening my door heard Martin's great voice in the hall, I flew downstairs--literally flew--in my eagerness to welcome him.

There he was in his brown Harris tweeds and soft slouch hat with such an atmosphere of health and sweep of winds about him as almost took away my breath.

"Helloa!" he cried, and I am sure his eyes brightened at the sight of me for they were like the sea when the sun shines on it.

"You're better, aren't you?" he said. "No need to ask that, though--the colour in your face is wonderful."

In spite of my resolution, and the attempt I made to show him only a kind of glad seriousness, I could not help it if I blushed. Also I could not help it if, while going upstairs and telling him what had happened to the house-party, I said he was doomed to the disappointment of having nobody except myself for company, and then, woman-like, waited eagerly for what he would say.

"So they're all gone except yourself, are they?" he said.

"I'm afraid they are," I answered.

"Well, if it had been the other way about, and you had gone and they had stayed, by the stars of God, I _should_ have been disappointed. But things being as they are, we'll muddle through, shan't we?"

Not all the vows in the world could prevent me from finding that answer delightful, and when, on entering my boudoir, he said:

"Sorry to miss Madame though. I wanted a word with that lady before I went down to the Antarctic," I could not resist the mischievous impulse to show him Alma's letter.

While he read it his bright face darkened (for all the world like a jeweller's window when the shutter comes down on it), and when he had finished it he said once more:

"I hate that woman! She's like a snake. I'd like to put my foot on it."

And then--

"She may run away as much as she likes, but I _will_ yet, you go bail, I will."

He was covered with dust and wanted to wash, so I rang for a maid, who told me that Mr. and Mrs. Eastcliff's rooms had been prepared for Mr. Conrad. This announcement (though I tried to seem unmoved) overwhelmed me with confusion, seeing that the rooms in question almost communicated with my own. But Martin only laughed and said:

"Stunning! We'll live in this wing of the house and leave the rest of the old barracks to the cats, should we?"

I was tingling with joy, but all the same I knew that a grim battle was before me.

SIXTY-FOURTH CHAPTER

By the time he returned from his room I had tea served in my boudoir, and while we sat facing the open door to the balcony he told me about his visit to his old school; how at the dinner on the previous night the Principal had proposed his health, and after the lads had sung "Forty Years On" he had told them yarns about his late expedition until they made the long hiss of indrawn breath which is peculiar to boys when they are excited; how they had followed him to his bedroom as if he had been the Pied Piper of Hamelin and questioned him and clambered over him until driven off by the house-master; and how, finally, before he was out of bed this morning the smallest scholar in the junior house, a tiny little cherub with the face of his mother, had come knocking at his door to ask if he wanted a cabin boy.

Martin laughed as if he had been a boy himself (which he always was and always will be) while telling me these stories, and I laughed too, though with a certain tremor, for I was constantly remembering my resolution and feeling afraid to be too happy.

After tea we went out on to the balcony, and leaned side by side over the crumbling stone balustrade to look at the lovely landscape--loveliest when the sun is setting on it--with the flower-garden below and the headland beyond, covered with heather and gorse and with a winding white path lying over it like the lash of a whip until it dipped down to the sea.

"It's a beautiful old world, though, isn't it?" said Martin.

"Isn't it?" I answered, and we looked into each other's eyes and smiled.

Then we heard the light _shsh_ of a garden hose, and looking down saw an old man watering the geraniums.

"Sakes alive! It's Tommy the Mate," cried Martin, and leaving me on the balcony he went leaping down the stone stairway to greet his old comrade.

"God bless me!" said Tommy. "Let me have a right look at ye. Yes, yes, it's himself, for sure."

A little gale of tender memories floated up to me from my childhood at seeing those two together again, with Martin now standing head and shoulders above the old man's Glengarry cap.

"You've been over the highways of the sea, farther than Franklin himself, they're telling me," said Tommy, and when Martin, laughing merrily, admitted that he had been farther south at all events, the old sailor said:

"Well, well! Think of that now! But wasn't I always telling the omadhauns what you'd be doing some day?"

Then with a "glime" of his "starboard eye" in my direction he said:

"You haven't got a woman yet though? . . . No, I thought not. You're like myself, boy--there's not many of them sorts _in_ for you."

After that, and a more undisguised look my way, the old man talked about me, still calling me the "lil misthress" and saying they were putting a power of gold on my fingers, but he would be burning candles to the miracles of God to see the colour of it in my cheeks too.

"She's a plant that doesn't take kindly to a hot-house same as this," (indicating the house) "and she'll not be thriving until somebody's bedding her out, I'm thinking."

It was Saturday, and after dinner Martin proposed that we should walk to the head of the cliff to see Blackwater by night, which was a wonderful spectacle, people said, at the height of the season, so I put a silk wrap over my head and we set out together.

There was no moon and few stars were visible, but it was one of those luminous nights in summer which never forget the day. Therefore we walked without difficulty along the white winding path with its nutty odour of the heather and gorse until we came near the edge of the cliff, and then suddenly the town burst upon our view, with its promenades, theatres, and dancing palaces ablaze with electric light, which was reflected with almost equal brilliance in the smooth water of the bay.

We were five miles from Blackwater, but listening hard we thought we could hear, through the boom of the sea on the dark cliffs below us, the thin sounds of the bands that were playing in the open-air pavilions, and looking steadfastly we thought we could see, in the black patches under the white light, the movement of the thousands of persons who were promenading along "the front."

This led Martin to talk of my father, saying as we walked back, with the dark outlines of the sleeping mountains confronting us, what a marvellous man he had been to transform in twenty years the little fishing and trading port into a great resort for hundreds of thousands of pleasure-seekers.

"But is he any better or happier for the wealth it has brought him, and for the connections he has bought with it? Is anybody any better?" said Martin.

"I know one who isn't," I answered.

I had not meant to say that. It had slipped out unawares, and in my confusion at the self-revelation which it seemed to make, I tripped in the darkness and would have fallen if Martin had not caught me up.

In doing this he had to put his arms about me and to hold me until I was steady on my feet, and having done so he took my hand and drew it through his arm and in this way we walked the rest of the way back.

It would be impossible and perhaps foolish to say what that incident meant to me. I felt a thrill of joy, a quivering flood of delight which, with all the raptures of my spiritual love, had never come to me before.

Every woman who loves her husband must know what it is, but to me it was a great revelation. It was just as if some new passion had sprung into life in me at a single moment. And it had--the mighty passion that lies at the root of our being, the overwhelming instinct of sex which, taking no account of religion and resolutions, sweeps everything before it like a flood.

I think Martin must have felt it too, for all at once he ceased to speak, and I was trembling so much with this new feeling of tenderness that I could not utter a word. So I heard nothing as we walked on but the crackle of our footsteps on the gravel path and the measured boom of the sea which we were leaving behind us--nothing but that and the quick beating in my own breast.

When we came to the garden the frowning face of the old house was in front of us, and it was all in darkness, save for the light in my room which came out on to the balcony. Everything was quiet. The air was breathless. There was not a rustle in the trees.

We took two or three turns on the lawn in front of my windows, saying nothing but feeling terribly, fearfully happy. After a few moments (or they seemed few) a cuckoo clock on my desk struck eleven, and we went up the stone stairway into my boudoir and parted for the night.

Even then we did not speak, but Martin took my hand and lifted my fingers to his lips, and the quivering delight I had been feeling ever since I slipped on the headland rushed through me again.

At the next moment I was in my room. I did not turn on the light. I undressed in the darkness and when my maid came I was in bed. She wanted to tell me about a scene with the housekeeper in the kitchen, but I said:

"I don't want to talk to-night, Price."

I did not know what was happening to me. I only knew, for the first time that night, that above everything else I was a woman, and that my renunciation, if it was ever to come to pass, would be a still more tragic thing than I had expected.

My grim battle had begun.

SIXTY-FIFTH CHAPTER

When I awoke in the morning I took myself severely to task. Was this how I was fulfilling the promise I had made to Martin's mother, or preparing to carry out the counsel of Father Dan?

"I must be more careful," I told myself. "I must keep a stronger hold of myself."

The church bells began to ring, and I determined to go to mass. I wanted to go alone and much as I grudged every minute of Martin's company which I lost, I was almost glad when, on going into the boudoir with my missal in my hand, I found him at a table covered with papers and heard him say:

"Helloa! See these letters and telegrams? Sunday as it is I've got to answer them."

Our church was a little chapel-of-ease on the edge of my husband's estate, opened, after centuries of neglect, by the bad Lord Raa, in his regenerate days, for the benefit of the people of his own village. It was very sweet to see their homely faces as they reverently bowed and rose, and even to hear their creachy voices when they joined in the singing of the Gloria.

Following the gospel there was a sermon on the words "Lead us not into temptation but deliver us from evil." The preacher was a young curate, the brother of my husband's coachman; and it occurred to me that he could know very little of temptation for himself, but the instruction he gave us was according to the doctrine of our Church, as I had received it from the Reverend Mother and the Cardinals who used to hold retreats at the convent.

"Beware of the temptations of the flesh, my children," said the priest. "The Evil One is very subtle, and not only in our moments of pride and prosperity, but also in our hours of sorrow and affliction, he is for ever waiting and watching to betray us to our downfall and damnation."

In the rustling that followed the sermon a poor woman who sat next to me, with a print handkerchief over her head, whispered in my ear that she was sorry she had not brought her husband, for he had given way to drink, poor fellow, since the island had had such good times and wages had been so high.

But the message came closer home to me. Remembering the emotions of the night before, I prayed fervently to be strengthened against all temptation and preserved from all sin. And when the mass was resumed I recalled some of the good words with which I had been taught to assist at the Holy Sacrifice--praying at the _Credo_ that as I had become a child in the bosom of the Church I might live and die in it.

When the service was over I felt more at ease and I emptied my purse, I remember, partly into the plate and partly to the poor people at the church door.

It was in this spirit that I returned home in the broad sunshine of noonday. But half way up the drive I met Martin walking briskly down to meet me. He was bareheaded and in flannels; and I could not help it if he looked to me so good, so strong, and so well able to protect a woman against every danger, that the instructions I had received in church, and the resolutions I had formed there, seemed to run out of my heart as rapidly as the dry sand of the sea-shore runs through one's fingers.

"Helloa!" he cried, as usual. "The way I've been wasting this wonderful morning over letters and telegrams! But not another minute will I give to anything under the stars of God but you."

If there was any woman in the world who could have resisted that greeting I was not she, and though I was a little confused I was very happy.

As we walked back to the house we talked of my father and his sudden illness, then of his mother and my glimpse of her, and finally of indifferent things, such as the weather, which had been a long drought and might end in a deluge.

By a sort of mutual consent we never once spoke of the central subject of our thoughts--my marriage and its fatal consequences--but I noticed that Martin's voice was soft and caressing, that he was walking close to my side, and that as often as I looked up at him he was looking down at me and smiling.

It was the same after luncheon when we went out into the garden and sat on a seat in the shrubbery almost immediately facing my windows, and he spread a chart on a rustic table and pointing to a red line on it said:

"Look, this is the course of our new cruise, please God."

He talked for a long time, about his captain and crew; the scientific experts who had volunteered to accompany him, his aeronautic outfit, his sledges and his skis; but whatever he talked about--if it was only his dogs and the food he had found for them--it was always in that soft, caressing voice which made me feel as if (though he never said one word of love) he were making love to me, and saying the sweetest things a man could say to a woman.

After a time I found myself answering in the same tones, and even when speaking on the most matter-of-fact subjects I felt as if I were saying the sweetest things a woman could say to a man.

We sat a long time so, and every moment we were together seemed to make our relation more perilous, until at length the sweet seductive twilight of the shortening autumn day began to frighten me, and making excuse of a headache I said I must go indoors.

He walked with me up the stone-stairway and into my boudoir, until we got to the very door of my room, and then suddenly he took up both my hands and kissed them passionately.

I felt the colour rushing to my cheeks and I had an almost irresistible impulse to do something in return. But conquering it with a great effort, I turned quickly into my bedroom, shut the door, pulled down the blinds and then sat and covered my face and asked myself, with many bitter pangs, if it could possibly be true (as I had been taught to believe) that our nature was evil and our senses were always tempting us to our destruction.

Several hours passed while I sat in the darkness with this warfare going on between my love and my religion, and then Price came to dress me for dinner, and she was full of cheerful gossip.

"Men are _such_ children," she said; "they can't help giving themselves away, can they?"

It turned out that after I had left the lawn she had had some conversation with Martin, and I could see that she was eager to tell me what he had said about myself.

"The talk began about your health and altered looks, my lady. 'Don't you think your mistress is looking ill?' said he. 'A little,' I said. 'But her body is not so ill as her heart, if you ask me,' said I."

"You never said that, Price?"

"Well, I could not help saying it if I thought so, could I?"

"And what did he say?"

"He didn't say anything then, my lady, but when I said, 'You see, sir, my lady is tied to a husband she doesn't love,' he said, 'How can she, poor thing? 'Worse than that,' I said, 'her husband loves another woman.' 'The fool! Where does he keep his eyes?' said he. 'Worse still,' said I, 'he flaunts his infidelities in her very face.' 'The brute!' he said, and his face looked so fierce that you would have thought he wanted to take his lordship by the throat and choke him. 'Why doesn't she leave the man?' said he. 'That's what I say, sir, but I think it's her religion,' I said. 'Then God help her, for there's no remedy for that,' said he. And then seeing him so down I said, 'But we women are always ruled by our hearts in the long run.' 'Do you think so?' said he. 'I'm sure of it,' said I, 'only we must have somebody to help us,' I said. 'There's her father,' said he. 'A father is of no use in a case like this,' I said, 'especially such a one as my lady's is, according to all reports. No,' said I, 'it must be somebody else--somebody who cares enough for a woman to risk everything for her, and just take her and make her do what's best for herself whether she likes it or not. Now if somebody like that were to come to my lady, and get her out of her trouble,' I said. . . . 'Somebody will,' said he. 'Make your mind easy about that. Somebody will,' he said, and then he went on walking to and fro."

Price told this story as if she thought she was bringing me the gladdest of glad tidings; but the idea that Martin had come back into my life to master me, to take possession of me, to claim me as his own (just as he did when I was a child) and thereby compel me to do what I had promised his mother and Father Dan not to do--this was terrifying.

But there was a secret joy in it too, and every woman will know what I mean if I say that my heart was beating high with the fierce delight of belonging to somebody when I returned to the boudoir where Martin was waiting to sit down to dinner.

Then came a great surprise.

Martin was standing with his back to the fire-place, and I saw in a moment that the few hours which had intervened had changed him as much as they had changed me.

"Helloa! Better, aren't we?" he cried, but he was now cold, almost distant, and even his hearty voice seemed to have sunk to a kind of nervous treble.

I could not at first understand this, but after a while I began to see that we two had reached the point beyond which it was impossible to go without encountering the most tremendous fact of our lives--my marriage and all that was involved by it.

During dinner we spoke very little. He seemed intentionally not to look at me. The warm glances of his sea-blue eyes, which all the afternoon had been making the colour mount to my cheeks, had gone, and it sent a cold chill to my heart to look across the table at his clouded face. But sometimes when he thought my own face was down I was conscious that his eyes were fixed on me with a questioning, almost an imploring gaze. His nervousness communicated itself to me. It was almost as if we had begun to be afraid of each other and were hovering on the brink of fatal revelations.

When dinner was over, the table cleared and the servants gone, I could bear the strain no longer, so making excuse of a letter I had to write to the Reverend Mother I sat down at my desk, whereupon Martin lit a cigar and said he would stroll over the headland.

I heard his footsteps going down the stone stairway from the balcony; I heard their soft thud on the grass of the lawn; I heard their sharper crackle on the gravel of the white path, and then they mingled with the surge and wash of the flowing tide and died away in the distance.

I rose from the desk, and going over to the balcony door looked out into the darkness. It was a beautiful, pathetic, heart-breaking night. No moon, but a perfect canopy of stars in a deep blue sky. The fragrance of unseen flowers--sweetbriar and rose as well as ripening fruit--came up from the garden. There was no wind either, not even the rustle of a leaf, and the last bird of evening was silent. All the great orchestra of nature was still, save for the light churning of the water running in the glen and the deep organ song of the everlasting sea.

"What can I do?" I asked myself.

Now that Martin was gone I had begun to understand him. His silence had betrayed his heart to me even more than his speech could have done. Towering above him like a frowning mountain was the fact that I was a married woman and he was trying to stand erect in his honour as a man.

"He must be suffering too," I told myself.

That was a new thought to me and it cut me to the quick.

When it came to me first I wanted to run after him and throw myself into his arms, and then I wanted to run away from him altogether.

I felt as if I were on the brink of two madnesses--the madness of breaking my marriage vows and the madness of breaking the heart of the man who loved me.

"Oh, what can I do?" I asked myself again.

I wanted him to go; I wanted him to stay; I did not know what I wanted. At length I remembered that in ordinary course he would be going in two days more, and I said to myself:

"Surely I can hold out that long."

But when I put this thought to my breast, thinking it would comfort me, I found that it burnt like hot iron.

Only two days, and then he would be gone, lost to me perhaps for ever. Did my renunciation require that? It was terrible!

There was a piano in the room, and to strengthen and console myself in my trouble I sat down to it and played and sang. I sang "Ave Maria Stella."

I was singing to myself, so I know I began softly--so softly that my voice must have been a whisper scarcely audible outside the room--

"_Hail thou star of ocean, Portal of the sky_."

But my heart was full and when I came to the verses which always moved me most--

"_Virgin of all virgins, To thy shelter take us_"--

my voice, without my knowing it, may have swelled out into the breathless night until it reached Martin, where he walked on the dark headland, and sounded to him like a cry that called him back.

I cannot say. I only know that when with a thickening throat I had come to an end, and my forehead had fallen on to the key-board, and there was no other sound in the air but the far-off surging of the sea. I heard somebody calling me in a soft and tremulous whisper,

"Mary!"

It was he. I went out to the balcony and there he was on the lawn below. The light of the room was on him and never before had I seen his strong face so full of agitation.

"Come down," he said. "I have something to say to you."

I could not resist him. He was my master. I had to obey.

When I reached the bottom of the stairway he took my hand, and I did not know whether it was his hand or mine that was trembling. He led me across the lawn to the seat in the shrubbery that almost faced my windows. In the soft and soundless night I could hear his footsteps on the turf and the rustle of my dress over the grass.

We sat, and for a moment he did not speak. Then with a passionate rush of words he said:

"Mary, I hadn't meant to say what I'm going to say now, but I can't do anything else. You are in trouble, and I can't stand by and see you so ill-used. I can't and I won't!"

I tried to answer him, but my throat was fluttering and I could not speak.

"It's only a few days before I ought to sail, but they may be enough in which to do something, and if they're not I'll postpone the expedition or put it off, or send somebody in my place, for go away I cannot and leave you like this."

I tried to say that he should not do that whatever happened to me, but still I could not speak.

"Mary. I want to help you. But I can only do so if you give me the _right_ to do it. Nobody must tell me I'm a meddler, butting in where I have no business. There are people enough about you who would be only too ready to do that--people related to you by blood and by law."

I knew what he was coming to, for his voice was quivering in my ears like the string of a bow.

"There is only one sort of right, Mary, that is above the right of blood, and you know what that is."

My eyes were growing so dim that I could hardly see the face which was so close to mine.

"Mary," he said, "I have always cared for you. Surely you know that. By the saints of God I swear there has never been any other girl for me, and now there never will he. Perhaps I ought to have told you this before, and I wanted to do so when I met you in Rome. But it didn't seem fair, and I couldn't bring myself to do it."

His passionate voice was breaking; I thought my heart was breaking also.

"All I could do I did, but it came to nothing; and now you are here and you are unhappy, and though it is so late I want to help you, to rescue you, to drag you out of this horrible situation before I go away. Let me do it. Give me the right of one you care enough for to allow him to speak on your behalf."

I knew what that meant. I knew that I was tottering on the very edge of a precipice, and to save myself I tried to think of Father Dan, of Martin's mother, of my own mother, and since I could not speak I struggled to pray.

"Don't say you can't. If you do I shall go away a sorrowful man. I shall go at once too--to-night or to-morrow morning at latest, for my heart bleeds to look at you and I can't stay here any longer to see you suffer. It is not torture to me--it's hell!"

And then the irrepressible, overwhelming, inevitable moment came. Martin laid hold of my right hand and said in his tremulous voice:

"Mary . . . Mary . . . I . . . I love you!"

I could hear no more. I could not think or pray or resist any longer. The bitter struggle was at an end. Before I knew what I was doing I was dropping my head on to his breast and he with a cry of joy was gathering me in his arms.

I was his. He had taken his own. Nothing counted in the presence of our love. To be only we two together--that was everything. The world and the world's laws, the Church and the Canons of the Church were blotted out, forgotten, lost.

For some moments I hardly breathed. I was only conscious that over my head Martin was saying something that seemed to come to me with all the deep and wonderful whispers of his heart.

"Then it's true! It's true that you love me! Yes, it's true! It's true! No one shall hurt you again. Never again! No, by the Lord God!"

And then suddenly--as suddenly as the moment of intoxication had come to me--I awoke from my delirium. Some little thing awakened me. I hardly know what it was. Perhaps it was only the striking of the cuckoo clock in my room.

"What are we doing?" I said.

Everything had rolled back on me--my marriage, Father Dan's warning, my promise to Martin's mother.

"Where are we?" I said.

"Hush! Don't speak," said Martin. "Let us think of nothing to-night--nothing except our love."

"Don't say that," I answered. "We are not free to love each other," and then, trying to liberate myself from his encircling arms I cried:

"God help me! God forgive me!"

"Wait!" said Martin, holding me a moment longer. "I know what you feel, and I'm not the man to want a girl to wrong her conscience. But there's one question I must ask you. If you _were_ free, could you love me then?"

"Don't ask me that. I must not answer it."

"You must and shall," said Martin. "Could you?"

"Yes."

"That's enough for me--enough for to-night anyway. Have no fear. All shall be well. Go to your room now."

He raised me to my feet and led me back to the foot of the balcony, and there he kissed my hand and let me go.

"Good night!" he said softly.

"Good night!" I answered.

"God bless you, my pure sweet girl!"

At the next moment I was in my room, lying face down on my bed--seeing no hope on any side, and sobbing my heart out for what might have been but for the hard law of my religion and the cruel tangle of my fate.

SIXTY-SIXTH CHAPTER

Next morning, Monday morning, while I was breakfasting in my bedroom, Price came with a message from Martin to say that he was going into the glen and wished to know if I would go with him.

I knew perfectly what that meant. He wished to tell me what steps he intended to take towards my divorce, and my heart trembled with the thought of the answer I had to give him--that divorce for me, under any circumstances, was quite impossible.

Sorry as I was for myself I was still more sorry for Martin. I felt like a judge who had to pronounce sentence upon him--dooming his dearest hopes to painful and instant death.

I could hear him on the lawn with Tommy the Mate, laughing like a boy let loose from school, and when I went down to him he greeted me with a cry of joy that was almost heart-breaking.

Our way to the glen was through a field of grass, where the dew was thick, and, my boots being thin, Martin in his high spirits wished to carry me across, and it was only with an effort that I prevented him from doing so.

The glen itself when we reached it (it was called Glen Raa) was almost cruelly beautiful that day, and remembering what I had to do in it I thought I should never be able to get it out of my sight--with its slumberous gloom like that of a vast cathedral, its thick arch of overhanging boughs through which the morning sunlight was streaming slantwards like the light through the windows of a clerestory, its running water below, its rustling leaves above, and the chirping of its birds on every side, making a sound that was like the chanting of a choir in some far-off apse and the rumbling of their voices in the roof.

Two or three times, as we walked down the glen towards a port (Port Raa) which lay at the seaward end of it. Martin rallied me on the settled gravity of my face and then I had to smile, though how I did so I do not know, for every other minute my heart was in my mouth, and never more so than when, to make me laugh, he rattled away in the language of his boyhood, saying:

"Isn't this stunning? Splendiferous, eh?"

When we came out at the mouth of the port, where a line of little stunted oaks leaned landward as with the memory of many a winter's storm, Martin said:

"Let us sit down here."

We sat on the sloping bank, with the insects ticking in the grass, the bees humming in the air, the sea fowl screaming in the sky, the broad sea in front, and the little bay below, where the tide, which was going out, had left behind it a sharp reef of black rocks covered with sea-weed.

A pleasure-steamer passed at that moment with its flags flying, its awnings spread, its decks crowded with excursionists, and a brass hand playing one of Sousa's marches, and as soon as it had gone, Martin said:

"I've been thinking about our affair, Mary, how to go to work and all that, and of course the first thing we've got to do is to get a divorce."

I made no answer, and I tried not to look at him by fixing my eyes upon the sea.

"You have evidence enough, you know, and if you haven't there's Price--she has plenty. So, since you've given me the right to speak for you, dear, I'm going to speak to your father first"

I must have made some half-articulate response, for not understanding me he said:

"Oh, I know he'll be a hard nut to crack. He won't want to hear what I've got to say, but he has got to hear it. And after all you're his daughter, and if he has any bowels of compassion . . ."

Again I must have made some effort to speak, for he said:

"Yes, he's ill, but he has only to set Curphy to work and the lawyer will do the rest."

I could not allow him to go any further, so I blurted out somehow that I had seen my father already.

"On this subject?"

"Yes."

"And what did he say?"

I told him as well as I could what my father had said, being ashamed to repeat it.

"That was only bluff, though," said Martin. "The real truth is that you would cease to be Lady Raa and that would be a blow to his pride. Then there would no longer be any possibility of establishing a family and that would disturb his plans. No matter! We can set Curphy to work ourselves."

"But I have seen Mr. Curphy also," I said.

"And what did _he_ say?"

I told him what the lawyer had said and he was aghast.

"Good heavens! What an iniquity! In England too! But never mind! There are other countries where this relic of the barbaric ages doesn't exist. We'll go there. We must get you a divorce somehow."

My time had come. I could keep back the truth no longer.

"But Martin," I said, "divorce is impossible for me--quite impossible."

And then I told him that I had been to see the Bishop also, and he had said what I had known before, though in the pain of my temptation I had forgotten it, that the Catholic Church did not countenance divorce under any circumstances, because God made marriages and therefore no man could dissolve them.

Martin listened intently, and in his eagerness to catch every word he raised himself to a kneeling position by my side, so that he was looking into my face.

"But Mary, my dear Mary," he said, "you don't mean to say you will allow such considerations to influence you?"

"I am a Catholic--what else can I do?" I said.

"But think--my dear, dear girl, think how unreasonable, how untrue, how preposterous it all is in a case like yours? God made your marriage? Yours? God married you to that notorious profligate? Can you believe it?"

His eyes were flaming. I dared not look at them.

"Then think again. They say there's no divorce in the Catholic Church, do they? But what are they talking about? Morally speaking you are a divorced woman already. Anybody with an ounce of brains can see that. When you were married to this man he made a contract with you, and he has broken the terms of it, hasn't he? Then where's the contract now? It doesn't any longer exist. Your husband has destroyed it."

"But isn't marriage different?" I asked.

And then I tried to tell him what the Bishop had said of the contract of marriage being unlike any other contract because God Himself had become a party to it.

"What?" he cried. "God become a party to a marriage like yours? My dear girl, only think! Think of what your marriage has been--the pride and vanity and self-seeking that conceived it, the compulsion that was put upon you to carry it through, and then the shame and the suffering and the wickedness and the sin of it! Was God a party to the making of a marriage like that?"

In his agitation he rose, walked two or three paces in front and came back to me.

"Then think what it means if your marriage may not be dissolved. It means that you must go on living with this man whose life is so degrading. Year in, year out, as long as your life lasts you must let him humiliate and corrupt you with his company, his companions and his example, until you are dragged down, down, down to the filth he lives in himself, and your very soul is contaminated. Is that what the Church asks of you?"

I answered no, and tried to tell him what the Bishop had told me about separation, but he interrupted me with a shout.

"Separation? Did he say that? If the Church has no right to divorce you what right has it to separate you? Oh, I see what it will say--hope of reconciliation. But if you were separated from your husband would you ever go back to him? Never in this world. Then what would your separation be? Only divorce under another name."

I was utterly shaken. Perhaps I wanted to believe what Martin was saying; perhaps I did not know enough to answer him, but I could not help it if I thought Martin's clear mind was making dust and ashes of everything that Father Dan and the Bishop had said to me.

"Then what can I do?" I asked.

I thought his face quivered at that question. He got up again, and stood before me for a moment without speaking. Then he said, with an obvious effort--

"If your Church will not allow you to divorce your husband, and if you and I cannot marry without that, then . . ."

"Yes?"

"I didn't mean to propose it . . . God knows I didn't, but when a woman . . . when a woman has been forced into a loveless marriage, and it is crushing the very soul out of her, and the iron law of her Church will not permit her to escape from it, what crime does she commit if she . . ."

"Well?" I asked, though I saw what he was going to say.

"Mary," he said, breathing, hard and fast, "you must come to me."

I made a sudden cry, though I tried not to.

"Oh, I know," he said. "It's not what we could wish. But we'll be open about it. We'll face it out. Why shouldn't we? I shall anyway. And if your father and the Bishop say anything to me I'll tell them what I think of the abominable marriage they forced you into. As for you, dear, I know you'll have to bear something. All the conventional canting hypocrisies! Every man who has bought his wife, and every woman who has sold herself into concubinage--there are thousands and thousands of them all the world over, and they'll try . . . perhaps they'll try . . . but let them try. If they want to trample the life out of you they'll have to walk over me first--yes, by God they will!"

"But Martin . . ."

"Well?"

"Do you mean that I . . . I am . . . to . . . to live with you without marriage?"

"It's the only thing possible, isn't it?" he said. And then he tried to show me that love was everything, and if people loved each other nothing else mattered--religious ceremonies were nothing, the morality of society was nothing, the world and its back-biting was nothing.

The great moment had come for me at last, and though I felt torn between love and pity I had to face it.

"Martin, I . . . I can't do it," I said.

He looked steadfastly into my face for a moment, but I dare not look back, for I knew he was suffering.

"You think it would be wrong?"

"Yes."

"A sin?"

I tried to say "Yes" again, but my reply died in my throat.

There was another moment of silence and then, in a faltering voice that nearly broke me down, he said:

"In that case there is nothing more to say. . . . There isn't, is there?"

I made an effort to speak, but my voice would not come.

"I thought . . . as there was no other way of escape from this terrible marriage . . . but if you think . . ."

He stopped, and then coming closer he said:

"I suppose you know what this means for you, Mary--that after all the degradation you have gone through you are shutting the door to a worthier, purer life, and that . . ."

I could bear no more. My heart was yearning for him, yet I was compelled to speak.

"But would it be a purer life, Martin, if it began in sin? No, no, it wouldn't, it couldn't. Oh, you can't think how hard it is to deny myself the happiness you offer me. It's harder than all the miseries my husband has inflicted upon me. But it wouldn't be happiness, because our sin would stand between us. That would always be there, Martin--every day, every night, as long as ever we lived. . . . We should never know one really happy hour. I'm sure we should not. I should be unhappy myself and I should make you unhappy. Oh, I daren't! I daren't! Don't ask me, I beg--I beseech you."

I burst into tears after this, and there was a long silence between us. Then Martin touched my arm and said with a gentleness that nearly broke my heart:

"Don't cry, Mary. I give in. I find I have no will but yours, dear. If _you_ can bear the present condition of things, I ought to be able to. Let us go back to the house."

He raised me to my feet and we turned our faces homeward. All the brightness of the day had gone for both of us by this time. The tide was now far out. Its moaning was only a distant murmur. The shore was a stretch of jagged black rocks covered with sea-weed.

SIXTY-SEVENTH CHAPTER

Notwithstanding Martin's tenderness I had a vague fear that he had only pretended to submit to my will, and before the day was over I had proof of it.

During dinner we spoke very little, and after it was over we went out to the balcony to sit on a big oak seat which stood there.

It was another soft and soundless night, without stars, very dark, and with an empty echoing air, which seemed to say that thunder was not far off, for the churning of the nightjar vibrated from the glen, and the distant roar of the tide, now rising, was like the rumble of drums at a soldier's funeral.

Just as we sat down the pleasure-steamer we had seen in the morning re-crossed our breadth of sea on its way back to Blackwater; and lit up on deck and in all its port-holes, it looked like a floating _café chantant_ full of happy people, for they were singing in chorus a rugged song which Martin and I had known all our lives--

_Ramsey town, Ramsey town, smiling by the sea, Here's a health to my true love, wheresoe'er she be_.

When the steamer had passed into darkness, Martin said:

"I don't want to hurt you again, Mary, but before I go there's something I want to know. . . . If you cannot divorce your husband, and if . . . if you cannot come to me what . . . what is left to us?"

I tried to tell him there was only one thing left to us, and (as much for myself as for him) I did my best to picture the spiritual heights and beauties of renunciation.

"Does that mean that we are to . . . to part?" he said. "You going your way and I going mine . . . never to meet again?"

That cut me to the quick, so I said--it was all I could trust myself to say--that the utmost that was expected of us was that we should govern our affections--control and conquer them.

"Do you mean that we are to stamp them out altogether?" he said.

That cut me to the quick too, and I felt like a torn bird that is struggling in the lime, but I contrived to say that if our love was guilty love it was our duty to destroy it.

"Is that possible?" he said.

"We must ask God to help us," I answered, and then, while his head was down and I was looking out into the darkness, I tried to say that though he was suffering now he would soon get over this disappointment.

"Do you _wish_ me to get over it?" he asked.

This confused me terribly, for in spite of all I was saying I knew at the bottom of my heart that in the sense he intended I did not and could not wish it.

"We have known and cared for each other all our lives, Mary--isn't that so? It seems as if there never was a time when we didn't know and care for each other. Are we to pray to God, as you say, that a time may come when we shall feel as if we had never known and cared for each other at all?"

My throat was fluttering--I could not answer him.

"_I_ can't," he said. "I never shall--never as long as I live. No prayers will ever help me to forget you."

I could not speak. I dared not look at him. After a moment he said in a thicker voice:

"And you . . . will you be able to forget _me_? By praying to God will you be able to wipe me out of your mind?"

I felt as if something were strangling me.

"A woman lives in her heart, doesn't she?" he said. "Love is everything to her . . . everything except her religion. Will it be possible--this renunciation . . . will it be possible for you either?"

I felt as if all the blood in my body were running away from me.

"It will not. You know it will not. You will never be able to renounce your love. Neither of us will he able to renounce it. It isn't possible. It isn't human. . . . Well, what then? If we continue to love each other--you here and I down there--we shall be just as guilty in the eyes of the Church, shan't we?"

I did not answer him, and after a moment he came closer to me on the seat and said almost in a whisper:

"Then think again, Mary. Only give one glance to the horrible life that is before you when I am gone. You have been married a year . . . only a year . . . and you have suffered terribly. But there is worse to come. Your husband's coarse infidelity has been shocking, but there will be something more shocking than his infidelity--his affection. Have you never thought of _that_?"

I started and shuddered, feeling as if somebody must have told him the most intimate secret of my life. Coming still closer he said:

"Forgive me, dear. I'm bound to speak plainly now. If I didn't I should never forgive myself in the future . . . Listen! Your husband will get over his fancy for this . . . this woman. He'll throw her off, as he has thrown off women of the same kind before. What will happen then? He'll remember that you belong to him . . . that he has rights in you . . . that you are his wife and he is your husband . . . that the infernal law which denies you the position of an equal human being gives him a right--a legal right--to compel your obedience. Have you never thought of _that_?"

For one moment we looked into each other's eyes; then he took hold of my hand and, speaking very rapidly, said:

"That's the life that is before you when I am gone--to live with this man whom you loathe . . . year after year, as long as life lasts . . . occupying the same house, the same room, the same . . ."

I uttered an involuntary cry and he stopped.

"Martin," I said, "there is something you don't know."

And then, I told him--it was forced out of me--my modesty went down in the fierce battle with a higher pain, and I do not know whether it was my pride or my shame or my love that compelled me to tell him, but I _did_ tell him--God knows how--that I could not run the risk he referred to because I was not in that sense my husband's wife and never had been.

The light was behind me, and my face was in the darkness; but still I covered it with my hands while I stammered out the story of my marriage day and the day after, and of the compact I had entered into with my husband that only when and if I came to love him should he claim my submission as a wife.

While I was speaking I knew that Martin's eyes were fixed on me, for I could feel his breath on the back of my hands, but before I had finished he leapt up and cried excitedly:

"And that compact has been kept?"

"Yes."

"Then it's all right! Don't be afraid. You shall be free. Come in and let me tell you how! Come in, come in!"

He took me back into the boudoir. I had no power to resist him. His face was as pale as death, but his eyes were shining. He made me sit down and then sat on the table in front of me.

"Listen!" he said. "When I bought my ship from the Lieutenant we signed a deed, a contract, as a witness before all men that he would give me his ship and I would give him some money. But if after all he hadn't given me his ship what would our deed have been? Only so much waste paper."

It was the same with my marriage. If it had been an honest contract, the marriage service would have been a witness before God that we meant to live together as man and wife. But I never had, therefore what was the marriage service? Only an empty ceremony!

"That's the plain sense of the matter, isn't it?" he cried. "I defy any priest in the world to prove the contrary."

"Well?"

"Well, don't you see what it comes to? You are free--morally free at all events. You can come to me. You must, too. I daren't leave you in this house any longer. I shall take you to London and fix you up there, and then, when I tome back from the Antarctic . . ."

He was glowing with joy, but a cold hand suddenly seized me, for I had remembered all the terrors of excommunication as Father Dan had described them.

"But Martin," I said, "would the Church accept that?"

"What matter whether it would or wouldn't? Our consciences would be clear. There would be no sin, and what you were saying this morning would not apply."

"But if I left my husband I couldn't marry you, could I?"

"Perhaps not."

"Then the Church would say that I was a sinful woman living a sinful life, wouldn't it?"

"But you wouldn't be."

"All the same the Church would say so, and if it did I should be cut out of communion, and if I were cut out of communion I should be cast out of the Church, and if I were cast out of the Church . . . what would become of me then?"

"But, my dear, dear girl," said Martin, "don't you see that this is not the same thing at all? It is only a case of a ceremony. And why should a mere ceremony--even if we cannot do away with it--darken a woman's life for ever?"

My heart was yearning for love, but my soul was crying out for salvation; and not being able to answer him for myself, I told him what Father Dan had said I was to say.

"Father Dan is a saint and I love him," he said. "But what can he know--what can any priest know of a situation like this? The law of man has tied you to this brute, but the law of God has given you to me. Why should a marriage service stand between us?"

"But it does," I said. "And we can't alter it. No, no, I dare not break the law of the Church. I am a weak, wretched girl, but I cannot give up my religion."

After that Martin did not speak for a moment. Then he said:

"You mean that, Mary?"

"Yes."

And then my heart accused me so terribly of the crime of resisting him that I took his hand and held his fingers in a tight lock while I told him--what I had never meant to tell--how long and how deeply I had loved him, but nevertheless I dared not face the thought of living and dying without the consolations of the Church.

"I dare not! I dare not!" I said. "I should be a broken-hearted woman if I did, and you don't want that, do you?"

He listened in silence, though the irregular lines in his face showed the disordered state of his soul, and when I had finished a wild look came into his eyes and he said:

"I am disappointed in you, Mary. I thought you were brave and fearless, and that when I showed you a way out of your miserable entanglement you would take it in spite of everything."

His voice was growing thick again. I could scarcely bear to listen to it.

"Do you suppose I wanted to take up the position I proposed to you? Not I. No decent man ever does. But I love you so dearly that I was willing to make that sacrifice and count it as nothing if only I could rescue you from the misery of your abominable marriage."

Then he broke into a kind of fierce laughter, and said:

"It seems I wasn't wanted, though. You say in effect that my love is sinful and criminal, and that it will imperil your soul. So I'm only making mischief here and the sooner I get away the better for everybody."

He threw off my hand, stepped to the door to the balcony, and looking out into the darkness said, between choking laughter and sobs:

"Ellan, you are no place for me. I can't bear the sight of you any longer. I used to think you were the dearest spot on earth, because you were the home of her who would follow me to the ends of the earth if I wanted her, but I was wrong. She loves me less than a wretched ceremony, and would sacrifice my happiness to a miserable bit of parchment."

My heart was clamouring loud. Never had I loved him so much as now. I had to struggle with myself not to throw myself into his arms.

"No matter!" he said. "I should be a poor-spirited fool to stay where I'm not wanted. I must get back to my work. The sooner the better, too. I thought I should be counting the days down there until I could come home again. But why should I? And why should I care what happens to me? It's all as one now."

He stepped back from the balcony with a resolute expression on his gloomy face, and I thought for a moment (half hoping and half fearing it) that he was going to lay hold of me and tell me I must do what he wished because I belonged to him.

But he only looked at me for a moment in silence, and then burst into a flood of tears, and turned and ran out of the house.

Let who will say his tears were unmanly. To me they were the bitter cry of a great heart, and I wanted to follow him and say, "Take me. Do what you like with me. I am yours."

I did not do so. I sat a long time where he had left me and then I went into my room and locked the door.

I did not cry. Unjust and cruel as his reproaches had been, I began to have a strange wild joy in them. I knew that he would not have insulted me like that if he had not loved me to the very verge of madness itself.

Hours passed. Price came tapping at my door to ask if she should lock up the house--meaning the balcony. I answered "No, go to bed."

I heard the deadened thud of Martin's footsteps on the lawn passing to and fro. Sometimes they paused under my window and then I had a feeling, amounting to certainty, that he was listening to hear if I was sobbing, and that if I had been he would have broken down my bedroom door to get to me.

At length I heard him come up the stone stairway, shut and bolt the balcony door, and walk heavily across the corridor to his own room.

The day was then dawning. It was four o'clock.

SIXTY-EIGHTH CHAPTER

I awoke on Wednesday morning in a kind of spiritual and physical fever. Every conflicting emotion which a woman can experience in the cruel battle between her religion and her love seemed to flood body and soul--joy, pain, pride, shame, fear, rapture--so that I determined (not without cause) to make excuse of a headache to stay in bed.

Although it was the last day of Martin's visit, and I charged myself with the discourtesy of neglecting him, as well as the folly of losing the few remaining hours of his company, I thought I could not without danger meet him again.

I was afraid of him, but I was still more afraid of myself.

Recalling my last sight of his face as he ran out of the house, and knowing well the desire of my own heart, I felt that if I spent another day in his company it would be impossible to say what might happen.

As a result of this riot of emotions I resolved to remain all day in my room, and towards evening to send out a letter bidding him good-bye and good-luck. It would be a cold end to a long friendship and my heart was almost frozen at the thought of it, but it was all I dared do and I saw no help for it.

But how little did I know what was written in the Book of Fate for me!

First came Price on pretence of bathing my forehead, and she bombarded me with accounts of Martin's anxiety. When he had heard that I was ill he had turned as white as if sixteen ounces of blood had been taken out of him. It nearly broke me up to hear that, but Price, who was artful, only laughed and said:

"Men _are_ such funny things, bless them! To think of that fine young man, who is big enough to fell an ox and brave enough to face a lion, being scared to death because a little lady has a headache."

All morning she was in and out of my room with similar stories, and towards noon she brought me a bunch of roses wet with the dew, saying that Tommy the Mate had sent them.

"Are you sure it was Tommy the Mate?" I asked, whereupon the sly thing, who was only waiting to tell the truth, though she pretended that I was forcing it out of her, admitted that the flowers were from Martin, and that he had told her not to say so.

"What's he doing now?" I asked.

"Writing a letter," said Price, "and judging by the times he has torn it up and started again and wiped his forehead, it must be a tough job, I can tell you."

I thought I knew whom the letter was meant for, and before luncheon it came up to me.

It was the first love letter I had ever had from Martin, and it melted me like wax over a candle. I have it still, and though Martin is such a great man now, I am tempted to copy it out just as it was written with all its appearance of irreverence (none, I am sure, was intended), and even its bad spelling, for without that it would not be Martin--my boy who could never learn his lessons.

_"Dear Mary,--I am destroyed to here how ill you are, and when I think it's all my fault I am ready to kick myself.

"Don't worry about what I was saying last night. I was mad to think what might happen to you while I should be down there, but I've been thinking it over since and I've come to the conclusion that if their is anything to God He can be trusted to look after you without any help from me, so when we meet again before I go away we'll never say another word on the subject--that's a promice.

"I can't go until your better though, so I'm just sending the jaunting car into town with a telegram to London telling them to postpone the expedision on account of illness, and if they think it's mine it won't matter because it's something worse.

"But if you are realy a bit better, as your maid says, you might come to the window and wave your hand to me, and I shall be as happy as a sand-boy.

"Yours,

"Mart."_

To this letter (forgetting my former fears) I returned an immediate verbal reply, saying I was getting better rapidly and hoped to be up to dinner, so he must not send that telegram to London on any account, seeing that nobody knew what was going to happen and everything was in the hands of God.

Price took my message with a knowing smile at the corner of her mouth, and a few minutes afterwards I heard Martin laughing with Tommy the Mate at the other end of the lawn.

I don't know why I took so much pains with my dress that night. I did not expect to see Martin again. I was sending him away from me. Yet never before had I dressed myself with so much care. I put on the soft white satin gown which was made for me in Cairo, a string of pearls over my hair, and another (a tight one) about my neck.

Martin was waiting for me in the boudoir, and to my surprise he had dressed too, but, except that he wore a soft silk shirt, I did not know what he was wearing, or whether he looked handsome or not, because it was Martin and that was all that mattered to me.

I am sure my footstep was light as I entered the room, for I was shod in white satin slippers, but Martin heard it, and I saw his eyes fluttering as he looked at me, and said something sweet about a silvery fir tree with its little dark head against the sky.

"It's to be a truce, isn't it?" he asked.

"Yes, a truce," I answered, which meant that as this was to be our last evening together all painful subjects were to be put aside.

Before we sat down to eat he took me out on to the balcony to look at the sea, for though there was no rain flashes of sheet lightning with low rumbling of distant thunder lit up the water for a moment with visions of heavenly beauty, and then were devoured by the grim and greedy darkness.

During dinner we kept faith with each other. In order to avoid the one subject that was uppermost in both our minds, we played at being children, and pretended it was the day we sailed to St. Mary's Rock.

Thinking back to that time, and all the incidents which he had thought so heroic and I so tragic, we dropped into the vernacular, and I called him "boy" and he called me "bogh millish," and at every racy word that came up from the forgotten cells of our brains we shrieked with laughter.

When Martin spoke of his skipper I asked "Is he a stunner?" When he mentioned one of his scientific experts I inquired "Is he any good?" And after he had told me that he hoped to take possession of some island in the name of the English crown, and raise the Union Jack on it, I said: "Do or die, we allus does that when we're out asploring."

How we laughed! He laughed because I laughed, and I laughed because he was laughing. I had some delicious moments of femininity too (such as no woman can resist), until it struck me suddenly that in all this make-believe we were making love to each other again. That frightened me for a time, but I told myself that everything was safe as long as we could carry on the game.

It was not always easy to do so, though, for some of our laughter had tears behind it, and some of our memories had an unexpected sting, because things had a meaning for us now which they never had before, and we were compelled to realise what life had done for us.

Thus I found my throat throbbing when I recalled the loss of our boat, leaving us alone together on that cruel rock with the rising tide threatening to submerge us, and I nearly choked when I repeated my last despairing cry: "I'm not a stunner! . . . and you'll have to give me up . . . and leave me here, and save yourself."

It was like walking over a solfataro with the thin hot earth ready to break up under our feet.

To escape from it I sat down at the piano and began to sing. I dared not sing the music I loved best--the solemn music of the convent--so I sang some of the nonsense songs I had heard in the streets. At one moment I twisted round on the piano stool and said:

"I'll bet you anything"--(I always caught Martin's tone in Martin's company), "you can't remember the song I sang sitting in the boat with William Rufus on my lap."

"I'll bet you anything I can," said Martin.

"Oh, no, you can't," I said.

"Have it as you like, bogh, but sing it for all," said Martin, and then I sang--

_"Oh, Sally's the gel for me, Our Sally's the gel for me, I'll marry the gel that I love best, When I come back from sea."_

But that arrow of memory had been sharpened on Time's grindstone and it seemed to pierce through us, so Martin proposed that we should try the rollicking chorus which the excursionists had sung on the pleasure-steamer the night before.

He did not know a note of music and he had no more voice than a corn-crake, but crushing up on to the music-stool by my side, he banged away with his left hand while I played with my right, and we sang together in a wild delightful discord--

_"Ramsey town, Ramsey town, smiling by the sea, Here's a health to my true love, wheresoe'er she be."_

We laughed again when that was over, but I knew I could not keep it up much longer, and every now and then I forgot that I was in my boudoir and seemed to see that lonesome plateau, twelve thousand feet above the icy barrier that guards the Pole, and Martin toiling through blizzards over rolling waves of snow.

Towards midnight we went out on to the balcony to look at the lightning for the last time. The thunder was shaking the cliffs and rolling along them like cannon-balls, and Martin said:

"It sounds like the breaking of the ice down there."

When we returned to the room he told me he would have to be off early in the morning, before I was out of bed, having something to do in Blackwater, where "the boys were getting up a spree of some sort."

In this way he rattled on for some minutes, obviously talking himself down and trying to prevent me from thinking. But the grim moment came at last, and it was like the empty gap of time when you are waiting for the whirring of the clock that is to tell the end of the old year and the beginning of the new.

My cuckoo clock struck twelve. Martin looked at me. I looked at him. Our eyes fell. He took my hand. It was cold and moist. His own was hot and trembling.

"So this is . . . the end," he said.

"Yes . . . the end," I answered.

"Well, we've had a jolly evening to finish up with, anyway," he said. "I shall always remember it."

I tried to say he would soon have other evenings to think about that would make him forget this one.

"Never in this world!" he answered.

I tried to wish him good luck, and great success, and a happy return to fame and fortune. He looked at me with his great liquid eyes and said:

"Aw, well, that's all as one now."

I tried to tell him it would always be a joy to me to remember that he and I had been such great, great friends.

He looked at me again, and answered:

"That's all as one also."

I reproached myself for the pain I was causing him, and to keep myself in countenance I began to talk of the beauty and nobility of renunciation--each sacrificing for the other's sake all sinful thoughts and desires.

"Yes, I'm doing what you wish," he said. "I can't deny you anything."

That cut me deep, so I went on to say that if I had acted otherwise I should always have had behind me the memory of the vows I had broken, the sacrament I had violated, and the faith I had abandoned.

"All the same we might have been very happy," he said, and then my throat became so thick that I could not say any more.

After a few moments he said:

"It breaks my heart to leave you. But I suppose I must, though I don't know what is going to happen."

"All that is in God's hands," I said.

"Yes," said Martin, "it's up to Him now."

It made my heart ache to look at his desolate face, so, struggling hard with my voice, I tried to tell him he must not despair.

"You are so young," I said. "Surely the future holds much happiness for you."

And then, though I knew that the bare idea of another woman taking the love I was turning away would have made the world a blank for me, I actually said something about the purest joys of love falling to his lot some day.

"No, by the Lord God," said Martin. "There'll be no other woman for me. If I'm not to have you I'll wear the willow for you the same as if you were dead."

There was a certain pain in that, but there was a thrill of secret joy in it too.

He was still holding my hand. We held each other's hands a long time. In spite of my affected resignation I could not let his hand go. I felt as if I were a drowning woman and his hand were my only safety. Nevertheless I said:

"We must say good-night and good-bye now."

"And if it is for ever?"

"Don't say that."

"But if it is?"

"Well, then . . . for ever."

"At least give me something to take away with me," he said.

"Better not," I answered, but even as I spoke I dropped the handkerchief which I had been holding in my other hand and he picked it up.

I knew that my tears, though I was trying to keep them back, were trickling down my cheeks. I saw that his face was all broken up as it had been the night before.

There was a moment of silence in which I was conscious of nothing but the fierce beating of my pulse, and then he raised my hand to his lips, dropped it gently and walked over to the door.

But after he had opened it he turned and looked at me. I looked at him, longing, craving, hungering for his love as for a flame at which my heart could warm itself.

Then came a blinding moment. It seemed as if in an instant he lost all control of himself, and his love came rushing upon him like a mighty surging river.

Flinging the door back he returned to me with long strides, and snatching me up in his great arms, he lifted me off my feet, clasped me tightly to him, kissed me passionately on the mouth and cried in a quivering, husky voice:

"You are my wife. I am your real husband. I am not leaving you because you are married to this brute, but for the sake of your soul. We love each other. We shall continue to love each other. No matter where you are, or what they do with you, you are mine and always will be."

My blood was boiling. The world was reeling round me. There was a roaring in my brain. All my spiritual impulses had gone. I was a woman, and it was the same to me as if the primordial man had taken possession of me by sheer force. Yet I was not afraid of that. I rejoiced in it. I wanted to give myself up to it.

But the next moment Martin had dropped me, and fled from the room, clashing the door behind him.

I felt as if a part of myself had been torn from my breast and had gone out with him.

The room seemed to become dark.

SIXTY-NINTH CHAPTER

For a moment I stood where Martin had left me, throbbing through and through like an open wound, telling myself that he had gone, that I should never see him again, and that I had driven him away from me.

Those passionate kisses had deprived me of the power of consecutive thought. I could only feel. And the one thing I felt above everything else was that the remedy I had proposed to myself for my unhappy situation--renunciation--was impossible, because Martin was a part of my own being and without him I could not live.

"Martin! Martin! My love! My love!" cried the voice of my heart.

In fear lest I had spoken the words aloud, and in terror of what I might do under the power of them, I hurried into my bedroom and locked and bolted the door.

But the heart knows nothing of locks and bolts, and a moment afterwards my spirit was following Martin to his room. I was seeing him as I had seen him last, with his face full of despair, and I was accusing myself of the pain I had caused him.

I had conquered Martin, but I had conquered myself also. I had compelled him to submit, but his submission had vanquished me.

Even if I had a right to impose renunciation on myself, what right had I to impose it upon him, who did not desire it, did not think it necessary, was not reconciled to it, and only accepted it out of obedience to my will?

He loved me. No man ever loved a woman more dearly. He deserved to be loved in return. He had done nothing to forfeit love. He was bound by no ties. And yet I was driving him away from me. What right had I to do so?

I began to see that I had acted throughout with the most abominable selfishness. In his great love he had said little or nothing about himself. But why had _I_ not thought of him? In the struggles of my religious conscience I had been thinking of myself alone, but Martin had been suffering too, and I had never once really thought of that? What _right_ had I to make him suffer?

After a while I began to prepare for bed, but it took me long to undress, for I stopped every moment to think.

I thought of the long years Martin had been waiting for me and while I was telling myself that he had kept pure for my sake, my heart was beating so fast that I could hardly bear the strain of it.

It cut me still deeper to think that even as there had been no other woman for him in the past so there would be no other in the future. Never as long as he lived! I was as sure of that as of the breath I breathed, and when I remembered what he had said about wearing the willow for me as if I were dead I was almost distracted.

His despairing words kept ringing mercilessly in my ears--"It's all as one now"; "How happy we might have been." I wanted to go to him and tell him that though I was sending him away still I loved him, and it was _because_ I loved him that I was sending him away.

I had made one step towards the door before I remembered that it was too late to carry out my purpose. The opportunity had passed. Martin had gone to his room. He might even be in bed by this time.

But there are spiritual influences which control our bodies independently of our will. I put on my dressing-gown (being partly undressed) and went back to the boudoir. I hardly knew what impulse impelled me to do so, and neither do I know why I went from the boudoir to the balcony unless it was in hope of the melancholy joy of standing once more where Martin and I had stood together a little while ago.

I was alone now. The low thunder was still rolling along the cliffs, but I hardly heard it. The white sheet lightning was still pulsing in the sky and rising, as it seemed, out of the sea, but I hardly saw it.

At one moment I caught a glimpse of a solitary fishing boat, under its brown lugger sails, heading towards Blackwater; at the next moment my eyes were dazzled as by a flashlight from some unseen battleship.

Leaning over the balcony and gazing into the intermittent darkness I pictured to myself the barren desolation of Martin's life after he had left me. Loving me so much he might fall into some excess, perhaps some vice, and if that happened what would be the measure of my responsibility?

Losing me he might lose his faith in God. I had read of men becoming spiritual castaways after they had lost their anchorage in some great love, and I asked myself what should I do if Martin became an infidel.

And when I told myself that I could only save Martin's soul by sacrificing my own I was overwhelmed by a love so great that I thought I could do even that.

"Martin! Martin! Forgive me, forgive me," I cried.

I felt so hot that I opened my dressing-gown to cool my bare breast. After a while I began to shiver and then fearing I might take cold I went back to the boudoir, and sat down.

I looked at my cuckoo clock. It was half-past twelve. Only half an hour since Martin had left me! It seemed like hours and hours. What of the years and years of my life that I had still to spend without him?

The room was so terribly silent, yet it seemed to be full of our dead laughter. The ghost of our happiness seemed to haunt it. I was sure I could never live in it again.

I wondered what Martin would be doing now. Would he be in bed and asleep, or sitting up like this, and thinking of me as I was thinking of him?

At one moment I thought I heard his footsteps. I listened, but the sound stopped. At another moment, covering my face with my hands, I thought I saw him in his room, as plainly as if there were no walls dividing us. He was holding out his hands to me, and his face had the yearning, loving, despairing expression which it had worn when he looked back at me from the door.

At yet another moment I thought I heard him calling me.

"Mary!"

I listened again, but again all was still, and when I told myself that if in actual fact he had spoken my name it was perhaps only to himself (as I was speaking his) my heart throbbed up to my throat.

Once more I heard his voice.

"Mary!"

I could bear no more. Martin wanted me. I must go to him. Though body and soul were torn asunder I must go.

Before I knew what I was doing I had opened the door and was walking across the corridor in the direction of Martin's room.

The house was dark. Everybody had gone to bed. Light as my footsteps were, the landing was creaking under me. I knew that the floors of the grim old Castle sometimes made noises when nobody walked on them, but none the less I felt afraid.

Half way to Martin's door I stopped. A ghostly hand seemed to be laid on my shoulder and a ghostly voice seemed to say in my ear:

"Wait! Reflect! If you do what you are thinking of doing what will happen? You will become an outcast. The whole body of your own sex will turn against you. You will be a bad woman."

I knew what it was. It was my conscience speaking to me in the voice of my Church--my Church, the mighty, irresistible power that was separating me from Martin. I was its child, born in its bosom, but if I broke its laws it would roll over me like a relentless Juggernaut.

It was not at first that I could understand why the Church should set itself up against my Womanhood. My Womanhood was crying out for life and love and liberty. But the Church, in its inexorable, relentless voice, was saying, "Thou Shalt Not!"

After a moment of impenetrable darkness, within and without, I thought I saw things more plainly. The Church was the soul of the world. It stood for purity, which alone could hold the human family together. If all women who had made unhappy marriages were to do as I was thinking of doing (no matter under what temptation) the world would fall to wreck and ruin.

Feeling crushed and ashamed, and oh, so little and weak, I groped my way back to the boudoir and closed the door.

Then a strange thing happened--one of those little accidents of life which seem to be thrown off by the mighty hand of Fate. A shaft of light from my bedroom, crossing the end of my writing-desk, showed me a copy of a little insular newspaper.

The paper, which must have come by the evening post, had probably been opened by Martin, and for that reason only I took it up and glanced at it.

The first thing that caught my eye was a short report headed "Charity Performance."

It ran:

_"The English ladies and gentlemen from Castle Raa who are cruising round the island in the handsome steam yacht, the_ Cleopatra, _gave a variety entertainment last night in aid of the Catholic Mission at the Palace, Ravenstown.

"At the end of the performance the Lord Bishop, who was present in person and watched every item of the programme with obvious enjoyment, proposed a vote of thanks in his usual felicitous terms, thanking Lord Raa for this further proof of his great liberality of mind in helping a Catholic charity, and particularly mentioning the beautiful and accomplished Madame Lier, who had charmed all eyes and won all hearts by her serpentine dances, and to whom the Church in Ellan would always be indebted for the handsome sum which had been the result of her disinterested efforts in promoting the entertainment.

"It is understood that the_ Cleopatra _will leave Ravenstown Harbour to-morrow morning on her way back to Port Raa."_

That was the end of everything. It came upon me like a torrent and swept all my scruples away.

Such was the purity of the Church--threatening _me_ with its censures for wishing to follow the purest dictates of my heart, yet taking money from a woman like Alma, who was bribing it to be blind to her misconduct and to cover her with its good-will!

My husband too--his infidelities were flagrant and notorious, yet the Church, through its minister, was flattering his vanity and condoning his offences!

He was coming back to me, too--this adulterous husband, and when he came the Church would require that I should keep "true faith" with him, whatever his conduct, and deny myself the pure love that was now awake within me.

But no, no, no! Never again! It would be a living death. Accursed be the power that could doom a woman to a living death!

Perhaps I was no longer sane--morally sane--and if so God and the Church will forgive me. But seeing that neither the Church nor the Law could liberate me from this bond which I did not make, that both were shielding the evil man and tolerating the bad woman, my whole soul rose in revolt.

I told myself now that to leave my husband and go to Martin would be to escape from shame to honour.

I saw Martin's despairing face again as I had seen it at the moment of our parting, and my brain rang with his passionate words. "You are my wife. I am your real husband. We love each other. We shall continue to love each other. No matter where you are, or what they do with you, you are mine and always will be."

Something was crying out within me: "Love him! Tell him you love him. Now, now! He is going away. To-morrow will be too late. Go to him. This will be your true marriage. The other was only legalised and sanctified prostitution."

I leapt up, and tearing the door open, I walked with strong steps across the corridor towards Martin's room.

My hair was down, my arms were bare in the ample sleeves of my dressing-gown, and my breast was as open as it had been on the balcony, but I thought nothing of all that.

I did not knock at Martin's door. I took hold of the handle as one who had a right. It turned of itself and the door opened.

My mind was in a whirl, black rings were circling round my eyes, but I heard my trembling, quivering, throbbing voice, as if it had been the voice of somebody else, saying:

"Martin, I am coming in."

Then my heart which had been beating violently seemed to stop. My limbs gave way. I was about to fall.

At the next moment strong arms were around me. I had no fear. But there was a roaring in my brain such as the ice makes when it is breaking up.

Oh, you good women, who are happy in the love that guards you, shields you, shelters you, wraps you round and keeps you pure and true, tread lightly over the prostrate soul of your sister in her hour of trial and fierce temptation.

And you blessed and holy saints who kneel before the Mother of all Mothers, take the transgression of her guilty child to Him who--long ago in the house of the self-righteous Pharisee--said to the woman who was a sinner and yet loved much--the woman who had washed His feet with her tears and dried them with the hair of her head--"Thy sins are forgiven thee."

FIFTH PART

I BECOME A MOTHER

SEVENTIETH CHAPTER

Next morning, at half-past eight, my Martin left me.

We were standing together in the boudoir between the table and the fire, which was burning briskly, for the sultry weather had gone in the night, and the autumn air was keen, though the early sun was shining.

At the last moment he was unwilling to go, and it was as much as I could do to persuade him. Perhaps it is one of the mysteries which God alone can read that our positions seemed to have been reversed since the day before.

He was confused, agitated, and full of self reproaches, while I felt no fear and no remorse, but only an indescribable joy, as if a new and gracious life had suddenly dawned on me.

"I don't feel that I can leave England now," he said.

"You can and you must," I answered, and then I spoke of his expedition as a great work which it was impossible to put off.

"Somebody else must do it, then," he said.

"Nobody else can, or shall," I replied.

"But our lives are for ever joined together now, and everything else must go by the board."

"Nothing shall go by the board for my sake, Martin. I refuse and forbid it."

Everything had been arranged, everything settled, great sums of money had been subscribed out of faith in him, and him only, and a large company was ready and waiting to sail under his command. He was the Man of Destiny, therefore nothing--nothing whatever--must keep him back.

"Then if I must go, you must go too," he said. "I mean you must go with me to London and wait there until I return."

"That is impossible," I answered.

The eyes of the world were on him now, and the heart of the world was with him. If I did what he desired it would reflect dishonour on his name, and he should not suffer for my sake under any circumstances.

"But think what may happen to you while I am away," he said.

"Nothing will happen while you are away, Martin."

"But how can you be so sure of the future when God alone knows what it is to be?"

"Then God will provide for it," I said, and with that last answer he had to be satisfied.

"You must take a letter from me at all events," said Martin, and sitting at my desk he began to write one.

It is amazing to me now when I come to think of it that I could have been so confident of myself and so indifferent to consequences. But I was thinking of one thing only--that Martin must go on his great errand, finish his great work and win his great reward, without making any sacrifice for me.

After a few minutes he rose from the desk and handed me his letter.

"Here it is," he said. "If the worst comes to the worst you may find it of some use some day."

I took it and doubled it and continued to hold it in my hand.

"Aren't you going to look at it!" he said.

"No."

"Not even to see whom it is written to?"

"That is unnecessary."

I thought I knew it was written to my husband or my father, and it did not matter to me which, for I had determined not to use it.

"It is open--won't you see what it says?"

"That is unnecessary also."

I thought I knew that Martin had tried to take everything upon himself, and I was resolved that he should not do so.

He looked at me with that worshipful expression which seen in the eyes of the man who loves her, makes a woman proud to be alive.

"I feel as if I want to kiss the hem of your dress, Mary," he said, and after that there was a moment of heavenly silence.

It was now half-past eight--the hour when the motor-car had been ordered round to take him to the town--and though I felt as if I could shed drops of my blood to keep back the finger of my cuckoo clock I pointed it out and said it was time for him to go.

I think our parting was the most beautiful moment of all my life.

We were standing a little apart, for though I wanted to throw my arms about his neck at that last instant I would not allow myself to do so, because I knew that that would make it the harder for him to go.

I could see, too, that he was trying not to make it harder for me, so we stood in silence for a moment while my bosom heaved and his breath came quick.

Then he took my right hand in both of his hands and said: "There is a bond between us now which can never be broken."

"Never," I answered.

"Whatever happens to either of us we belong to each other for ever."

"For ever and ever," I replied.

I felt his hands tighten at that, and after another moment of silence, he said:

"I may be a long time away, Mary."

"I can wait."

"Down there a man has to meet many dangers."

"You will come back. Providence will take care of you."

"I think it will. I feel I shall. But if I don't. . . ."

I knew what he was trying to say. A shadow seemed to pass between us. My throat grew thick, and for a moment I could not speak. But then I heard myself say:

"Love is stronger than death; many waters cannot quench it."

His hands quivered, his whole body trembled, and I thought he was going to clasp me to his breast as before, but he only drew down my forehead with his hot hand and kissed it.

That was all, but a blinding mist seemed to pass before my eyes, and when it cleared the door of the room was open and my Martin was gone.

I stood where he had left me and listened.

I heard his strong step on the stone flags of the hall--he was going out at the porch.

I heard the metallic clashing of the door of the automobile--he was already in the car.

I heard the throb of the motor and ruckling of the gravel of the path--he was moving away.

I heard the dying down of the engine and the soft roll of the rubber wheels--I was alone.

For some moments after that the world seemed empty and void. But the feeling passed, and when I recovered my strength I found Martin's letter in my moist left hand.

Then I knelt before the fire, and putting the letter into the flames I burnt it.

SEVENTY-FIRST CHAPTER

Within, two hours of Martin's departure I had regained complete possession of myself and was feeling more happy than I had ever felt before.

The tormenting compunctions of the past months were gone. It was just as if I had obeyed some higher law of my being and had become a freer and purer woman.

My heart leapt within me and to give free rein to the riot of my joy I put on my hat and cloak to go into the glen.

Crossing the garden I came upon Tommy the Mate, who told me there had been a terrific thunderstorm during the night, with torrential rain, which had torn up all the foreign plants in his flower-beds.

"It will do good, though," said the old man. "Clane out some of their dirty ould drains, I'm thinkin'."

Then he spoke of Martin, whom he had seen off, saying he would surely come back.

"'Deed he will though. A boy like yander wasn't born to lave his bark in the ice and snow . . . Not if his anchor's at home, anyway"--with a "glime" in my direction.

How the glen sang to me that morning! The great cathedral of nature seemed to ring with music--the rustling of the leaves overhead, the ticking of the insects underfoot, the bleating of the sheep, the lowing of the cattle, the light chanting of the stream, the deep organ-song of the sea, and then the swelling and soaring Gloria in my own bosom, which shot up out of my heart like a lark out of the grass in the morning.

I wanted to run, I wanted to shout, and when I came to the paths where Martin and I had walked together I wanted--silly as it sounds to say so--to go down on my knees and kiss the very turf which his feet had trod.

I took lunch in the boudoir as before, but I did not feel as if I were alone, for I had only to close my eyes and Martin, from the other side of the table, seemed to be looking across at me. And neither did I feel that the room was full of dead laughter, for our living voices seemed to be ringing in it still.

After tea I read again my only love-letter, revelling in the dear delightful errors in spelling which made it Martin's and nobody else's, and then I observed for the first time what was said about "the boys of Blackwater," and their intention of "getting up a spree."

This suggested that perhaps Martin had not yet left the island but was remaining for the evening steamer, in order to be present at some sort of celebrations to be given in his honour.

So at seven o'clock--it was dark by that time--I was down at the Quay, sitting in our covered automobile, which had been drawn up in a sheltered and hidden part of the pier, almost opposite the outgoing steamer.

Shall I ever forget the scene that followed?

First, came a band of music playing one of our native songs, which was about a lamb that had been lost in the snow, and how the Big Man of the Farm went out in search of it, and found it and brought it home in his arms.

Then came a double row of young men carrying flags and banners--fine, clean-limbed lads such as make a woman's heart leap to look at them.

Then came Martin in a jaunting car with a cheering crowd alongside of him, trying to look cheerful but finding it fearfully hard to do so.

And then--and this touched me most of all--a double line of girls in knitted woollen caps (such as men wear in frozen regions) over their heads and down the sides of their comely faces.

I was crying like a child at the sight of it all, but none the less I was supremely happy.

When the procession reached the gangway Martin disappeared into the steamer, and then the bandsmen ranged themselves in front of it, and struck up another song:

"_Come back to Erin, mavourneen, mavourneen, Come back, aroon, to the land of your birth_."

In another moment every voice in the crowd seemed to take up the refrain.

That brought Martin on to the captain's bridge, where he stood bareheaded, struggling to smile.

By this time the last of the ship's bells had rung, the funnels were belching, and the captain's voice was calling on the piermen to clear away.

At last the hawsers were thrown off and the steamer started, but, with Martin still standing bareheaded on the bridge, the people rushed to the end of the pier to see the last of him.

There they sang again, louder than ever, the girls' clear voices above all the rest, as the ship sailed out into the dark sea.

_"Come back to Erin, mavourneen, mavourneen, Come back, aroon, to the land of your birth."_

As well as I could, for the mist in my eyes was blinding me, I watched the steamer until she slid behind the headland of the bay, round, the revolving light that stands on the point of it--stretching my neck through the window of the car, while the fresh wind from the sea smote my hot face and the salt air licked my parched lips. And then I fell back in my seat and cried for sheer joy of the love that was shown to Martin.

The crowd was returning down the pier by this time, like a black river running in the darkness and rumbling over rugged stones, and I heard their voices as they passed the car.

One voice--a female voice--said:

"Well, what do you think of _our_ Martin Conrad?"

And then another voice--a male voice--answered:

"By God he's a Man!"

Within a few minutes the pier was deserted, and the chauffeur was saying:

"Home, my lady?"

"Home," I answered.

Seeing Martin off had been too much like watching the lifeboat on a dark and stormy night, when the lights dip behind a monstrous wave and for some breathless moments you fear they will never rise.

But as we drove up the head I caught the lights of the steamer again now far out at sea, and well I knew that as surely as my Martin was there he was thinking of me and looking back towards the house in which he had left me behind him.

When we reached the Castle I found to my surprise that every window was ablaze.

The thrum of the automobile brought Price into the hall. She told me that the yachting party had come back, and were now in their bedrooms dressing for dinner.

As I went upstairs to my own apartments I heard trills of laughter from behind several of the closed doors, mingled with the muffled humming of various music-hall ditties.

And then suddenly a new spirit seemed to take possession of me, and I knew that I had become another woman.

MEMORANDUM BY MARTIN CONRAD

My darling was right. For a long hour after leaving Blackwater I continued to stand on the captain's bridge, looking back at the lighted windows of the house above Port Raa, and asking myself the question which for sixteen months thereafter was to haunt me day and night--Why had I left her behind me?

In spite of all her importunities, all her sweet unselfish thought of my own aims and interests, all her confidence in herself, all her brave determination to share responsibility for whatever the future might have in store for us--Why had I left her behind me?

The woman God gave me was mine--why had I left her in the house of a man who, notwithstanding his infidelities and brutalities, had a right in the eyes of the law, the church, and the world to call her his wife and to treat her accordingly?

Let me make no pretence of a penitence I did not feel. Never for one moment did I reproach myself for what had happened. Never for the shadow of a moment did I reproach her. She had given herself to me of her queenly right and sovereign grace as every good woman in the world must give herself to the man she loves if their union is to be pure and true.

But why did I not see then, as I see now, that it is the law of Nature--the cruel and at the same time the glorious law of Nature--that the woman shall bear the burden, the woman shall pay the price?

It is over now, and though many a time since my sweet girl has said out of her stainless heart that everything has worked out for the best, and suffering is God's salt for keeping our souls alive, when I think of what she went through for me, while I was out of all reach and sight, I know I shall never forgive myself for leaving her behind--never, never never.

M.C.

[END OF MARTIN CONRAD'S MEMORANDUM]

SEVENTY-SECOND CHAPTER

As this will be the last time I shall have to speak of my husband's guests, I wish to repeat that I am trying to describe them without malice exactly as they were--selfish, cruel, ill-mannered, and insincere.

The dinner-bell rang while I was dressing, and on going downstairs a few minutes afterwards I found that there had been no attempt to wait for me.

Already the whole party were assembled at the table, my husband being at the foot of it, and Alma (incredible as it may seem) in the place of the hostess at the head.

This in my altered mood, was more than I could bear, so, while the company made some attempt to welcome me with rather crude salutations, and old Mrs. Lier cried, "Come along here, my pore dear, and tell me how you've gotten on while we've been away" (indicating an empty seat by her side), I walked boldly up to Alma, put my hand on the back of her chair and said, "If you please."

Alma looked surprised. But after a moment she carried off the difficult situation by taking the seat which had been reserved for me beside her mother, by congratulating me on my improved appearance and herself on relief from the necessity of filling my place and discharging my responsible duties.

My husband, with the rest of the company, had looked up at the awkward incident, and I thought I saw by his curious grimace that he supposed my father (of whom he was always in fear) had told me to assert myself. But Alma, with surer instinct, was clearly thinking of Martin, and almost immediately she began to speak of him.

"So your great friend has just gone, dearest. The servants are crazy about him. We've missed him again, you see. Too bad! I hope you gave him our regrets and excuses--did you?"

The evil one must have taken hold of me by this time, for I said:

"I certainly did not, Alma."

"Why not, my love?"

"Because we have a saying in our island that it's only the ass that eats the cushag"--a bitter weed that grows in barren places.

Alma joined in the general laughter which followed this rather intemperate reply, and then led off the conversation On the incidents of the cruise.

I gathered that, encouraged by her success in capturing the Bishop by her entertainment, she had set herself to capture the "aristocracy" of our island by inviting them to a dance on the yacht, while it lay at anchor off Holmtown, and the humour of the moment was to play battledore and shuttlecock with the grotesque efforts of our great people (the same that had figured at my wedding) to grovel before my husband and his guests.

"I say, Jimmy," cried Mr. Vivian in his shrill treble, "do you remember the old gal in the gauze who--etc . . . ?"

"But do you remember," cried Mr. Eastcliff, "the High Bailiff or Bum Bailiff with the bottle-nose who--etc . . . ?"

"Killing, wasn't it, Vivian?" said one of the ladies.

"Perfectly killing," said everybody.

This shocking exhibition of bad manners had not gone on very long before I became aware that it was being improvised for my benefit.

After Alma had admitted that the Bishop was a "great flirt" of hers, and Mr. Vivian, amid shouts of laughter, had christened him her "crush," she turned to me and said, with her smiling face slightly drawn down on one side:

"Mary, my love, you will certainly agree that your islanders who do not eat cushags, poor dears, are the funniest people alive as guests."

"Not funnier," I answered, "than the people who laugh at them as hosts."

It was not easy to laugh at that, so to cover Alma's confusion the men turned the talk to their usual topic, horses and dogs, and I heard a great deal about "laying on the hounds," which culminated in a rather vulgar story of how a beater who "wasn't nippy on his pins" had been "peppered from behind," whereupon he had "bellowed like a bull" until "soothed down by a sov."

I cannot say how long the talk would have continued in this manner if old Mrs. Lier, addressing herself to me, had not struck a serious subject.

It was about Alma's dog, which was dead. The poor wheezy, spaniel had died in the course of the cruise, though what the cause of its death was nobody knew, unless it had been fretting for its mistress during the period of quarantine which the absurd regulations of government had required on our return from abroad.

The dog having died at sea, I presumed it had been buried there, but no, that seemed to shock the company as an unfeeling supposition. The ship's carpenter had made a coffin for it--a beautiful one of mahogany with a plate-glass inset at the head, and a gilt-lettered inscription below, giving the dog's name, Prue, and its age, three.

In this condition it had been brought ashore, and was now lying in a kind of state in Alma's dressing-room. But to-morrow it was to be buried in the grounds, probably in the glen, to which the company, all dressed in black, were to follow in procession as at a human funeral.

I was choking with anger and horror at the recital of these incredible arrangements, and at the close of it I said in a clear, emphatic voice:

"I must ask you to be good enough not to do that, please."

"Why not, my dear?" said Alma.

"Because I do not wish and cannot permit it," I answered.

There was an awkward pause after this unexpected pronouncement, and when the conversation was resumed my quick ears (which have not always added to my happiness) caught the half-smothered words:

"Getting a bit sidey, isn't she?"

Nevertheless, when I rose to leave the dining-room, Alma wound her arm round my waist, called me her "dear little nun," and carried me off to the hall.

There we sat about the big open fire, and after a while the talk became as free, as it often is among fashionable ladies of a certain class.

Mr. Eastcliff's Camilla told a slightly indelicate anecdote of a "dresser" she had had at the theatre, and then another young woman (the same who "adored the men who went to the deuce for a woman") repeated the terms of an advertisement she had seen in a Church newspaper: "A parlour-maid wants a situation in a family where a footman is kept."

The laughter which followed this story was loud enough, but it was redoubled when Alma's mother, from the depths of an arm-chair, said, with her usual solemnity, that she "didn't see nothing to laugh at" in that, and "the pore girl hadn't no such thought as they had."

Again I was choking with indignation, and in order to assert myself once for all I said:

"Ladies, I will ask you to discontinue this kind of conversation. I don't like it."

At last the climax came.

About ten days after Martin left me I received a telegram, which had been put ashore at Southampton, saying, "Good-bye! God bless you!" and next day there came a newspaper containing an account of his last night at Tilbury.

He had given a dinner to a number of his friends, including his old commander and his wife, several other explorers who happened to be in London, a Cabinet Minister, and the proprietor of the journal which had promoted his expedition.

They had dined in the saloon of the "Scotia" (how vividly I remembered it!), finishing up the evening with a dance on deck in the moonlight; and when the time came to break up, Martin had made one of his sentimental little speeches (all heart and not too much grammar), in which he said that in starting out for another siege of the South Pole he "couldn't help thinking, with a bit of a pain under the third button of his double-breasted waistcoat, of the dear ones they were leaving behind, and of the unknown regions whither they were tending where dancing would be forgotten."

I need not say how this moved me, being where I was, in that uncongenial company; but by some mischance I left the paper which contained it on the table in the drawing-room, and on going downstairs after breakfast next morning I found Alma stretched out in a rocking-chair before the fire in the hail, smoking a cigarette and reading the report aloud in a mock heroic tone to a number of the men, including my husband, whose fat body (he was growing corpulent) was shaking with laughter.

It was as much as I could do to control an impulse to jump down and flare out at them, but, being lightly shod, I was standing quietly in their midst before they were aware of my presence.

"Ah," said Alma, with the sweetest and most insincere of her smiles, "we were just enjoying the beautiful account of your friend's last night in England."

"So I see," I said, and, boiling with anger underneath, I quietly took the paper out of her hand between the tips of my thumb and first finger (as if the contamination of her touch had made it unclean) and carried it to the fire and burnt it.

This seemed to be the end of all things. The tall Mr. Eastcliff went over to the open door and said:

"Deuced fine day for a motor drive, isn't it?"

That gentleman had hitherto shown no alacrity in establishing the truth of Alma's excuse for the cruise on the ground of his visit to "his friend who had taken a shoot in Skye;" but now he found himself too deeply interested in the Inverness Meeting to remain longer, while the rest of the party became so absorbed in the Perth and Ayr races, salmon-fishing on the Tay, and stag-shooting in the deer-forests of Invercauld, that within a week thereafter I had said good-bye to all of them.

All save Alma.

I was returning from the hall after the departure of a group of my guests when Alma followed me to my room and said:

"My dear, sweet girl, I want you to do me the greatest kindness."

She had to take her mother to New York shortly; but as "that dear old dunce" was the worst of all possible sailors, it would be necessary to wait for the largest of all possible steamers, and as the largest steamers sailed from Liverpool, and Ellan was so near to that port, perhaps I would not mind . . . just for a week or two longer. . . .

What _could_ I say? What I did say was what I had said before, with equal weakness and indiscretion, but less than equal danger. A word, half a word, and almost before it was spoken, Alma's arms were about my neck and she was calling me her "dearest, sweetest, kindest friend in the world."

My maid Price was present at this interview, and hardly had Alma left the boudoir when she was twitching at my arm and whispering in my ear:

"My lady, my lady, don't you see what the woman wants? She's watching you."

SEVENTY-THIRD CHAPTER

My husband was the next to go.

He made excuse of his Parliamentary duties. He might be three or four weeks away, but meantime Alma would be with me, and in any case I was not the sort of person to feel lonely.

Never having heard before of any devotion to his duty as a peer, I asked if that was all that was taking him to London.

"Perhaps not all," he answered, and then, with a twang of voice and a twitch of feature, he said:

"I'm getting sick of this God-forsaken place, and then . . . to tell you the truth, your own behaviour is beginning to raw me."

With my husband's departure my triumphal course seemed to come to a close. Left alone with Alma, I became as weak and irresolute as before and began to brood upon Price's warning.

My maid had found a fierce delight in my efforts to assert myself as mistress in my husband's house, but now (taking her former advantage) she was for ever harping upon my foolishness in allowing Alma to remain in it.

"She's deceiving you, my lady," said Price. "_Her_ waiting for a steamer indeed! Not a bit of her. If your ladyship will not fly out at me again and pack me off bag and baggage, I'll tell you what's she's waiting for."

"What?"

"She's waiting for . . . she thinks . . . she fancies . . . well, to tell you the honest truth, my lady, the bad-minded thing suspects that something is going to happen to your ladyship, and she's just waiting for the chance of telling his lordship."

I began to feel ill. A dim, vague, uneasy presentiment of coming trouble took frequent possession of my mind.

I tried to suppress it. I struggled to strangle it as an ugly monster created by the nervous strain I had been going through, and for a time I succeeded in doing so. I had told Martin that nothing would happen during his absence, and I compelled myself to believe that nothing would or could.

Weeks passed; the weather changed; the golden hue of autumn gave place to a chilly greyness; the sky became sad with winterly clouds; the land became soggy with frequent rains; the trees showed their bare black boughs; the withered leaves drifted along the roads before blustering winds that came up from the sea; the evenings grew long and the mornings dreary; but still Alma, with her mother, remained at Castle Raa.

I began to be afraid of her. Something of the half-hypnotic spell which she had exercised over me when I was a child asserted itself again, but now it seemed to me to be always evil and sometimes almost demoniacal.

I had a feeling that she was watching me day and night. Occasionally, when she thought I was looking down, I caught the vivid gaze of her coal-black eyes looking across at me through her long sable-coloured eyelashes.

Her conversation was as sweet and suave as ever, but I found myself creeping away from her and even shrinking from her touch.

More than once I remembered what Martin in his blunt way had said of her: "I hate that woman; she's like a snake; I want to put my foot on it."

The feeling that I was alone in this great gaunt house with a woman who was waiting and watching to do me a mischief, that she might step into my shoes, was preying upon my health and spirits.

Sometimes I had sensations of faintness and exhaustion for which I could not account. Looking into my glass in the morning, I saw that my nose was becoming pinched, my cheeks thin, and my whole face not merely pale, but grey.

Alma saw these changes in my appearance, and in the over-sweet tones of her succulent voice she constantly offered me her sympathy. I always declined it, protesting that I was perfectly well, but none the less I shrank within myself and became more and more unhappy.

So fierce a strain could not last very long, and the climax came about three weeks after my husband had left for London.

I was rising from breakfast with Alma and her mother when I was suddenly seized with giddiness, and, after staggering for a moment, I fainted right away.

On recovering consciousness I found myself stretched out on the floor with Alma and her mother leaning over me.

Never to the last hour of my life shall I forget the look in Alma's eyes as I opened my own. With her upper lip sucked in and her lower one slightly set forward she was giving her mother a quick side-glance of evil triumph.

I was overwhelmed with confusion. I thought I might have been speaking as I was coming to, mentioning a name perhaps, out of that dim and sacred chamber of the unconscious soul into which God alone should see. I noticed, too, that my bodice had been unhooked at the back so as to leave it loose over my bosom.

As soon as Alma saw that my eyes were open, she put her arm under my head and began to pour out a flood of honeyed words into my ears.

"My dear, sweet darling," she said, "you scared us to death. We must send for a doctor immediately--your own doctor, you know."

I tried to say there was no necessity, but she would not listen.

"Such a seizure may be of no consequence, my love. I trust it isn't. But on the other hand, it may be a serious matter, and it is my duty, dearest, my duty to your husband, to discover the cause of it."

I knew quite well what Alma was thinking of, yet I could not say more without strengthening her suspicions, so I asked for Price, who helped me up to my room, where I sat on the edge of the bed while she gave me brandy and other restoratives.

That was the beginning of the end. I needed no doctor to say what had befallen me. It was something more stupendous for me than the removal of mountains or the stopping of the everlasting coming and going of the sea.

The greatest of the mysteries of womanhood, the most sacred, the most divine, the mighty mystery of a new life had come to me as it comes to other women. Yet how had it come? Like a lowering thunderstorm.

That golden hour of her sex, which ought to be the sweetest and most joyful in a woman's life--the hour when she goes with a proud and swelling heart to the one she loves, the one who loves her, and with her arms about his neck and her face hidden in his breast whispers her great new secret, and he clasps her more fondly than ever to his heart, because another and closer union has bound them together--that golden hour had come to me, and there was none to share it.

O God! O God! How proudly I had been holding up my head! How I had been trampling on the conventions of morality, the canons of law, and even the sacraments of religion, thinking Nature, which had made our hearts what they are, did not mean a woman to be ashamed of her purest instincts!

And now Nature herself had risen up to condemn me, and before long the whole world would be joining in her cry.

If Martin had been there at that moment I do not think I should have cared what people might think or say of a woman in my condition. But he was separated from me by this time by thousands of miles of sea, and was going deeper and deeper every day into the dark Antarctic night.

How weak I felt, how little, how helpless! Never for a moment did I blame Martin. But I was alone with my responsibility, I was still living in my husband's house, and--worst of all--another woman knew my secret.

SEVENTY-FOURTH CHAPTER

Early next day Doctor Conrad came to see me. I thought it significant that he came in my father's big motor-car--a car of great speed and power.

I was in my dressing-gown before the fire in the boudoir, and at the first glance of his cheerful face under his iron-grey head I knew what Alma had said in the letter which had summoned him.

In his soft voice he asked me a few questions, and though I could have wished to conceal the truth I dared not. I noticed that his face brightened at each of my replies, and at the end of them he said:

"There is nothing to be alarmed at. We shall be better than ever by-and-by."

Then in his sweet and delicate way (as if he were saying something that would be very grateful) he told me what I knew already, and I listened with my head down and my face towards the fire.

He must have been disappointed at the sad way I received his news, for he proceeded to talk of my general health; saying the great thing in such a case as mine was to be cheerful, to keep a good heart, and to look hopefully to the future.

"You must have pleasant surroundings and the society of agreeable people--old friends, old schoolfellows, familiar and happy faces."

I said "Yes" and "Yes," knowing only too well how impossible it all was; and then his talk turned on general topics--my father, whose condition made his face very grave, and then his wife, Christian Ann, whose name caused his gentle old eyes to gleam with sunshine.

She had charged him with a message to me.

"Tell her," she had said, "I shall never forget what she did for me in the autumn, and whiles and whiles I'm thanking God for her."

That cut me to the quick, but I was nearly torn to pieces by what came next.

"Christian Ann told me to say too that Sunny Lodge is longing for you. 'She's a great lady now,' said she, 'but maybe great ladies have their troubles same as ourselves, poor things, and if she ever wants to rest her sweet head in a poor woman's bed, Mary O'Neill's little room is always waiting for her.'"

"God bless her!" I said--it was all I _could_ say--and then, to my great relief, he talked on other subjects.

The one thing I was afraid of was that he might speak of Martin. Heaven alone, which looks into the deep places of a woman's heart in her hour of sorest trial, knows why I was in such dread that he might do so, but sure I am that if he had mentioned Martin at that moment I should have screamed.

When he rose to go he repeated his warnings.

"You'll remember what I said about being bright and cheerful?"

"I'll try."

"And keeping happy and agreeable faces about you?"

"Ye-s."

Hardly had he left the room when Alma came sweeping into it, full of I her warmest and insincerest congratulations.

"There!" she cried, with all the bitter honey of her tongue. "Wasn't I right in sending for the doctor? Such news, too! Oh, happy, happy you! But I must not keep you now, dearest. You'll be just crazy to write to your husband and tell him all about it."

Alma's mother was the next to visit me. The comfortable old soul, redolent of perfume and glittering with diamonds, began by congratulating herself on her perspicacity.

"I knew it," she said. "When I saw as how you were so and so, I said to Alma as I was sure you were that way. 'Impossible,' said Alma, but it's us married women to know, isn't it?"

After that, and some homely counsel out of her own experience--to take my breakfast in bed in future, avoiding tea, &c.,--she told me how fortunate I was to have Alma in the house at such a moment.

"The doctor says you're to be kept bright and cheerful, and she's such a happy heart, is Alma. So crazy about you too! You wouldn't believe it, but she's actually talking of staying with you until the December sailing, at all events."

The prospect of having Alma two months longer, to probe my secret soul as with a red-hot iron, seemed enough to destroy me, but my martyrdom had only begun.

Next day, Aunt Bridget came, and the bright glitter of the usually cold grey eyes behind her gold-rimmed spectacles told me at a glance that her visit was not an unselfish one.

"There now," she said, "you've got to thank me for this. Didn't I give you good advice when I told you to be a little blind? It's the only way with husbands. When Conrad came home with the news I said, 'Betsy, I must get away to the poor girl straight.' To be sure I had enough on my hands already, but I couldn't leave you to strangers, could I?"

Hearing no response to this question, Aunt Bridget went on to say that what was coming would be a bond between me and my husband.

"It always is. It was in my case, anyway. The old colonel didn't behave very well after our marriage, and times and times I was telling myself I had made a rue bargain; but when Betsy came I thought, 'I might have done better, but I might have done worse, and he's the father of my offspring, anyway.'"

Hearing no response to this either, Aunt Bridget went on to talk of Alma and her mother. Was not this the woman I suspected with my husband--the young one with the big eyes and "the quality toss with her?" Then why did I have a person like that about the house?

"If you need bright and cheerful company, what's amiss with your aunt and your first cousin? Some people are selfish, but I thank the saints I don't know what selfishness is. I'm willing to do for you what I did for your poor mother, and _I_ can't say more than that, can I?"

I must have made some kind of response, for Aunt Bridget went on to say it might be a sacrifice, but then she wouldn't be sorry to leave the Big House either.

"I'm twenty years there, and now I'm to be a servant to my own stepchild. Dear heart knows if I can bear it much longer. The way that Nessy is carrying on with your father is something shocking. I do believe she'll marry the man some day."

To escape from a painful topic I asked after my father's health.

"Worse and worse, but Conrad's news was like laughing-gas to the man. He would have come with me to-day, but the doctor wouldn't hear of it. He'll come soon though, and meantime he's talking and talking about a great entertainment."

"Entertainment?"

"To celebrate the forthcoming event, of course, though nobody is to know that except ourselves, it seems. Just a house-warming in honour of your coming home after your marriage--that's all it's to be on the outside, anyway."

I made some cry of pain, and Aunt Bridget said:

"Oh, I know what you're going to say--why doesn't he wait? I'll tell you why if you'll promise not to whisper a word to any one. Your father is a sick man, my dear. Let him say what he likes when Conrad talks about cancer, he knows Death's hand is over him. And thinking it may fall before your time has come, he wants to take time by the forelock and see a sort of fulfilment of the hope of his life--and you know what that is."

It was terrible. The position in which I stood towards my father was now so tragic that (wicked as it was) I prayed with all my heart that I might never look upon his face again.

I was compelled to do so. Three days after Aunt Bridget's visit my father came to see me. The day was fine and I was walking on the lawn when his big car came rolling up the drive.

I was shocked to see the change in him. His face was ghastly white, his lips were blue, his massive and powerful head seemed to have sunk into his shoulders, and his limbs were so thin that his clothes seemed to hang on them; but the stern mouth was there still, and so was the masterful lift of the eyebrows.

Coming over to meet me with an uncertain step, he said:

"Old Conrad was for keeping me in bed, but I couldn't take rest without putting a sight on you."

After that, and some plain speech out of the primitive man he always was and will be (about it's being good for a woman to have children because it saved her from "losing her stomach" over imaginary grievances), he led me, with the same half-contemptuous tenderness which he used to show to my mother, back to the house and into the drawing-room.

Alma and her mother were there, the one writing at a desk, the other knitting on the sofa, and they rose as my father entered, but he waved them back to their places.

"Set down, ma'am. Take your seat, mother. I'm only here for a minute to talk to my gel about her great reception."

"Reception?" said Alma.

"Hasn't she told you about it?" he said, and being answered that I had not, he gave a rough outline of his project, whereupon Alma, whose former attitude towards my father had changed to one of flattery and subservience, lifted her hands and cried:

"How splendid! Such an inspiration! Only think, my love, you were to be kept bright and cheerful, and what could be better for that purpose?"

In the torment of my soul I urged one objection after another--it would be expensive, we could not afford it.

"Who asks you to afford it? It's my affair, isn't it?" said my father.

I was unwell, and therefore unable to undertake the hard work of such an entertainment--but that was the worst of excuses, for Alma jumped in with an offer of assistance.

"My dearest child," she said, "you know how happy I shall be to help you. In fact, I'll do all the work and you shall have all the glory."

"There you are, then," cried my father, slapping me on the shoulder, and then, turning to Alma, he told her to set to work without a day's delay.

"Let everything be done correct even if it costs me a bit of money."

"Yes, sir."

"A rael big thing, ma'am, such as nobody has ever seen before."

"Yes indeed, sir."

"Ask all the big people on the island--Nessy MacLeod shall send you a list of them."

"I will, sir."

"That'll do for the present--I guess I must be going now, or old Conrad will be agate of me. So long, gel, so long."

I was silenced, I was helpless, I was ashamed.

I did not know then, what now I know, that, besides the desire of celebrating the forthcoming birth of an heir, my father had another and still more secret object--that of throwing dust in the eyes of his advocates, bankers, and insular councillors, who (having expected him to make money for them by magic) were beginning to whisper that all was not well with his financial schemes.

I did not know then, what now I know, that my father was at that moment the most tragic figure in Ellan except myself, and that, shattered in health and shaken in fortune, he was indulging in this wild extravagance equally to assert his solvency and to gratify his lifelong passion under the very wing of Death.

But oh, my wild woe, my frantic prayers! It was almost as if Satan himself were torturing me.

The one terror of the next few days was that my husband might return home, for I knew that at the first moment of his arrival the whole world of make-believe which my father and Alma were setting up around me would tumble about my head like a pack of cards.

He did not come, but he wrote. After saying that his political duties would keep him in London a little longer, he said:

"I hear that your father is getting you to give a great reception in honour of our home-coming. But why _now_, instead of three months ago? _Do you know the reason?_"

As I read these last words I felt an icy numbness creeping up from my feet to my heart. My position was becoming intolerable. The conviction was being forced upon me that I had no right in my husband's house.

It made no difference that my husband's house was mine also, in the sense that it could not exist without me--I had no right to be there.

It made no difference that my marriage had been no marriage--I had no right to be there.

It made no difference that the man I had married was an utterly bad husband--I had no right to be there.

It made no difference that I was not really an adulterous wife--I had no right to be there.

Meanwhile Price, my maid, but my only real friend in Castle Raa, with the liberty I allowed her, was unconsciously increasing my torture. Every night as she combed out my hair she gave me her opinion of my attitude towards Alma, and one night she said:

"Didn't I tell you she was only watching you, my lady? The nasty-minded thing is making mischief with his lordship. She's writing to him every day. . . . How do I know? Oh, I don't keep my eyes and my ears open downstairs for nothing. You'll have no peace of your life, my lady, until you turn that woman out of the house."

Then in a fit of despair, hardly knowing what I was doing, I covered my face with my hands and said:

"I had better turn myself out instead, perhaps."

The combing of my hair suddenly stopped, and at the next moment I heard Price saying in a voice which seemed to come from a long way off:

"Goodness gracious me! Is it like that, my lady?"

SEVENTY-FIFTH CHAPTER

Alma was as good as her word.

She did everything without consulting me--fixed the date of the reception for a month after the day of my father's visit, and sent out invitations to all "the insular gentry" included in the lists which came from Nessy MacLeod in her stiff and formal handwriting.

These lists came morning after morning, until the invitations issued reached the grand total of five hundred.

As the rooms of the Castle were not large enough to accommodate so many guests, Alma proposed to erect a temporary pavilion. My father agreed, and within a week hundreds of workmen from Blackwater were setting up a vast wooden structure, in the form of the Colosseum, on the headlands beyond the garden where Martin and I had walked together.

While the work went on my father's feverish pride seemed to increase. I heard of messages to Alma saying that no money was to be spared. The reception was to surpass in grandeur any fête ever held in Ellan. Not knowing what high stakes my father was playing for, I was frightened by this extravagance, and from that cause alone I wished to escape from the sight of it.

I could not escape.

I felt sure that Alma hated me with an implacable hatred, and that she was trying to drive me away, thinking that would be the easiest means to gain her own ends. For this reason, among others, the woman in me would not let me fly, so I remained and went through a purgatory of suffering.

Price, too, who had reconciled herself to my revelation, was always urging me to remain, saying:

"Why should you go, my lady? You are your husband's wife, aren't you? Fight it out, I say. Ladies do so every day. Why shouldn't you?"

Before long the whole island seemed to be astir about our reception. Every day the insular newspapers devoted columns to the event, giving elaborate accounts of what limitless wealth could accomplish for a single night's entertainment. In these descriptions there was much eulogy of my father as "the uncrowned king of Ellan," as well as praise of Alma, who was "displaying such daring originality," but little or no mention of myself.

Nevertheless everybody seemed to understand the inner meaning of the forthcoming reception, and in the primitive candour of our insular manners some of the visits I received were painfully embarrassing.

One of the first to come was my father's advocate, Mr. Curphy, who smiled his usual bland smile and combed his long beard while he thanked me for acting on his advice not to allow a fit of pique to break up a marriage which was so suitable from points of property and position.

"How happy your father must be to see the fulfilment of his hopes," he said. "Just when his health is failing him, too! How good! How gratifying!"

The next to come was the Bishop, who, smooth and suave as ever, congratulated me on putting aside all thoughts of divorce, so that the object of my marriage might be fulfilled and a good Catholic become the heir of Castle Raa.

More delicate, but also more distressing, was a letter from Father Dan, saying he had been forbidden my husband's house and therefore could not visit me, but having heard an angel's whisper of the sweet joy that was coming to me, he prayed the Lord and His Holy Mother to carry me safely through.

"I have said a rosary for you every day since you were here, my dear child, that you might be saved from a great temptation. And now I know you have been, and the sacrament of your holy marriage has fulfilled its mission, as I always knew it would. So God bless you, my daughter, and keep you pure and fit for eternal union with that blessed saint, your mother, whom the Lord has made His own."

More than ever after this letter I felt that I must fly from my husband's house, but, thinking of Alma, my wounded pride, my outraged vanity (as I say, the _woman_ in me), would not let me go.

Three weeks passed.

The pavilion had been built and was being hung with gaily painted bannerets to give the effect of the Colosseum as seen at sunset. A covered corridor connecting the theatre with the house was being lined with immense hydrangeas and lit from the roof by lamps that resembled stars.

A few days before the day fixed for the event Alma, who had been too much occupied to see me every day in the boudoir to which I confined myself, came up to give me my instructions.

The entertainment was to begin at ten o'clock. I was to be dressed as Cleopatra and to receive my guests in the drawing-room. At the sound of a fanfare of trumpets I was to go into the theatre preceded by a line of pages, and accompanied by my husband. After we had taken our places in a private box a great ballet, brought specially from a London music-hall, was to give a performance lasting until midnight. Then there was to be a cotillon, led by Alma herself with my husband, and after supper the dancing was to be resumed and kept up until sunrise, when a basketful of butterflies and doves (sent from the South of France) were to be liberated from cages, and to rise in a multicoloured cloud through the sunlit space.

I was sick and ashamed when I thought of this vain and gaudy scene and the object which I supposed it was intended to serve.

The end of it all was that I wrote to my father, concealing the real cause of my suffering, but telling him he could not possibly be aware of what was being done in his name and with his money, and begging him to put an end to the entertainment altogether.

The only answer I received was a visit from Nessy MacLeod. I can see her still as she came into my room, the tall gaunt figure with red hair and irregular features.

"Cousin Mary," she said, seating herself stiffly on the only stiff-backed chair, and speaking in an impassive tone, "your letter has been received, but your father has not seen it, his health being such as makes it highly undesirable that he should be disturbed by unnecessary worries."

I answered with some warmth that my letter had not been unnecessary, but urgent and important, and if she persisted in withholding it from my father I should deliver it myself.

"Cousin Mary," said Nessy, "I know perfectly what your letter is, having opened and read it, and while I am as little as yourself in sympathy with what is going on here, I happen to know that your father has set his heart on this entertainment, and therefore I do not choose that it shall be put off."

I replied hotly that in opening my letter to my father she had taken an unwarrantable liberty, and then (losing myself a little) I asked her by what right did she, who had entered my father's house as a dependent, dare to keep his daughter's letter from him.

"Cousin Mary," said Nessy, in the same impassive tone, "you were always self-willed, selfish, and most insulting as a child, and I am sorry to see that neither marriage nor education at a convent has chastened your ungovernable temper. But I have told you that I do not choose that you shall injure your father's health by disturbing his plans, and you shall certainly not do so."

"Then take care," I answered, "that in protecting my father's health you do not destroy it altogether."

In spite of her cold and savourless nature, she understood my meaning, for after a moment of silence she said:

"Cousin Mary, you may do exactly as you please. Your conduct in the future, whatever it may be, will be no affair of mine, and I shall not consider that I am in any way responsible for it."

At last I began to receive anonymous letters. They came from various parts of Ellan and appeared to be in different handwritings. Some of them advised me to fly from the island, and others enclosed a list of steamers' sailings.

Only a woman who has been the victim of this species of cowardly torture can have any idea of the shame of it, and again and again I asked myself if I ought not to escape from my husband's house before he returned.

But Price seemed to find a secret joy in the anonymous letters, saying she believed she knew the source of them: and one evening towards the end, she came running into my room with a shawl over her head, a look of triumph in her face, and an unopened letter in her hand.

"There!" she said. "It's all up with Madame now. You've got the game in your own hands, my lady, and can send them all packing."

The letter was addressed to my husband in London. Price had seized the arm of Alma's maid in the act of posting it, and under threat of the law (not to speak of instant personal chastisement) the girl had confessed that both this letter and others had been written by our housekeeper under the inspiration of her mistress.

Without any compunction Price broke the seal of the intercepted letter and read it aloud to me. It was a shocking thing, accusing me with Martin, and taunting my husband with the falseness of the forthcoming entertainment.

Feeling too degraded to speak, I took the letter in silence out of my maid's hands, and while I was in the act of locking it away in a drawer Alma came up with a telegram from my husband, saying he was leaving London by the early train the following morning and would arrive at Blackwater at half-past three in the afternoon.

"Dear old Jimmy!" she said, "what a surprise you have in store for him! But of course you've told him already, haven't you? . . . No? Ah, I see, you've been saving it all up to tell him face to face. Oh, happy, happy you!"

It was too late to leave now. The hour of my trial had come. There was no possibility of escape. It was just as if Satan had been holding me in the net of my sin, so that I could not fly away.

At three o'clock next day (which was the day before the day fixed for the reception) I heard the motor-car going off to meet my husband at Blackwater. At four o'clock I heard it return. A few minutes afterwards I heard my husband's voice in the hall. I thought he would come up to me directly, but he did not do so, and I did not attempt to go down. When, after a while, I asked what had become of him, I was told that he was in the library with Alma, and that they were alone.

Two hours passed.

To justify and fortify myself I thought how badly my husband had behaved to me. I remembered that he had married me from the most mercenary motives; that he had paid off his mistress with the money that came through me; that he had killed by cruelty the efforts I had made to love him; that he had humiliated me by gross infidelities committed on my honeymoon. I recalled the scenes in Rome, the scenes in Paris, and the insults I had received under my own roof.

It was all in vain. Whether God means it that the woman's fault in breaking her marriage vows (whatever her sufferings and excuse) shall be greater than that of the man I do not know. I only know that I was trembling like a prisoner before her judge when, being dressed for dinner and waiting for the sound of the bell, I heard my husband's footsteps approach my door.

I was standing by the fire at that moment, and I held on to the mantelpiece as my husband came into the room.

SEVENTY-SIXTH CHAPTER

He was very pale. The look of hardness, almost of brutality, which pierced his manner at normal moments had deepened, and I could see at a glance that he was nervous. His monocle dropped of itself from his slow grey eyes, and the white fat fingers which replaced it trembled.

Without shaking hands or offering any other sort of salutation he plunged immediately into the matter that was uppermost in his mind.

"I am still at a loss to account for this affair of your father's," he said. "Of course I know what it is supposed to be--a reception in honour of our home-coming. That explanation may or may not be sufficient for these stupid islanders, but it's rather too thin for me. Can you tell me what your father means by it?"

I knew he knew what my father meant, so I said, trembling like a sheep that walks up to a barking dog:

"Hadn't you better ask that question of my father himself?"

"Perhaps I should if he were here, but he isn't, so I ask you. Your father is a strange man. There's no knowing what crude things he will not do to gratify his primitive instincts. But he does not spend five or ten thousand pounds for nothing. He isn't a fool exactly."

"Thank you," I said. I could not help it. It was forced out of me.

My husband flinched and looked at me. Then the bully in him, which always lay underneath, came uppermost.

"Look here, Mary," he said. "I came for an explanation and I intend to have one. Your father may give this affair what gloss he pleases, but you must know as well as I do what rumour and report are saying, so we might as well speak plainly. Is it the fact that the doctor has made certain statements about your own condition, and that your father is giving this entertainment because . . . well, because he is expecting an heir?"

To my husband's astonishment I answered:

"Yes."

"So you admit it? Then perhaps you'll be good enough to tell me how that condition came about?"

Knowing he needed no explanation, I made no answer.

"Can't you speak?" he said.

But still I remained silent.

"You know what our relations have been since our marriage, so I ask you again how does that condition come about?"

I was now trembling more than ever, but a kind of forced courage came to me and I said:

"Why do you ask? You seem to know already."

"I know what anonymous letters have told me, if that's what you mean. But I'm your husband and have a right to know from _you_. How does your condition come about, I ask you?"

I cannot say what impulse moved me at that moment unless it was the desire to make a clean breast and an end of everything, but, stepping to my desk, I took out of a drawer the letter which Price had intercepted and threw it on the table.

He took it up and read it, with the air of one to whom the contents were not news, and then asked how I came by it.

"It was taken out of the hands of a woman who was in the act of posting it," I said. "She confessed that it was one of a number of such letters which had been inspired, if not written, by your friend Alma."

"My friend Alma!"

"Yes, your friend Alma."

His face assumed a frightful expression and he said:

"So that's how it is to be, is it? In spite of the admission you have just made you wish to imply that this" (holding out the letter) "is a trumped-up affair, and that Alma is at the bottom of it. You're going to brazen it out, are you, and shelter your condition under your position as a married woman?"

I was so taken by surprise by this infamous suggestion that I could not speak to deny it, and my husband went on to say:

"But it doesn't matter a rush to me who is at the bottom of the accusation contained in this letter. There's only one thing of any consequence--is it true?"

My head was reeling, my eyes were dim, my palms were moist, I felt as if I were throwing myself over a precipice but I answered:

"It is perfectly true."

I think that was the last thing he expected. After a moment he said:

"Then you have broken your marriage vows--is that it?"

"Yes, if you call it so."

"Call it so? Call it so? Good heavens, what do _you_ call it?"

I did not reply, and after another moment he said:

"But perhaps you wish me to understand that this man whom I was so foolish as to invite to my house abused my hospitality and betrayed my wife. Is that what you mean?"

"No," I said. "He observed the laws of hospitality much better than you did, and if I am betrayed I betrayed myself."

I shall never forget the look with which my husband received this confession. He drew himself up with the air of an injured man and said:

"What? You mean that you yourself . . . deliberately . . . Good God!"

He stopped for a moment and then said with a rush:

"I suppose you've not forgotten what happened at the time of our marriage . . . your resistance and the ridiculous compact I submitted to? Why did I submit? Because I thought your innocence, your convent-bred ideas, and your ignorance of the first conditions of matrimony. . . . But I've been fooled, for you now tell me . . . after all my complacency . . . that you have deliberately. . . . In the name of God do you know what you are? There's only one name for a woman who does what you've done. Do you want me to tell you what that name is?"

I was quivering with shame, but my mind, which was going at lightning speed, was thinking of London, of Cairo, of Rome, and of Paris.

"Why don't you speak?" he cried, lifting his voice in his rage. "Don't you understand what a letter like this is calling you?"

My heart choked. But the thought that came to me--that, bad as his own life had been, he considered he had a right to treat me in this way because he was a man and I was a woman--brought strength out of my weakness, so that when he went on to curse my Church and my religion, saying this was all that had come of "the mummery of my masses," I fired up for a moment and said:

"You can spare yourself these blasphemies. If I have done wrong, it is I, and not my Church, that is to blame for it."

"_If_ you have done wrong!" he cried. "Damn it, have you lost all sense of a woman's duty to her husband? While you have been married to me and I have been fool enough not to claim you as a wife because I thought you were only fit company for the saints and angels, you have been prostituting yourself to this blusterer, this . . ."

"That is a lie," I said, stepping up to him in the middle of the floor. "It's true that I am married to you, but _he_ is my real husband and you . . . you are nothing to me at all."

My husband stood for a moment with his mouth agape. Then he began to laugh--loudly, derisively, mockingly.

"Nothing to you, am I? You don't mind bearing my name, though, and when your time comes you'll expect it to cover your disgrace."

His face had become shockingly distorted. He was quivering with fury.

"That's not the worst, either," he cried. "It's not enough that you should tell me to my face that somebody else is your real husband, but you must shunt your spurious offspring into my house. Isn't that what it all comes to . . . all this damnable fuss of your father's . . . that you are going to palm off on me and my name and family your own and this man's . . . bastard?"

And with the last word, in the drunkenness of his rage, he lifted his arm and struck me with the back of his hand across the cheek.

The physical shock was fearful, but the moral infamy was a hundred-fold worse. I can truly say that not alone for myself did I suffer. When my mind, still going at lightning speed, thought of Martin, who loved me so tenderly, I felt crushed by my husband's blow to the lowest depths of shame.

I must have screamed, though I did not know it, for at the next moment Price was in the room and I saw that the housekeeper (drawn perhaps, as before, by my husband's loud voice) was on the landing outside the door. But even that did not serve to restrain him.

"No matter," he said. "After what has passed you may not enjoy to-morrow's ceremony. But you shall go through it! By heaven, you shall! And when it is over, I shall have something to say to your father."

And with that he swung out of the room and went lunging down the stairs.

I was still standing in the middle of the floor, with the blow from my husband's hand tingling on my cheek, when Price, after clashing the door in the face of the housekeeper, said, with her black eyes ablaze:

"Well, if ever I wanted to be a man before to-day!"

News of the scene went like wildfire through the house, and Alma's mother came to comfort me. In her crude and blundering way she told me of a similar insult she had suffered at the hands of the "bad Lord Raa," and how it had been the real reason of her going to America.

"Us married ladies have much to put up with. But cheer up, dearie. I guess you'll have gotten over it by to-morrow morning."

When she was gone I sat down before the fire. I did not cry. I felt as if I had reached a depth of suffering that was a thousand fathoms too deep for tears. I do not think I wept again for many months afterwards, and then it was a great joy, not a great grief, that brought me a burst of blessed tears.

But I could hear my dear good Price crying behind me, and when I said:

"Now you see for yourself that I cannot remain in this house any longer," she answered, in a low voice:

"Yes, my lady."

"I must go at once--to-night if possible."

"You shall. Leave everything to me, my lady."

SEVENTY-SEVENTH CHAPTER

The bell rang, but of course I did not go down to dinner.

As soon as Price had gone off to make the necessary arrangements I turned the key in the lock of my door, removed my evening gown, and began to dress for my flight.

My brain was numb, but I did my best to confront the new situation that was before me.

Hitherto I had been occupied with the problem of whether I should or should not leave my husband's house; now I had to settle the question of where I was to go to.

I dared not think of home, for (Nessy MacLeod and Aunt Bridget apart) the house of my father was the last place I could fly to at a moment when I was making dust and ashes of his lifelong expectations.

Neither dared I think of Sunny Lodge, although I remembered, with a tug of tenderness, Christian Ann's last message about Mary O'Neill's little room that was always waiting for me--for I thought of how I had broken my pledge to her.

The only place I could think of was that which Martin had mentioned when he wished to carry me away--London. In the mighty world of London I might hide myself from observation and wait until Martin returned from his expedition.

"Yes, yes, London," I told myself in my breathless excitement, little knowing what London meant.

I began to select the clothes I was to carry with me and to wear on my journey. They must be plain, for I had to escape from a house in which unfriendly eyes would be watching me. They must be durable, for during my time of waiting I expected to be poor.

I hunted out some of the quaker-like costumes which had been made for me before my marriage; and when I had put them on I saw that they made a certain deduction from my appearance, but that did not matter to me now--the only eyes I wished to look well in being down in the Antarctic seas.

Then I tried to think of practical matters--how I was to live in London and how, in particular, I was to meet the situation that was before me. Surely never did a more helpless innocent confront such a serious problem. I was a woman, and for more than a year I had been a wife, but I had no more experience of the hard facts of material existence than a child.

I thought first of the bank-book which my father had sent me with authority to draw on his account. But it was then nine o'clock, the banks were closed for the day, and I knew enough of the world to see that if I attempted to cash a cheque in the morning my whereabouts would he traced. That must never happen, I must hide myself from everybody; therefore my bank-book was useless.

"Quite useless," I thought, throwing it aside like so much waste paper.

I thought next of my jewels. But there I encountered a similar difficulty. The jewels which were really mine, having been bought by myself, had been gambled away by my husband at Monte Carlo. What remained were the family jewels which had come to me as Lady Raa; but that was a name I was never more to bear, a person I was never more to think about, so I could not permit myself to take anything that belonged to her.

The only thing left to me was my money. I had always kept a good deal of it about me, although the only use I had had for it was to put it in the plate at church, and to scatter it with foolish prodigality to the boys who tossed somersaults behind the carriage in the road.

Now I found it all over my room--in my purse, in various drawers, and on the toilet-tray under my dressing-glass. Gathered together it counted up to twenty-eight pounds. I owed four pounds to Price, and having set them aside, I saw that I had twenty-four pounds left in notes, gold, and silver.

Being in the literal and unconventional sense utterly ignorant of the value of sixpence, I thought this a great sum, amply sufficient for all my needs, or at least until I secured employment--for I had from the first some vague idea of earning my own living.

"Martin would like that," I told myself, lifting my head with a thrill of pride.

Then I began to gather up the treasures which were inexpressibly more dear to me than all my other possessions.

One of them was a little miniature of my mother which Father Dan had given me for a wedding-present when (as I know now) he would rather have parted with his heart's blood.

Another was a pearl rosary which the Reverend Mother had dropped over my arm the last time she kissed me on the forehead; and the last was my Martin's misspelt love-letter, which was more precious to me than rubies.

Not for worlds, I thought, would I leave these behind me, or ever part with them under any circumstances.

Several times while I was busy with such preparations, growing more and more nervous every moment, Price came on tip-toe and tapped softly at my door.

Once it was to bring me some food and to tell me, with many winks (for the good soul herself was trembling with excitement), that everything was "as right as ninepence." I should get away without difficulty in a couple of hours, and until to-morrow morning nobody would be a penny the wiser.

Fortunately it was Thursday, when a combined passenger and cargo steamer sailed to Liverpool. Of course the motor-car would not be available to take me to the pier, but Tommy the Mate, who had a stiff cart in which he took his surplus products to market, would be waiting for me at eleven o'clock by the gate to the high road.

The people downstairs, meaning my husband and Alma and her mother, were going off to the pavilion (where hundreds of decorators were to work late and the orchestra and ballet were to have a rehearsal), and they had been heard to say that they would not be back until "way round about midnight."

"But the servants?" I asked.

"They're going too, bless them," said Price. "So eat your dinner in peace, my lady, and don't worry about a thing until I come back to fetch you."

Another hour passed. I was in a fever of apprehension. I felt like a prisoner who was about to escape from a dungeon.

A shrill wind was coming up from the sea and whistling about the house. I could hear the hammering of the workmen in the pavilion as well as the music of the orchestra practising their scores.

A few minutes before eleven Price returned, carrying one of the smaller of the travelling-trunks I had taken to Cairo. I noticed that it bore no name and no initials.

"It's all right," she said. "They've gone off, every mother's son and daughter of them--all except the housekeeper, and I've caught her out, the cat!"

That lynx-eyed person had begun to suspect. She had seen Tommy harnessing his horse and had not been satisfied with his explanation--that he was taking tomatoes to Blackwater to be sent off by the Liverpool steamer.

So to watch events, without seeming to watch them, the housekeeper (when the other servants had gone off to the rehearsal) had stolen upstairs to her room in the West tower overlooking the back courtyard.

But Price had been more than a match for her. Creeping up behind, she had locked the door of the top landing, and now the "little cat" might scream her head off through the window, and (over the noises of the wind and the workmen) it would be only like "tom" shrieking on the tiles.

"We must be quick, though," said Price, tumbling into my travelling-trunk as many of my clothes as it would hold.

When it was full and locked and corded she said:

"Wait," and stepped out on the landing to listen.

After a moment she returned saying:

"Not a sound! Now for it, my lady."

And then, tying her handkerchief over her head to keep down her hair in the wind, she picked up the trunk in her arms and crept out of the room on tiptoe.

The moment had come to go, yet, eager as I had been all evening to escape from my husband's house, I could scarcely tear myself away, for I was feeling a little of that regret which comes to us all when we are doing something for the last time.

Passing through the boudoir this feeling took complete possession of me. Only a few hours before it had been the scene of my deepest degradation, but many a time before it had been the place of my greatest happiness.

_"You are my wife. I am your real husband. No matter where you are or what they do with you, you are mine and always will be."_

Half-closing the door, I took a last look round--at the piano, the desk, the table, the fireplace, all the simple things associated with my dearest memories. So strong was the yearning of my own soul that I felt as if the soul of Martin were in the room with me at that moment.

I believe it was.

"Quick, my lady, or you'll lose your steamer," whispered Price, and then we crossed the landing (which was creaking again) and crept noiselessly down a back staircase. We were near the bottom when I was startled by a loud knocking, which seemed to come from a distant part of the house. My heart temporarily stopped its beating, but Price only laughed and whispered:

"There she is! We've fairly caught her out, the cat."

At the next moment Price opened an outer door, and after we had passed through she closed and locked it behind us.

We were then in the courtyard behind the house, stumbling in the blinding darkness over cobble-stones.

"Keep close to me, my lady," said Price.

After a few moments we reached the drive. I think I was more nervous than I had ever been before. I heard the withered leaves behind me rustling along the ground before the wind from the sea, and thought they were the footsteps of people pursuing us. I heard the hammering of the workmen and the music of the orchestra, and thought they were voices screaming to us to come back.

Price, who was forging ahead, carried the trunk in her arms as if it had been a child, but every few minutes she waited for me to come up to her, and encouraged me when I stumbled in the darkness.

"Only a little further, my lady," she said, and I did my best to struggle on.

We reached the gate to the high road at last. Tommy the Mate was there with his stiff cart, and Price, who was breathless after her great exertion, tumbled my trunk over the tail-board.

The time had come to part from her, and, remembering how faithful and true she had been to me, I hardly knew what to say. I told her I had left her wages in an envelope on the dressing-table, and then I stammered something about being too poor to make her a present to remember me by.

"It doesn't need a present to help me to remember a good mistress, my lady," she said.

"God bless you for being so good to me," I answered, and then I kissed her.

"I'll remember you by that, though," she said, and she began to cry.

I climbed over the wheel of the stiff cart and seated myself on my trunk, and then Tommy, who had been sitting on the front-board with his feet on the outer shaft, whipped up his horse and we started away.

During the next half-hour the springless cart bobbed along the dark road at its slow monotonous pace. Tommy never once looked round or spoke except to his horse, but I understood my old friend perfectly.

I was in a fever of anxiety lest I should be overtaken and carried back. Again and again I looked behind. At one moment, when a big motor-car, with its two great white eyes, came rolling up after us, my stormy heart stood still. But it was not my husband's car, and in a little while its red tail-light disappeared in the darkness ahead.

We reached Blackwater in time for the midnight steamer and drew up at the landward end of the pier. It was cold; the salt wind from the sea was very chill. Men who looked like commercial travellers were hurrying along with their coat-collars turned up, and porters with heavy trunks on their shoulders were striving to keep pace with them.

I gave my own trunk to a porter who came up to the cart, and then turned to Tommy to say good-bye. The old man had got down from the shaft and was smoothing his smoking horse, and snuffling as if he had caught a cold.

"Good-bye, Tommy," I said--and then something more which I do not wish to write down.

"Good-bye, lil missie," he answered (that cut me deep), "I never believed ould Tom Dug would live to see ye laving home like this . . . But wait! Only wait till himself is after coming back, and I'll go bail it'll be the divil sit up for some of them."

SEVENTY-EIGHTH CHAPTER

It was very dark. No more than three or four lamps on the pier were burning, but nevertheless I was afraid that the pier-master would recognise me.

I thought he did so as I approached the gangway to the saloon, for he said:

"Private cabin on main deck aft."

Nervous as I was, I had just enough presence of mind to say "Steerage, please," which threw him off the scent entirely, so that he cried, in quite a different voice:

"Steerage passengers forward."

I found my way to the steerage end of the steamer; and in order to escape observation from the few persons on the pier I went down to the steerage cabin, which was a little triangular place in the bow, with an open stove in the middle of the floor and a bleary oil-lamp swinging from a rafter overhead.

The porter found me there, and in my foolish ignorance of the value of money I gave him half a crown for his trouble. He first looked at the coin, then tested it between his teeth, then spat on it, and finally went off chuckling.

The first and second bells rang. I grudged every moment of delay before the steamer sailed, for I still felt like a prisoner who was running away and might even yet be brought back.

Seating myself in the darkest corner of the cabin, I waited and watched. There were only two other steerage passengers and they were women. Judging by their conversation I concluded that they were cooks from lodging-houses on "the front," returning after a long season to their homes in Liverpool. Both were very tired, and they were spreading their blankets on the bare bunks so as to settle themselves for the night.

At last the third bell rang. I heard the engine whistle, the funnel belch out its smoke, the hawsers being thrown off, the gangways being taken in, and then, looking through the porthole, I saw the grey pier gliding behind us.

After a few moments, with a feeling of safety and a sense of danger passed, I went up on deck. But oh, how little I knew what bitter pain I was putting myself to!

We were just then swinging round the lighthouse which stands on the south-east headland of the bay, and the flash of its revolving light in my face as I reached the top of the cabin stairs brought back the memory of the joyous and tumultuous scenes of Martin's last departure.

That, coupled and contrasted with the circumstances of my own flight, stealthily, shamefully, and in the dead of night, gave me a pang that was almost more than I could bear.

But my cup was not yet full. A few minutes afterwards we sailed in the dark past the two headlands of Port Raa, and, looking up, I saw the lights in the windows of my husband's house, and the glow over the glass roof of the pavilion.

What would happen there to-morrow morning when it was discovered that I was gone? What would happen to-morrow night when my father arrived, ignorant of my flight, as I felt sure the malice of my husband would keep him?

Little as I knew then of my father's real motives in giving that bizarre and rather vulgar entertainment, I thought I saw and heard everything that would occur.

I saw the dazzling spectacle, I saw the five hundred guests, I saw Alma and my husband, and above all I saw my father, the old man stricken with mortal maladies, the wounded lion whom the shadow of death itself could not subdue, degraded to the dust in his hour of pride by the act of his own child.

I heard his shouts of rage, his cries of fury, his imprecations on me as one who should never touch a farthing of his fortune. And then I heard the whispering of his "friends," who were telling the "true story" of my disappearance, the tale of my "treacheries" to my husband--just as if Satan had willed it that the only result of the foolish fête on which my father had wasted his wealth like water should be the publication of my shame.

But the bitterest part of my experience was still to come. In a few minutes we sailed past the headlands of Port Raa, the lights of my husband's house shot out of view like meteors on a murky night, and the steamer turned her head to the open sea.

I was standing by a rope which crossed the bow and holding on to it to save myself from falling, for, being alone with Nature at last, I was seeing my flight for the first time in full light.

I was telling myself that as surely as my flight became known Martin's name would be linked with mine, and the honour that was dearer to me than, my own would be buried in disgrace.

O God! O God! Why should Nature be so hard and cruel to a woman? Why should it be permitted that, having done no worse than obey the purest impulses of my heart, the iron law of my sex should rise up to condemn both me and the one who was dearer to my soul than life itself?

I hardly know how long I stood there, holding on to that rope. There was no sound now except the tread of a sailor in his heavy boots, an inarticulate call from the bridge, an answering shout from the wheel, the rattling of the wind in the rigging, the throbbing of the engine in the bowels of the ship, and the monotonous wash of the waves against her side.

Oh, how little I felt, how weak, how helpless!

I looked up towards the sky, but there seemed to be no sky, no moon, and no stars, only a vaporous blackness that came down and closed about me.

I looked out to the sea, but there seemed to be no sea, only a hissing splash of green spray where the steamer's forward light fell on the water which her bow was pitching up, and beyond that nothing but a threatening and thundering void.

I did not weep, but I felt as other women had felt before me, as other women have felt since, as women must always feel after they have sinned against the world and the world's law, that there was nothing before me but the blackness of night.

"Out of the depths I cry unto thee, O Lord. Lord, hear my cry."

But all at once a blessed thought came to me. We were travelling eastward, and dark as the night was now, in a few hours the day would dawn, the sun would shine in our faces and the sky would smile over our heads!

It would be like that with me. Martin would come back. I was only going to meet him. It was dark midnight with me now, but I was sailing into the sunrise!

Perhaps I was like a child, but I think that comforted me.

At all events I went down to the little triangular cabin with a cheerful heart, forgetting that I was a runaway, a homeless wanderer, an outcast, with nothing before me but the wilderness of London where I should be friendless and alone.

The fire had gone out by this time, the oil-lamp was swinging to the motion of the ship, the timbers were creaking, and the Liverpool women were asleep.

SEVENTY-NINTH CHAPTER

At eight o'clock next morning I was in the train leaving Liverpool for London.

I had selected a second-class compartment labelled "For Ladies," and my only travelling companion was a tall fair woman, in a seal-skin coat and a very large black hat. She had filled the carriage with the warm odour of eau-de-Cologne and the racks on both sides with her luggage, which chiefly consisted of ladies' hat boxes of various shapes and sizes.

Hardly had we started when I realised that she was a very loquacious and expansive person.

Was I going all the way? Yes? Did I live in Liverpool? No? In London perhaps? No? Probably I lived in the country? Yes? That was charming, the country being so lovely.

I saw in a moment that if my flight was to be carried out to any purpose I should have to conceal my identity; but how to do so I did not know, my conscience never before having had to accuse me of deliberate untruth.

Accident helped me. My companion asked me what was my husband's profession, and being now accustomed to think of Martin as my real husband, I answered that he was a commander.

"You mean the commander of a ship?"

"Yes."

"Ah, yes, you've been staying in Liverpool to see him off on a voyage. How sweet! Just what I should do myself if my husband were a sailor."

Then followed a further battery of perplexing questions.

Had my husband gone on a long voyage? Yes? Where to? The South. Did I mean India, Australia, New Zealand? Yes, and still farther.

"Ah, I see," she said again. "He's probably the captain of a tramp steamer, and will go from port to port as long as he can find a cargo."

Hardly understanding what my companion meant by this, I half agreed to it, and then followed a volley of more personal inquiries.

I was young to be married, wasn't I? Probably I hadn't been married very long, had I? And not having settled myself in a home perhaps I was going up to London to wait for my husband? Yes? How wise--town being so much more cheerful than the country.

"Any friends there?"

"No."

"None whatever?"

"None whatever."

"But won't you be lonely by yourself in London?"

"A little lonely perhaps."

Being satisfied that she had found out everything about me, my travelling companion (probably from the mere love of talking) told me something about herself.

She was a fashionable milliner and had a shop in the West End of London. Occasionally she made personal visits to the provinces to take orders from the leading shopkeepers, but during the season she found it more profitable to remain in town, where her connection was large, among people who could pay the highest prices.

By this time we had reached Crewe, and as there was some delay in getting into the station, my travelling companion put her head out of the window to inquire the cause. She was told that a night train from Scotland was in front of us, and we should have to be coupled on to it before we could proceed to London.

This threw her into the wildest state of excitement.

"I see what it is," she said. "The shooting season is over and the society people are coming down from the moors. I know lots and lots of them. They are my best customers--the gentlemen at all events."

"The gentlemen?"

"Why, yes," she said with a little laugh.

After some shunting our Liverpool carriages were coupled to the Scotch train and run into the station, where a number of gentlemen in knickerbockers and cloth caps were strolling about the platform.

My companion seemed to know them all, and gave them their names, generally their Christian names, and often their familiar ones.

Suddenly I had a shock. A tall man, whose figure I recognised, passed close by our carriage, and I had only time to conceal myself from observation behind the curtain of the window.

"Helloa!" cried my companion. "There's Teddy Eastcliff. He married Camilla, the Russian dancer. They first met in my shop I may tell you."

I was feeling hot and cold by turns, but a thick veil must have hidden my confusion, for after we left Crewe my companion, becoming still more confidential, talked for a long time about her aristocratic customers, and I caught a glimpse of a life that was on the verge of a kind of fashionable Bohemia.

More than once I recognised my husband's friends among the number of her clients, and trembling lest my husband himself should become a subject of discussion, I, made the excuse of a headache to close my eyes and be silent.

My companion thereupon slept, very soundly and rather audibly, from Rugby to Willesden, where, awakening with a start while the tickets were being collected, she first powdered her face by her fashion-glass and then interested herself afresh in my affairs.

"Did you say, my dear, that you have no friends in London?"

I repeated that I had none.

"Then you will go to an hotel, I suppose?"

I answered that I should have to look for something less expensive.

"In that case," she said, "I think I know something that will suit you exactly."

It was a quiet boarding establishment in Bloomsbury--comfortable house, reasonable terms, and, above all, perfectly respectable. In fact, it was kept by her own sister, and if I liked she would take me along in her cab and drop me at the door. Should she?

Looking back at that moment I cannot but wonder that after what I had heard I did not fear discovery. But during the silence of the last hour I had been feeling more than ever weak and helpless, so that when my companion offered me a shelter in that great, noisy, bewildering city in which I had intended to hide myself, but now feared I might be submerged and lost, with a willing if not a cheerful heart I accepted.

Half an hour afterwards our cab drew up in a street off Russell Square at a rather grimy-looking house which stood at the corner of another and smaller square that was shut off by an iron railing.

The door was opened by a young waiter of sixteen or seventeen years, who was wearing a greasy dress-suit and a soiled shirt front.

My companion pushed into the hall, I followed her, and almost at the same moment a still larger and perhaps grosser woman than my friend, with the same features and complexion, came out of a room to the left with, a serviette in her hand.

"Sophie!"

"Jane!" cried my companion, and pointing to me she said:

"I've brought you a new boarder."

Then followed a rapid account of where she had met me, who and what I was, and why I had come up to London.

"I've promised you'll take her in and not charge her too much, you know."

"Why, no, certainly not," said the sister.

At the next moment the boy waiter was bringing, my trunk into the house on his shoulder and my travelling companion was bidding me good-bye and saying she would look me up later.

When the door was closed I found the house full of the smell of hot food, chiefly roast beef and green vegetables, and I could hear the clink of knives and forks and the clatter of dishes in the room the landlady had come from.

"You'd like to go up to your bedroom at once, wouldn't you?" she said.

We went up two flights of stairs covered with rather dirty druggeting, along a corridor that had a thin strip of linoleum, and finally up a third flight that was bare to the boards, until we came to a room which seemed to be at the top of the house and situated in its remotest corner.

It was a very small apartment, hardly larger than the room over the hall at home in which Aunt Bridget had made me sleep when I was a child, and it was nearly as cold and cheerless.

The wall-paper, which had once been a flowery pink, was now pale and patternless; the Venetian blind over the window (which looked out on the smaller square) had lost one of its cords and hung at an irregular angle; there was a mirror over the mantelpiece with the silvering much mottled, and a leather-covered easy chair whereof the spring was broken and the seat heavily indented.

"I dare say this will do for the present," said my landlady, and though my heart was in my mouth I compelled myself to agree.

"My terms, including meals and all extras, will be a pound a week," she added, and to that also, with a lump in my throat I assented, whereupon my landlady left me, saying luncheon was on and I could come downstairs when I was ready.

A talkative cockney chambermaid, with a good little face, brought me a fat blue jug of hot water, and after I had washed and combed I found my way down to the dining-room.

What I expected to find there I hardly know. What I did find was a large chamber, as dingy as the rest of the house, and as much in need of refreshing, with a long table down the middle, at which some twenty persons sat eating, with the landlady presiding at the top.

The company, who were of both sexes and chiefly elderly, seemed to me at that first sight to be dressed in every variety of out-of-date clothes, many of them rather shabby and some almost grotesque.

Raising their faces from their plates they looked at me as I entered, and I was so confused that I stood hesitating near the door until the landlady called to me.

"Come up here," she said, and when I had done so, and taken the seat by her side, which had evidently been reserved for me, she whispered:

"I don't think my sister mentioned your name, my dear. What is it?"

I had no time to deliberate.

"O'Neill," I whispered back, and thereupon my landlady, raising her voice, and addressing the company as if they had been members of her family, said:

"Mrs. O'Neill, my dears."

Then the ladies at the table inclined their heads at me and smiled, while the men (especially those who were the most strangely dressed) rose from their seats and bowed deeply.

EIGHTIETH CHAPTER

Of all houses in London this, I thought, was the least suitable to me.

Looking down the table I told myself that it must be the very home of idle gossip and the hot-bed of tittle-tattle.

I was wrong. Hardly had I been in the house a day when I realised that my fellow-guests were the most reserved and self-centred of all possible people.

One old gentleman who wore a heavy moustache, and had been a colonel in the Indian army, was understood to be a student of Biblical prophecy, having collected some thousands of texts which established the identity of the British nation with the lost tribes of Israel.

Another old gentleman, who wore a patriarchal beard and had taken orders without securing a living, was believed to be writing a history of the world and (after forty years of continuous labour) to have reached the century before Christ.

An elderly lady with a benign expression was said to be a tragic actress who was studying in secret for a season at the National Theatre.

Such, and of such kind, were my house-mates; and I have since been told that every great city has many such groups of people, the great prophets, the great historians, the great authors, the great actors whom the world does not know--the odds and ends of humanity, thrown aside by the rushing river of life into the gulley-ways that line its banks, the odd brothers, the odd sisters, the odd uncles, the odd aunts, for whom there is no place in the family, in society, or in the business of the world.

It was all very curious and pathetic, yet I think I should have been safe, for a time at all events, in this little corner of London into which chance had so strangely thrown me, but for one unfortunate happening.

That was the arrival of the daily newspaper.

There was never more than a single copy. It came at eight in the morning and was laid on the dining-room mantelpiece, from which (by an unwritten law of the house) it was the duty as well as the honour of the person who had first finished breakfast to take it up and read the most startling part of the news to the rest of the company.

Thus it occurred that on the third morning after my arrival I was startled by the voice of the old colonel, who, standing back to the fire, with the newspaper in his hand, cried:

"Mysterious Disappearance of a Peeress."

"Read it," said the old clergyman.

The tea-cup which I was raising to my mouth trembled in my hand, and when I set it down it rattled against the saucer. I knew what was coming, and it came.

The old colonel read:

_"A telegram from Blackwater announces the mysterious disappearance of the young wife of Lord Raa, which appears to have taken place late on Thursday night or in the early hours of Friday morning.

"It will be remembered that the missing lady was married a little more than a year ago, and her disappearance is the more unaccountable from the fact that during the past month she has been actively occupied in preparing for a fête in honour of her return home after a long and happy honeymoon.

"The pavilion in which the fête was to have been held had been erected on a headland between Castle Raa and a precipitous declivity to the sea, and the only reasonable conjecture is that the unhappy lady, going out on Thursday night to superintend the final preparations, lost her way in the darkness and fell over the cliffs.

"The fact that the hostess was missing was not generally known in Ellan until the guests had begun to arrive for the reception on Friday evening, when the large assembly broke up in great confusion.

"Naturally much sympathy is felt for the grief-stricken husband."_

* * * * *

After the colonel had finished reading I had an almost irresistible impulse to scream, feeling sure that the moment my house-mates looked into my face they must see that I was the person indicated.

They did not look, and after a chorus of exclamations ("Most mysterious!" "What can have become of her?" "On the eve of her fête too!") they began to discuss disappearances in general, each illustrating his point by reference to the subject of his own study.

"Perfectly extraordinary how people disappear nowadays," said one.

"Extraordinary, sir?" said the old colonel, looking over his spectacles, "why should it be extraordinary that one person should disappear when whole nations--the ten tribes for example. . . ."

"But that's a different thing altogether," said the old clergyman. "Now if you had quoted Biblical examples--Elisha or perhaps Jonah. . . ."

After the discussion had gone on for several minutes in this way I rose from the table on my trembling limbs and slipped out of the room.

It would take long to tell of the feverish days that followed--how newspaper correspondents were sent from London to Ellan to inquire into the circumstances of my disappearance; how the theory of accident gave place to the theory of suicide, and the theory of suicide to the theory of flight; how a porter on the pier at Blackwater said he had carried my trunk to the steamer that sailed on Thursday midnight, thinking I was a maid from the great house until I had given him half-a-crown (his proper fee being threepence); how two female passengers had declared that a person answering to my description had sailed with them to Liverpool; how these clues had been followed up and had led to nothing; and how, finally, the correspondents had concluded the whole incident of my disappearance could not be more mysterious if I had been dropped from mid-air into the middle of the Irish Sea.

But then came another development.

My father, who was reported to have received the news of my departure in a way that suggested he had lost control of his senses (raging and storming at my husband like a man demented), having come to the conclusion that I, being in a physical condition peculiar to women, had received a serious shock resulting in a loss of memory, offered five hundred pounds reward for information that would lead to my discovery, which was not only desirable to allay the distress of my heart-broken family but urgently necessary to settle important questions of title and inheritance.

With this offer of a reward came a description of my personal appearance.

_"Age 20, a little under medium height; slight; very black hair; lustrous dark eyes; regular features; pale face; grave expression; unusually sunny smile."_

It would be impossible for me to say with what perturbation I heard these reports read out by the old colonel and the old clergyman. Even the nervous stirring of my spoon and the agitated clatter of my knife and fork made me wonder that my house-mates did not realise the truth, which must I thought, be plainly evident to all eyes.

They never did, being so utterly immersed in their own theories. But all the same I sometimes felt as if my fellow guests in that dingy house in Bloomsbury were my judges and jury, and more than once, in my great agitation, when the reports came near to the truth, I wanted to cry. "Stop, stop, don't you see it is I?"

That I never did so was due to the fact that, not knowing what legal powers my father might have to compel my return to Ellan, the terror that sat on me like a nightmare was that of being made the subject of a public quarrel between my father and my husband, concerning the legitimacy of my unborn child, with the shame and disgrace which that would bring not only upon me but upon Martin.

I had some reason for this fear.

After my father's offer of a reward there came various spiteful paragraphs (inspired, as I thought, by Alma and written by the clumsier hand of my husband) saying it was reported in Ellan that, if my disappearance was to be accounted for on the basis of flight, the only "shock" I could have experienced must be a shock of conscience, rumour having for some time associated my name with that of a person who was not unknown in connection with Antarctic exploration.

It was terrible.

Day by day the motive of my disappearance became the sole topic of conversation in our boarding-house. I think the landlady must have provided an evening as well as a morning paper, for at tea in the drawing-room upstairs the most recent reports were always being discussed.

After a while I realised that not only my house-mates but all London was discussing my disappearance.

It was a rule of our boarding-house that during certain hours of the day everybody should go out as if he had business to go to, and having nothing else to do I used to walk up and down the streets. In doing so I was compelled to pass certain newsvendors' stalls, and I saw for several days that nearly every placard had something about "the missing peeress."

When this occurred I would walk quickly along the thoroughfare with a sense of being pursued and the feeling which a nervous woman has when she is going down a dark corridor at night--that noiseless footsteps are coming behind, and a hand may at any moment be laid on her shoulder.

But nobody troubled me in the streets and the only person in our boarding-house who seemed to suspect me was our landlady. She said nothing, but when my lip was quivering while the old colonel read that cruel word about Martin I caught her little grey eyes looking aslant at me.

One afternoon, her sister, the milliner, came to see me according to her promise, and though she, too, said nothing, I saw that, while the old colonel and the old clergyman were disputing on the hearthrug about some disappearance which occurred thousands of years ago, she was looking fixedly at the fingers with which, in my nervousness, I was ruckling up the discoloured chintz of my chair.

Then in a moment--I don't know why--it flashed upon me that my travelling companion was in correspondence with my father.

That idea became so insistent towards dinner-time that I made pretence of being ill (which was not very difficult) to retire to my room, where the cockney chambermaid wrung handkerchiefs out of vinegar and laid them on my forehead to relieve my headache--though she increased it, poor thing, by talking perpetually.

Next morning the landlady came up to say that if, as she assumed from my name, I was Irish and a Catholic, I might like to receive a visit from a Sister of Mercy who called at the house at intervals to attend to the sick.

I thought I saw in a moment that this was a subterfuge, but feeling that my identity was suspected I dared not give cause for further suspicion, so I compelled myself to agree.

A few minutes later, having got up and dressed, I was standing with my back to the window, feeling like one who would soon have to face an attack, when a soft footstep came up my corridor and a gentle hand knocked at my door.

"Come in," I cried, trembling like the last leaf at the end of a swinging bough.

And then an astonishing thing happened.

A young woman stepped quietly into the room and closed the door behind her. She was wearing the black and white habit of the Little Sisters of the Poor, but I knew her long, pale, plain-featured face in an instant.

A flood of shame, and at the same time a flood of joy swept over me at the sight of her.

It was Mildred Bankes.

EIGHTY-FIRST CHAPTER

"Mary," said Mildred, "speak low and tell me everything."

She sat in my chair, I knelt by her side, took one of her hands in both of mine, and told her.

I told her that I had fled from my husband's house because I could not bear to remain there any longer.

I told her that my father had married me against my will, in spite of my protests, when I was a child, and did not know that I had any right to resist him.

I told her that my father--God forgive me if I did him a wrong--did not love me, that he had sacrificed my happiness to his lust of power, and that if he were searching for me now it was only because my absence disturbed his plans and hurt his pride.

I told her that my husband did not love me either, and that he had married me from the basest motives, merely to pay his debts and secure an income.

I told her, too, that not only did my husband not love me, but he loved somebody else, that he had been cruel and brutal to me, and therefore (for these and other reasons) I could not return to him under any circumstances.

While I was speaking I felt Mildred's hand twitching between mine, and when I had finished she said:

"But, my dear child, they told me your friends were broken-hearted about you; that you had lost your memory and perhaps your reason, and therefore it would be a good act to help them to send you home."

"It's not true, it's not true," I said.

And then in a low voice, as if afraid of being overheard, she told me how she came to be there--that the woman who had travelled with me in the train from Liverpool, seeing my father's offer of a reward, had written to him to say that she knew where I was and only needed somebody to establish my identity; that my father wished to come to London for this purpose, but had been forbidden by his doctor; that our parish priest, Father Donovan, had volunteered to come instead, but had been prohibited by his Bishop; and finally that my father had written to his lawyers in London, and Father Dan to her, knowing that she and I had been together at the Sacred Heart in Rome, and that it was her work now to look after lost ones and send them safely back to their people.

"And now the lawyer and the doctors are downstairs," she said in a whisper, "and they are only waiting for me to say who you are that they may apply for an order to send you home."

This terrified me so much that I made a fervent appeal to Mildred to save me.

"Oh, Mildred, save me, save me," I cried.

"But how can I? how can I?" she asked.

I saw what she meant, and thinking to touch her still more deeply I told her the rest of my story.

I told her that if I had fled from my husband's house it was not merely because he had been cruel and brutal to me, but because I, too, loved somebody else--somebody who was far away but was coming back, and there was nothing I could not bear for him in the meantime, no pain or suffering or loneliness, and when he returned he would protect me from every danger, and we should love each other eternally.

If I had not been so wildly agitated I should have known that this was the wrong way with Mildred, and it was not until I had said it all in a rush of whispered words that I saw her eyes fixed on me as if they were about to start from their sockets.

"But, my dear, dear child," she said, "this is worse and worse. Your father and your husband may have done wrong, but you have done wrong too. Don't you see you have?"

I did not tell her that I had thought of all that before, and did not believe any longer that God would punish me for breaking a bond I had been forced to make. But when she was about to rise, saying that after all it would be a good thing to send me home before I had time to join my life to his--whoever he was--who had led me to forget my duty as a wife, I held her trembling hands and whispered:

"Wait, Mildred. There is something I have not told you even yet."

"What is it?" she asked, but already I could see that she knew what I was going to say.

"Mildred," I said, "if I ran away from my husband it was not merely because I loved somebody else, but because. . . ."

I could not say it. Do what I would I could not. But holy women like Mildred, who spend their lives among the lost ones, have a way of reading a woman's heart when it is in trouble, and Mildred read mine.

"Do you mean that . . . that there are consequences . . . going to be?" she whispered.

"Yes."

"Does your husband know?"

"Yes."

"And your father?"

"No."

Mildred drew her hand away from me and crossed herself, saying beneath her breath:

"Oh Mother of my God!"

I felt more humbled than I had ever been before, but after a while I said:

"Now you see why I can never go back. And you will save me, will you not?"

There was silence for some moments. Mildred had drawn back in her chair as if an evil spirit had passed between us But at length she said:

"It is not for me to judge you, Mary. But the gentlemen will come up soon to know if you are the Mary O'Neill whom I knew at the Sacred Heart, and what am I to say to them?"

"Say no," I cried. "Why shouldn't you? They'll never know anything to the contrary. Nobody will know."

"Nobody?"

I knew what Mildred meant, and in my shame and confusion I tried to excuse myself by telling her who the other woman was.

"It is Alma," I said.

"Alma? Alma Lier?"

"Yes."

And then I told her how Alma had come back into my life, how she had tortured and tempted me, and was now trying to persuade my husband, who was a Protestant, to divorce me that she might take my place.

And then I spoke of Martin again--I could not help it--saying that the shame which Alma would bring on him would be a greater grief to me than anything else that could befall me in this world.

"If you only knew who he is," I said, "and the honour he is held in, you would know that I would rather die a thousand deaths than that any disgrace should fall on him through me."

I could see that Mildred was deeply moved at this, and though I did not intend to play upon her feelings, yet in the selfishness of my great love I could not help doing so.

"You were the first of my girl friends, Mildred--the very first. Don't you remember the morning after I arrived at school? They had torn me away from my mother, and I was so little and lonely, but you were so sweet and kind. You took me into church for my first visitation, and then into the garden for my first rosary--don't you remember it?"

Mildred had closed her eyes. Her face was becoming very white.

"And then don't you remember the day the news came that my mother was very ill, and I was to go home? You came to see me off at the station, and don't you remember what you said when we were sitting in the train? You said we might never meet again, because our circumstances would be so different. You didn't think we should meet like this, did you?"

Mildred's face was growing deadly white.

"My darling mother died. She was all I had in the world and I was all she had, and when she was gone there was no place for me in my father's house, so I was sent back to school. But the Reverend Mother was very kind to me, and the end of it was that I wished to become a nun. Yes indeed, and never so much as on the day you took your vows."

Mildred's eyes were still closed, but her eyelids were fluttering and she was breathing audibly.

"How well I remember it! The sweet summer morning and the snow-white sunshine, and the white flowers and the white chapel of the Little Sisters, and then you dressed as a bride in your white gown and long white veil. I cried all through the ceremony. And if my father had not come for me then, perhaps I should have been a nun like you now."

Mildred's lips were moving. I was sure she was praying to our Lady for strength to resist my pleading, yet that only made me plead the harder.

"But God knows best what our hearts are made for," I said. "He knows that mine was made for love. And though you may not think it I know God knows that he who is away is my real husband--not the one they married me to. You will not separate us, will you? All our happiness--his and mine--is in your hands. You will save us, will you not?"

Some time passed before Mildred spoke. It may have been only a few moments, but to me it seemed like an eternity. I did not know then that Mildred was reluctant to extinguish the last spark of hope in me. At length she said:

"Mary, you don't know what you are asking me to do. When I took my vows I promised to speak the truth under all circumstances, no matter what the consequences, as surely as I should answer to God at the great Day of Judgment. Yet you wish me to lie. How can I? How can I? Remember my vows, my duty."

I think the next few minutes must have been the most evil of all my life. When I saw, or thought I saw, that, though one word would save me, one little word, Mildred intended to give me away to the men downstairs, I leapt to my feet and burst out on her with the bitterest reproaches.

"You religious women are always talking about your duty," I cried. "You never think about love. Love is kind and merciful; but no, duty, always duty! Love indeed! What do you cold creatures out of the convent, with your crosses and rosaries, know about love--real love--the blazing fire in a woman's heart when she loves somebody so much that she would give her heart's blood for him--yes, and her soul itself if need be."

What else I said I cannot remember, for I did not know what I was doing until I found myself looking out of the window and panting for breath.

Then I became aware that Mildred was making no reply to my reproaches, and looking over my shoulder I saw that she was still sitting in my chair with both her hands covering her face and the tears trickling through her fingers on to the linen of her habit.

That conquered me in a moment.

I was seized with such remorse that I wished to throw my arms about her neck and kiss her. I dared not do that, now, but I knelt by her side again and asked her to forgive me.

"Forgive me, sister," I said. "I see now that God has brought us to this pass and there is no way out of it. You must do what you think is right. I shall always know you couldn't have done otherwise. _He_ will know too. And if it must be that disgrace is to fall on him through me . . . and that when he comes home he will find. . . ."

But I could not bear to speak about that, so I dropped my head on Mildred's lap.

During the silence that followed we heard the sound of footsteps coming up the stairs.

"Listen! They're here," said Mildred. "Get up. Say nothing. Leave everything to me."

I rose quickly and returned to the window. Mildred dried her eyes, got up from the chair and stood with her back to the fire-place.

There was a knock at my door. I do not know which of us answered it, but my landlady came into the room, followed by three men in tall silk hats.

"Excuse us, my dear," she said, in an insincere voice. "These gentlemen are making an examination of the house, and they wish to see your room. May they?"

I do not think I made any reply. I was holding my breath and watching intently. The men made a pretence of glancing round, but I could see they were looking at Mildred. Their looks seemed to say as plainly as words could speak:

"Is it she?"

Mildred hesitated for a moment, there was a dreadful silence and then--may the holy Virgin bless her!--she shook her head.

I could bear no more. I turned back to the window. The men, who had looked at each other with expressions of surprise, tried to talk together in ordinary tones as if on common place subjects.

"So there's nothing to do here, apparently."

"Apparently not."

"Let's go, then. Good day, Sister. Sorry to have troubled you."

I heard the door close behind them. I heard their low voices as they passed along the corridor. I heard their slow footsteps as they went down the stairs. And then, feeling as if my heart would burst, I turned to throw myself at Sister Mildred's feet.

But Sister Mildred was on her knees, with her face buried in my bed, praying fervently.

EIGHTY-SECOND CHAPTER

I did not know then, and it seems unnecessary to say now, why my father gave up the search for me in London. He did so, and from the day the milliner's clue failed him I moved about freely.

Then from the sense of being watched I passed into that of being lost.

Sister Mildred was my only friend in London, but she was practically cut off from me. The Little Sisters had fixed her up (in the interests of her work among the lost ones) in a tiny flat at the top of a lofty building near Piccadilly, where her lighted window always reminded me of a lighthouse on the edge of a dangerous reef. But in giving me her address she warned me not to come to her except in case of urgent need partly because further intercourse might discredit her denial, and partly because it would not be good for me to be called "one of Sister Veronica's girls"--that being Mildred's name as a nun.

Oh the awful loneliness of London!

Others just as friendless have wandered in the streets of the big city. I knew I was not the first, and I am sure I have not been the last to find London the most solitary place in the world. But I really and truly think there was one day of the week when, from causes peculiar to my situation, my loneliness must have been deeper than that of the most friendless refugee.

Nearly every boarder in our boarding-house used to receive once a week or once a month a letter containing a remittance from some unknown source, with which he paid his landlady and discharged his other obligations.

I had no such letter to receive, so to keep up the character I had not made but allowed myself to maintain (of being a commander's wife) I used to go out once a week under pretence of calling at a shipping office to draw part of my husband's pay.

In my childish ignorance of the habits of business people I selected Saturday afternoon for this purpose; and in my fear of encountering my husband, or my husband's friends in the West End streets, I chose the less conspicuous thoroughfares at the other side of the river.

Oh, the wearisome walks I had on Saturday afternoons, wet or dry, down the Seven Dials, across Trafalgar Square, along Whitehall, round the eastern end of the Houses of Parliament, and past Westminster Pier (dear to me from one poignant memory), and so on and on into the monotonous and inconspicuous streets beyond.

Towards nightfall I would return, generally by the footway across Hungerford Bridge, which is thereby associated with the most painful moments of my life, for nowhere else did I feel quite so helpless and so lonely.

The trains out of Charing Cross shrieking past me, the dark river flowing beneath, the steamers whistling under the bridge, the automobiles tooting along the Embankment, the clanging of the electric cars, the arc lamps burning over the hotels and the open flares blazing over the theatres--all the never-resting life of London--and myself in the midst of the tumultuous solitude, a friendless and homeless girl.

But God in His mercy saved me from all that--saved me too, in ways in which it was only possible to save a woman.

The first way was through my vanity.

Glancing at myself in my mottled mirror one morning I was shocked to see that what with my loneliness and my weary walks I was losing my looks, for my cheeks were hollow, my nose was pinched, my eyes were heavy with dark rings underneath them, and I was plainer than Martin had ever seen me.

This frightened me.

It would be ridiculous to tell all the foolish things I did after that to improve and preserve my appearance for Martin's sake, because every girl whose sweetheart is away knows quite well, and it is not important that anybody else should.

There was a florist's shop in Southampton Row, and I went there every morning for a little flower which I wore in the breast of my bodice, making believe to myself that Martin had given it to me.

There was a jeweller's shop there too, and I sold my wedding ring (having long felt as if it burnt my finger) and bought another wedding ring with an inscription on the inside "_From Martin to Mary_."

As a result of all this caressing of myself I saw after a while, to my great joy, that my good looks were coming back; and it would be silly to say what a thrill of delight I had when, going into the drawing-room of our boarding-house one day, the old actress called me "Beauty" instead of the name I had hitherto been known by.

The second way in which God saved me from my loneliness was through my condition.

I did not yet know what angel was whispering to me out of the physical phase I was passing through, when suddenly I became possessed by a passion for children.

It was just as if a whole new world of humanity sprang into life for me by magic. When I went out for my walks in the streets I ceased to be conscious of the faces of men and women, and it seemed as if London were peopled by children only.

I saw no more of the crowds going their different ways like ants on an ant-hill, but I could not let a perambulator pass without peering under the lace of the hood at the little cherub face whose angel eyes looked up at me.

There was an asylum for children suffering from incurable diseases in the smaller square beside our boarding-house, and every morning after breakfast, no matter how cold the day might be, I would open my window to hear the cheerful voices of the suffering darlings singing their hymn:

"_There's a Friend for little children, Above the bright blue sky_."

Thus six weeks passed, Christmas approached, and the sad old city began to look glad and young and gay.

Since a certain night at Castle Raa I had had a vague feeling that I had thrown myself out of the pale of the Church, therefore I had never gone to service since I came to London, and had almost forgotten that confession and the mass used to be sweet to me.

But going home one evening in the deepening London fog (for the weather had begun to be frosty) I saw, through the open doors of a Catholic church, a great many lights in a side chapel, and found they were from a little illuminated model of the Nativity with the Virgin and Child in the stable among the straw. A group of untidy children were looking at it with bright beady eyes and chattering under their breath, while a black-robed janitor was rattling his keys to make them behave.

This brought back the memory of Rome and of Sister Angela. But it also made me think of Martin, and remember his speech at the public dinner, about saying the prayers for the day with his comrades, that they might feel that they were not cut off from the company of Christian men.

So telling myself he must be back by this time on that lonely plateau that guards the Pole, I resolved (without thinking of the difference of time) to go to mass on Christmas morning, in order to be doing the same thing as Martin at the same moment.

With this in my mind I returned to our boarding-house and found Christmas there too, for on looking into the drawing-room on my way upstairs I saw the old actress, standing on a chair, hanging holly which the old colonel with old-fashioned courtesy was handing up to her.

They were cackling away like two old hens when they caught sight of me, whereupon the old actress cried:

"Ah, here's Beauty!"

Then she asked me if I would like a ticket for a dress rehearsal on Christmas Eve of a Christmas pantomime.

"The audience will be chiefly children out of the lanes and alleys round about, but perhaps you won't mind that," she said.

I told her I should be overjoyed, and at two o'clock the following afternoon I was in my seat at the corner of the dress-circle of the great theatre, from which I could see both the stage and the auditorium.

The vast place was packed with children from ceiling to floor, and I could see the invisible hands of thousands of mothers who had put the girls into clean pinafores and brushed and oiled the tousled heads of the boys.

How their eager faces glistened! How sad they looked when the wicked sisters left Cinderella alone in the kitchen! How bright when the glittering fairy godmother came to visit her! How their little dangling feet clapped together with joy when the pretty maid went off to the ball behind six little ponies which pranced along under the magical moonlight in the falling snow!

But the part of the performance which they liked best was their own part when, in the interval, the band struck up one of the songs they sang in their lanes and alleys:

"_Yew aw the enny, Oi em ther bee, Oi'd like ter sip ther enny from those red lips yew see_."

That was so loaded with the memory of one of the happiest days of my life (the day I went with Martin to see the _Scotia_) that, in the yearning of the motherhood still unborn in me, I felt as if I should like to gather the whole screaming houseful of happy children to my breast.

But oh why, why, why, does not Providence warn us when we are on the edge of tragic things?

The pantomime rehearsal being over I was hurrying home (for the evening was cold, though I was so warm within) when I became aware of a number of newsmen who were flying up from the direction of the Strand, crying their papers at the top of their voice.

I did not usually listen to such people, but I was compelled to do so now, for they were all around me.

"_Paper--third e'shen--loss of the Sco-sha_."

The cry fell on me like a thunderbolt. An indescribable terror seized me. I felt paralysed and stood dead still. People were buying copies of the papers, and at first I made a feeble effort to do the same. But my voice was faint; the newsman did not hear me and he went flying past.

"_Paper--third e'shen--reported loss of the Sco-sha_."

After that I dared not ask for a paper. Literally I dared not. I dared not know the truth. I dared not see the dreadful fact in print.

So I began to hurry home. But as I passed through the streets, stunned, stupefied, perspiring, feeling as if I were running away from some malignant curse, the newsmen seemed to be pursuing me, for they were darting out from every street.

"_Paper--third e'shen--loss of the Sco-sha_."

Faster and faster I hurried along. But the awful cry was always ringing in my ears, behind, before, and on either side.

When I reached our boarding-house my limbs could scarcely support me. I had hardly strength enough to pull the bell. And before our young waiter had opened the door two news men, crossing the square, were crying:

"_Paper--third edition--reported loss of the 'Scotia.'_"

EIGHTY-THIRD CHAPTER

As I passed through the hall the old colonel and the old clergyman were standing by the dining-room door. They were talking excitedly, and while I was going upstairs, panting hard and holding on by the handrail, I heard part of their conversation.

"Scotia was the name of the South Pole ship, wasn't it?"

"Certainly it was. We must send young John out for a paper."

Reaching my room I dropped into my chair. My faculties had so failed me that for some minutes I was unable to think. Presently my tired brain recalled the word "Reported" and to that my last hope began to cling as a drowning sailor clings to a drifting spar.

After a while I heard some of our boarders talking on the floor below. Opening my door and listening eagerly I heard one of them say, in such a casual tone:

"Rather sad--this South Pole business, isn't it?"

"Yes, if it's true."

"Doesn't seem much doubt about that--unless there are two ships of the same name, you know."

At that my heart leapt up. I had now two rafts to cling to. Just then the gong sounded, and my anxiety compelled me to go down to tea.

As I entered the drawing-room the old colonel was unfolding a newspaper.

"Here we are," he was saying. "Reported loss of the _Scotia_--Appalling Antarctic Calamity."

I tried to slide into the seat nearest to the door, but the old actress made room for me on the sofa close to the tea-table.

"You enjoyed the rehearsal? Yes?" she whispered.

"Hush!" said our landlady, handing me a cup of tea, and then the old colonel, standing back to the fire, began to read.

_"Telegrams from New Zealand report the picking up of large fragments of a ship which were floating from the Antarctic seas. Among them were the bulwarks, some portions of the deck cargo, and the stern of a boat, bearing the name 'Scotia.'

"Grave fears are entertained that these fragments belong to the schooner of the South Pole expedition, which left Akaroa a few weeks ago, and the character of some of the remnants (being vital parts of a ship's structure) lead to the inference that the vessel herself must have foundered."_

"Well, well," said the old clergyman, with his mouth full of buttered toast.

The walls of the room seemed to be moving around me. I could scarcely see; I could scarcely hear.

_"Naturally there can be no absolute certainty that the 'Scotia' may not be still afloat, or that the members of the expedition may not have reached a place of safety, but the presence of large pieces of ice attached to some of the fragments seem to the best authorities to favour the theory that the unfortunate vessel was struck by one of the huge icebergs which have lately been floating up from the direction of the Admiralty Mountains, and in that case her fate will probably remain one of the many insoluble mysteries of the ocean."_

"Now that's what one might call the irony of fate," said the old clergyman, "seeing that the object of the expedition . . ."

"Hush!"

_"While the sympathy of the public will be extended to the families of all the explorers who have apparently perished in a brave effort to protect mankind from one of the worst dangers of the great deep, the entire world will mourn the loss (as we fear it may be) of the heroic young Commander, Doctor Martin Conrad, who certainly belonged to the ever-diminishing race of dauntless and intrepid souls who seem to be born will that sacred courage which leads men to render up their lives at the lure of the Unknown and the call of a great idea."_

I felt as if I were drowning. At one moment there was the shrieking of waves about my face; at the next the rolling of billows over my head.

_"Though it seems only too certain . . . this sacred courage quenched . . . let us not think such lives as his are wasted . . . only wasted lives . . . lives given up . . . inglorious ease . . . pursuit of idle amusements. . . . Therefore let loved ones left behind . . . take comfort . . . inspiring thought . . . if lost . . . not died in vain . . . Never pleasure but Death . . . the lure that draws true hearts. . . ."_

I heard no more. The old colonel's voice, which had been beating on my brain like a hammer, seemed to die away in the distance.

"How hard you are breathing. What is amiss?" said our landlady.

I made no reply. Rising to my feet I became giddy and held on to the table cloth to prevent myself from falling.

The landlady jumped up to protect her crockery and at the same moment the old actress led me from the room. I excused myself on the ground of faintness, and the heat of the house after my quick walk home from the theatre.

Back in my bedroom my limbs gave way and I sank to the floor with my head on the chair. There was no uncertainty for me now. It was all over. The great love which had engrossed my life had gone.

In the overwhelming shock of that moment I could not think of the world's loss. I could not even think of Martin's. I could only think of my own, and once more I felt as if something of myself had been torn out of my breast.

"Why? Why?" I was crying in the depths of my heart--why, when I was so utterly alone, so helpless and so friendless, had the light by which I lived been quenched.

After a while the gong sounded for dinner. I got up and lay on the bed. The young waiter brought up some dishes on a tray. I sent them down again. Then time passed and again I heard voices on the floor below.

"Rough on that young peeress if Conrad has gone down, eh?"

"What peeress?"

"Don't you remember--the one who ran away from that reprobate Raa?"

"Ah, yes, certainly. I remember now."

"Of course, Conrad was the man pointed at, and perhaps if he had lived to come back he might have stood up for the poor thing, but now. . . ."

"Ah, well, that's the way, you see."

The long night passed.

Sometimes it seemed to go with feet of lead, sometimes with galloping footsteps. I remember that the clocks outside seemed to strike every few minutes, and then not to strike at all. At one moment I heard the bells of a neighbouring church ringing merrily, and by that I knew it was Christmas morning.

I did not sleep during the first hours of night, but somewhere in the blank reaches of that short space between night and day (like the slack-water between ebb and flow), which is the only time when London rests, I fell into a troubled doze.

I wish I had not done so, for at the first moment of returning consciousness I had that sense, so familiar to bereaved ones, of memory rushing over me like a surging tide. I did not cry, but I felt as if my heart were bleeding.

The morning dawned dark and foggy. In the thick air of my room the window looked at me like a human eye scaled with cataract. It was my first experience of a real London fog and I was glad of it. If there had been one ray of sunshine that morning I think my heart would have broken.

The cockney chambermaid came with her jug of hot water and wished me "a merry Christmas." I did my best to answer her.

The young waiter came with my breakfast. I told him to set it down, but I did not touch it.

Then the cockney chambermaid came back to make up my room and, finding me still in bed, asked if I would like a fire. I answered "Yes," and while she was lighting a handful between the two bars of my little grate she talked of the news in the newspaper.

"It don't do to speak no harm of the dead, but as to them men as 'ad a collusion with a iceberg in the Australier sea, serve 'em jolly well right I say. What was they a-doing down there, risking their lives for nothing, when they ought to have been a-thinking of their wives and children. My Tom wanted to go for a sailor, but I wouldn't let him! Not me! 'If you're married to a sailor,' says I, ''alf your time you never knows whether you 'as a 'usband or 'asn't.' 'Talk sense,' says Tom. 'I _am_ a-talking sense,' says I, 'and then think of the kiddies,' I says."

After a while I got up and dressed and sat long hours before the fire. I tried to think of others beside myself who must be suffering from the same disaster--especially of Martin's mother and the good old doctor. I pictured the sweet kitchen-parlour in Sunny Lodge, with the bright silver bowls on the high mantelpiece. There was no fire under the _slouree_ now. The light of that house was out, and two old people were sitting on either side of a cold hearth.

I passed in review my maidenhood, my marriage, and my love, and told myself that the darkest days of my loneliness in London had hitherto been relieved by one bright hope. I had only to live on and Martin would come back to me. But now I was utterly alone, I was in the presence of nothingness. The sanctuary within me where Martin had lived was only a cemetery of the soul.

"Why? Why? Why?" I cried again, but there was no answer.

Thus I passed my Christmas Day (for which I had formed such different plans), and I hardly knew if it was for punishment or warning that I was at last compelled to think of something besides my own loss.

My unborn child!

No man on earth can know anything about that tragic prospect, though millions of women must have had to face it. To have a child coming that is doomed before its birth to be fatherless--there is nothing in the world like that.

I think the bitterest part of my grief was that nobody could ever know. If Martin had lived he would have leapt to acknowledge his offspring in spite of all the laws and conventions of life. But being dead he could not be charged with it. Therefore the name of the father of my unborn child must never, never, never be disclosed.

The thickening of the fog told me that the day was passing.

It passed. The houses on the opposite side of the square vanished in a vaporous, yellow haze, and their lighted windows were like rows of bloodshot eyes looking out of the blackness.

Except the young waiter and the chambermaid nobody visited me until a little before dinner time. Then the old actress came up, rather fantastically dressed (with a kind of laurel crown on her head), to say that the boarders were going to have a dance and wished me to join them. I excused myself on the ground of headache, and she said:

"Young women often suffer from it. It's a pity, though! Christmas night, too!"

Not long after she had gone, I heard, through the frequent tooting of the taxis in the street, the sound of old-fashioned waltzes being played on the piano, and then a dull thudding noise on the floor below, mingled with laughter, which told me that the old boarders were dancing.

I dare say my head was becoming light. I had eaten nothing for nearly forty hours, and perhaps the great shock which chance had given me had brought me near to the blank shadowland which is death.

I remember that in some vague way there arose before me a desire to die. It was not to be suicide--my religion saved me from that--but death by exhaustion, by continuing to abstain from food, having no desire for it.

Martin was gone--what was there to live for? Had I not better die before my child came to life? And if I could go where Martin was I should be with him eternally.

Still I did not weep, but--whether audibly or only in the unconscious depths of my soul--more than once I cried to Martin by name.

"Martin! Martin! I am coming to you!"

I was in this mood (sitting in my chair as I had done all day and staring into the small slow fire which was slipping to the bottom of the grate) when I heard a soft step in the corridor outside. At the next moment my door was opened noiselessly, and somebody stepped into the room.

It was Mildred, and she knelt by my side and said in a low voice:

"You are in still deeper trouble, Mary--tell me."

I tried to pour out my heart to her as to a mother, but I could not do so, and indeed there was no necessity. The thought that must have rushed into my eyes was instantly reflected in hers.

"It is he, isn't it?" she whispered, and I could only bow my head.

"I thought so from the first," she said. "And now you are thinking of . . . of what is to come?"

Again I could only bow, but Mildred put her arms about me and said:

"Don't lose heart, dear. Our Blessed Lady sent me to take care of you. And I will--I will."

MEMORANDUM BY MARTIN CONRAD

Surely Chance must be the damnedest conspirator against human happiness, or my darling could never have been allowed to suffer so much from the report that my ship was lost.

What actually happened is easily told.

Two days after we left Akaroa, N.Z., which was the last we saw of the world before we set our faces towards the Unknown, we ran into a heavy lumpy sea and made bad weather of it for forty-eight hours.

Going at good speed, however, we proceeded south on meridian 179 degrees E., latitude 68, when (just as we were sighting the Admiralty Mountains, our first glimpse of the regions of the Pole) we encountered a south-westerly gale, which, with our cumbersome deck cargo, made the handling of the ship difficult.

Nevertheless the _Scotia_ rode bravely for several hours over the mountainous seas, though sometimes she rolled fifty degrees from side to side.

Towards nightfall we shipped a good deal of water; the sea smashed in part of our starboard bulwarks, destroyed the upper deck, washed out the galley, carried off two of our life boats and sent other large fragments of the vessel floating away to leeward.

At last the pumps became choked, and the water found its way to the engine-room. So to prevent further disaster we put out the fires, and then started, all hands, to bale out with buckets.

It was a sight to see every man-jack at work on that job (scientific staff included), and you would not have thought our spirits were much damped, whatever our bodies may have been, if you had been there when I cried, "Are we downhearted, shipmates?" and heard the shout that came up from fifty men (some of them waist deep in the water):

"No!"

We had a stiff tussle until after midnight, but we stuck hard, and before we turned into our bunks, we had fought the sea and beaten it.

Next morning broke fine and clear, with that fresh crisp air of the Antarctic which is the same to the explorer as the sniff of battle to the warhorse, and no sign of the storm except the sight of some lead-white icebergs which had been torn from the islands south-west of us.

Everybody was in high spirits at breakfast, and when one of the company started "Sweethearts and Wives" all hands joined in the chorus, and (voice or no voice) I had a bit of a go at it myself.

It is not the most solemn music ever slung together, but perhaps no anthem sung in a cathedral has ascended to heaven with a heartier spirit of thanksgiving.

When I went up on deck again, though, I saw that enough of our "wooden walls" had gone overboard to give "scarey people" the impression (if things were ever picked up, as I knew they would be, for the set of the current was to the north-east) that we had foundered, and that made me think of my dear one.

We had no wireless aboard, and the ship would not be going back to New Zealand until March, so I was helpless to correct the error; but I determined that the very first message from the very first station I set up on the Antarctic continent should be sent to her to say that I was safe and everything going splendid.

What happened on Christmas day is a longer story.

On the eighteenth of December, having landed some of my deck cargo and provisions, and sent up my ship to winter quarters, I was on my way, with ponies, dogs, and sledges and a large company of men, all in A1 condition, to the lower summit of Mount Erebus, for I intended to set up my first electric-power-wave station there--that being high enough, we thought, to permit of a message reaching the plateau of the Polar zone and low enough (allowing for the curvature of the earth) to cover the maximum distance in a northerly direction.

It was a long reach, but we chose the rocky ridges and moraines, trying to avoid the crevassed glaciers, and all went well until the twentieth, when just as we were reaching the steeper gradients a strong wind sprang up, blowing straight down the course before us.

All day long we toiled against it, but the weather grew worse, with gusts of sleet and snow, until the wind reached the force of a hurricane and the temperature fell to 28 degrees below zero.

There was nothing to do but to wait for the blizzard to blow itself out, so we plugged down our tents in the shelter of the rocky side of a ravine that had an immense snow-field behind it.

The first night was bad enough, for the canvas of one tent flew into ribbons, and the poor chaps in it had to lie uncovered in their half-frozen sleeping-bags until morning.

All through the twenty-first, twenty-second, and twenty-third the storm continued, sweeping with terrific force down the ravine, and whirling the snow in dense masses from the snow-field overhead.

Christmas Eve was worse, with the temperature down to 38 degrees below zero and the wind up to eighty miles an hour in gusts, and during the greater part of Christmas Day we were all confined to our sleeping-bags and half buried in the snow that had drifted in on us.

As a consequence we had no religious service, and if anybody said a De Profundis it was between his crackling lips under his frozen beard. We had no Christmas dinner either, except a few Plasmon biscuits and a nip of brandy and water, which were served out by good old O'Sullivan who had come with me as doctor to the expedition.

On St. Stephen's Day I made a round of the camp and found the ponies suffering terribly and the dogs badly hit. The storm was telling on the men too, for some of them were down with dysentery, and the toes of one poor chap were black from frostbite.

I was fit enough myself, thank God, but suffering from want of sleep or rather from a restless feeling which broken sleep brought with it.

The real truth is that never since I sailed had I been able to shake off the backward thought that I ought not to have left my dear one behind me. In active work, like the gale, I could dismiss the idea of her danger; but now that I had nothing to do but to lie like a log in a sleeping-bag, I suffered terribly from my recollection of her self-sacrifice and my fear of the consequences that might come of it.

This was not so bad in the daytime, for even in the midst of the whirling snow and roaring wind I had only to close my eyes, and I could see her as she came up the road in the sunshine that Sunday morning when she was returning from church in her drooping hat and fluttering veil, or as she looked at me with her great "seeing eyes" at the last moment of all when she compelled me to come away.

But the night was the devil. No sooner did I drop off to sleep than I awoke with a start at the sound of her voice calling me by my name.

"Martin! Martin!"

It was always a voice of distress, and though I am no dreamer and I think no crank, I could not get away from the idea that she was crying to me to come back.

That was about the one thing in the world that was impossible to me now, and yet I knew that getting assurance from somewhere that my dear one was being cared for was the only way to set my mind at rest for the job that was before me.

It may seem ridiculous that I should have thought of that, but everybody who has ever been with Nature in her mighty solitudes, aloof from the tides of life, knows that the soul of man is susceptible down there to signs which would seem childish amid the noise and bustle of the world.

It was like that with me.

I shared my tent with O'Sullivan, the chief of our scientific staff, and Treacle, who thought it his duty to take care of me, though the work was generally the other way about.

The old salt had been badly battered, and I had not liked the way he had been mumbling about "mother," which is not a good sign in a stalwart chap when his strength is getting low.

So while buttoning up the tent on the night after Christmas Day I was a bit touched up to see old Treacle, who had lived the life of a rip, fumbling at his breast and hauling something out with an effort.

It was a wooden image of the Virgin (about the length of my hand) daubed over with gilt and blue paint, and when he stuck it up in front of his face as he lay in his sleeping-bag, I knew that he expected to go out before morning, and wished _that_ to be the last thing his old eyes should rest on.

I am not much of a man for saints myself (having found that we get out of tight places middling well without them), but perhaps what Treacle did got down into some secret place of my soul, for I felt calmer as I fell asleep, and when I awoke it was not from the sound of my darling's voice, but from a sort of deafening silence.

The roaring of the wind had ceased; the blizzard was over; the lamp that hung from the staff of the tent had gone out; and there was a sheet of light coming in from an aperture in the canvas.

It was the midnight sun of the Antarctic, and when I raised my head I saw that it fell full on the little gilded image of the Virgin. Anybody who has never been where I was then may laugh if he likes and welcome, but that was enough for me. It was all right! Somebody was looking after my dear one!

I shouted to my shipmates to get up and make ready, and at dawn, when we started afresh on our journey, there may have been dark clouds over our heads but the sun was shining inside of us.

M.C.

[END OF MARTIN CONRAD'S MEMORANDUM]

EIGHTY-FOURTH CHAPTER

Sister Mildred was right. Our Blessed Lady must have interceded for me, because help came immediately.

I awoke on St. Stephen's morning with that thrilling emotion which every mother knows to be the first real and certain consciousness of motherhood.

It is not for me to describe the physical effects of that great change. But the spiritual effect is another matter. It was like that of a miracle. God in his great mercy, looking down on me in my sorrow, had sent one of His ministering angels to comfort me.

It seemed to say:

"Don't be afraid. He who went away is not lost to you. Something of himself is about to return."

I felt no longer that I was to be left alone in my prison-house of London, because Martin's child was to bear me company--to be a link between us, an everlasting bond, so that he and I should be together to the end.

I tremble to say what interpretation I put upon all this--how it seemed to be a justification of what I did on the night before Martin left Ellan, as if God, knowing he would not return, had prompted me, so that when my dark hour came I might have this great hope for my comforter.

And oh how wonderful it was, how strange, how mysterious, how joyful!

Every day and all day and always I was conscious of my unborn child, as a fluttering bird held captive in the hand. The mystery and the joy of the coming life soothed away my sorrow, and if I had shed any tears they would have dried them.

And then the future!

I seemed to know from the first that it was to be a girl, and already I could see her face and look into her sea-blue eyes. As she grew up I would talk to her of her father--the brave explorer, the man of destiny, who laid down his life in a great work for the world. We should always be talking of him--we two alone together, because he belonged to us and nobody else in the world besides. Everything I have written here I should tell her--at least the beautiful part of it, the part about our love, which nothing in life, and not even death itself, could quench.

Oh the joy of those days! It may seem strange that I should have been so happy so soon after my bereavement, but I cannot help it if it was so, and it _was_ so.

Perhaps it was a sort of hysteria, due to the great change in my physical condition. I do not know. I do not think I want to know. But one thing is sure--that hope and prayer and the desire of life awoke in me again, as by the touch of God's own hand, and I became another and a happier woman.

Such was the condition in which Mildred found me when she returned a few days later. Then she brought me down plump to material matters. We had first to consider the questions of ways and means, in order to find out how to face the future.

It was the beginning of January, my appointed time was in June, and I had only some sixteen pounds of my money left, so it was clear that I could not stay in the boarding-house much longer.

Happily Mildred knew of homes where women could live inexpensively during their period of waiting. They were partly philanthropic and therefore subject to certain regulations, which my resolute determination (not to mention Martin's name, or permit it to be mentioned) might make it difficult for me to observe, but Mildred hoped to find one that would take me on her recommendation without asking further question.

In this expectation we set out in search of a Maternity Home. What a day of trial we had! I shall never forget it.

The first home we called at was a Catholic one in the neighbourhood of our boarding-house.

It had the appearance of a convent, and that pleased me exceedingly. After we had passed the broad street door, with its large brass plate and small brass grille, we were shown into a little waiting-room with tiled floor, distempered walls, and coloured pictures of the saints.

The porteress told us the Mother was at prayers with the inmates, but would come downstairs presently, and while we waited we heard the dull hum of voices, the playing of an organ, and the singing of the sweet music I knew so well.

Closing my eyes I felt myself back in Rome, and began to pray that I might be permitted to remain there. But the desire was damped when the Mother entered the room.

She was a stout woman, wearing heavy outdoor boots and carrying her arms interlaced before her, with the hands hidden in the ample sleeves of her habit, and her face was so white and expressionless, that it might have been cast in plaster of Paris.

In a rather nervous voice Mildred explained our errand. "Mother," she said, "I cannot tell you anything about this young lady, and I have come to ask if you will take her on my recommendation."

"My dear child," said the Mother, "that would be utterly against our rule. Not to know who the young lady is, where she comes from, why she is here, and whether she is married or single or a widow--it is quite impossible."

Mildred, looking confused and ashamed, said:

"She can afford to pay a little."

"That makes no difference."

"But I thought that in exceptional cases . . ."

"There can be no exceptional cases, Sister. If the young lady is married and can say that her husband consents, or single and can give us assurance that her father or guardian agrees, or a widow and can offer satisfactory references . . ."

Mildred looked across at me, but I shook my head.

"In that case there seems to be nothing more to say," said the Mother, and rising without ceremony she walked with us to the door.

Our next call was at the headquarters of a home which was neither Catholic nor Protestant, but belonged, Mildred said, to a kind of Universal Church, admitting inmates of all denominations.

It was in a busy thoroughfare and had the appearance of a business office. After Mildred had written her name and the object of our visit on a slip of paper we were taken up in a lift to another office with an open safe, where a man in a kind of uniform (called a Commissioner) was signing letters and cheques.

The Commissioner was at first very courteous, especially to me, and I had an uncomfortable feeling that he was mistaking me for something quite other than I was until Mildred explained our errand, and then his manner changed painfully.

"What you ask is against all our regulations," he said. "Secrecy implies something to hide, and we neither hide anything nor permit anything to be hidden. In fact our system requires that we should not only help the woman, but punish the man by making him realise his legal, moral, and religious liability for his wrong-doing. Naturally we can only do this by help of the girl, and if she does not tell us at the outset who and what the partner of her sin has been and where he is to be found. . . ."

I was choking with shame and indignation, and rising to my feet I said to Mildred:

"Let us go, please."

"Ah, yes, I know," said the Commissioner, with a superior smile, "I have seen all this before. The girl nearly always tries to shield the guilty man. But why should she? It may seem generous, but it is really wicked. It is a direct means of increasing immorality. The girl who protects the author of her downfall is really promoting the ruin of another woman, and if. . . ."

Thinking of Martin I wanted to strike the smug Pharisee in the face, and in order to conquer that unwomanly impulse I hurried out of the office, and into the street, leaving poor Mildred to follow me.

Our last call was at the home of a private society in a little brick house that seemed to lean against the wall of a large lying-in hospital in the West End of London.

At the moment of our arrival the Matron was presiding in the drawing-room over a meeting of a Missionary League for the Conversion of the Jews, so we were taken through a narrow lobby into a little back-parlour which overlooked, through a glass screen, a large apartment, wherein a number of young women, who had the appearance of dressmakers, ladies' maids, and governesses, were sewing tiny pieces of linen and flannel that were obviously baby-clothes.

There were no carpets on the floors and the house had a slight smell of carbolic. The tick-tick of sewing machines on the other side of the screen mingled with the deadened sound of the clapping of hands in the room overhead.

After a while there was rustle of dresses coming down the bare stairs, followed by the opening and closing of the front door, and then the Matron came into the parlour.

She was a very tall, flat-bosomed woman in a plain black dress, and she seemed to take in our situation instantly. Without waiting for Mildred's explanation she began to ask my name, my age, and where I came from.

Mildred fenced these questions as well as she could, and then, with even more nervousness than ever, made the same request as before.

The Matron seemed aghast.

"Most certainly not," she said. "My committee would never dream of such a thing. In the interests of the unfortunate girls who have fallen from the path of virtue, as well as their still more unfortunate offspring, we always make the most searching inquiries. In fact, we keep a record of every detail of every case. Listen to this," she added, and opening a large leather-bound hook like a ledger, she began to read one of its entries:

_"H.J., aged eighteen years, born of very respectable parents, was led astray_ [that was not the word] _in a lonely road very late at night by a sailor who was never afterwards heard of. . . ."_

But I could bear no more, and rising from my seat I fled from the room and the house into the noisy street outside.

All day long my whole soul had been in revolt. It seemed to me that, while God in His gracious mercy was giving me my child to comfort and console me, to uplift and purify me, and make me a better woman than I had been before, man, with his false and cruel morality, with his machine-made philanthropy, was trying to use it as a whip to punish not only me but Martin.

But that it should never do! Never as long as I lived! I would die in the streets first!

Perhaps I was wrong, and did not understand myself, and certainly Mildred did not understand me. When she rejoined me in the street we turned our faces homeward and were half way back to the boarding-house before we spoke again.

Then she said:

"I am afraid the other institutions will be the same. They'll all want references."

I answered that they should never get them.

"But your money will be done soon, my child, and then what is to become of you?"

"No matter!" I said, for I had already determined to face the world myself without help from anybody.

There was a silence again until we reached the door of our boarding-house, and then Mildred said:

"Mary, your father is a rich man, and however much you may have displeased him he cannot wish you to be left to the mercy of the world--especially when your time comes. Let me write to him. . . ."

That terrified me, for I saw only one result--an open quarrel between my father and my husband about the legitimacy of my child, who would probably be taken away from me as soon as it was born.

So taking Mildred by the arm, regardless of the observation of passers-by, I begged and prayed and implored of her not to write to my father.

She promised not to do so, and we parted on good terms; but I was not satisfied, and the only result of our day's journeying was that I became possessed of the idea that the whole world was conspiring to rob me of my unborn child.

A few days later Mildred called again, and then she said:

"I had another letter from Father Donovan this morning, Mary. Your poor priest is broken-hearted about you. He is sure you are in London, and certain you are in distress, and says that with or without his Bishop's consent he is coming up to London to look for you, and will never go back until you are found."

I began to suspect Mildred. In the fever of my dread of losing my child I convinced myself that with the best intentions in the world, merely out of love for me and pity for my position, she would give me up--perhaps in the very hour of my peril.

To make this impossible I determined to cut myself off from her and everybody else, by leaving the boarding-house and taking another and cheaper lodging far enough away.

I was encouraged in this course by the thought of my diminishing resources, and though heaven knows I had not too many comforts where I was. I reproached myself for spending so much on my own needs when I ought to be economising for the coming of my child.

The end of it all was that one morning early I went down to the corner of Oxford Street where the motor-omnibuses seem to come and go from all parts of London.

North, south, east, and west were all one to me, leading to labyrinths of confused and interminable streets, and I knew as little as a child which of them was best for my purpose. But chance seems to play the greatest part in our lives, and at that moment it was so with me.

I was standing on the edge of the pavement when a motor-bus labelled "Bayswater Road" stopped immediately in front of me and I stepped into it, not knowing in the least why I did so.

Late that evening, having found what I wanted, I returned in the mingled mist and darkness to the boarding-house to pack up my belongings. That was not difficult to do, and after settling my account and sending young John for a cab I was making for the door when the landlady came up to me.

"Will you not leave your new address, my dear, lest anybody should call," she said.

"Nobody will call," I answered.

"But in case there should he letters?"

"There will be no letters," I said, and whispering to the driver to drive up Oxford Street, I got into the cab.

It was then quite dark. The streets and shops were alight, and I remembered that as I crossed the top of the Charing Cross Road I looked down in the direction of the lofty building in which Mildred's window would be shining like a lighthouse over Piccadilly.

Poor dear ill-requited Mildred! She has long ago forgiven me. She knows now that when I ran away from the only friend I had in London it was because I could not help it.

She knows, too, that I was not thinking of myself, and that in diving still deeper into the dungeon of the great city, in hiding and burying myself away in it, I was asking nothing of God but that He would let me live the rest of my life--no matter how poor and lonely--with the child that He was sending to be a living link between my lost one and me.

In the light of what happened afterwards, that was all so strange, and oh, so wonderful and miraculous!

EIGHTY-FIFTH CHAPTER

My new quarters were in the poorer district which stands at the back of Bayswater.

The street was a cul-de-sac (of some ten small houses on either side) which was blocked up at the further end by the high wall of a factory for the "humanization" of milk, and opened out of a busy thoroughfare of interior shops like a gully-way off a noisy coast.

My home in this street was in number one, and I had been attracted to it by a printed card in the semi-circular fan-light over the front door, saying: "A ROOM TO LET FURNISHED."

My room, which was of fair size, was on the first floor and had two windows to the street, with yellow holland blinds and white muslin curtains.

The furniture consisted of a large bed, a horse-hair sofa, three cane-bottomed chairs, a chest of drawers (which stood between the windows), and a mirror over the mantelpiece, which had pink paper, cut into fanciful patterns, over the gilt frame, to keep off the flies.

The floor was covered with linoleum, but there were two strips of carpet, one before the fire and the other by the bed: the walls were papered with a bright red paper representing peonies in bloom; and there were three pictures--a portrait of a great Welsh preacher with a bardic name ("Dyfed"), an engraving entitled "Feed my Sheep" (showing Jesus carrying a lamb), and a memorial card of some member of the family of the house, in the form of a tomb with a weeping angel on either side.

I paid five shilling a week for my room, and, as this included the use of kettle, cooking utensils, and crockery, I found to my great delight at the end of the first week that providing for myself (tea, bread and butter, and eggs being my principal food) I had only spent ten shillings altogether, which, according to my present needs, left me enough for my time of waiting and several weeks beyond.

Every morning I went out with a little hand-bag to buy my provisions in the front street; and every afternoon I took a walk in the better part of Bayswater and even into the Park (Hyde Park), which was not far off, but never near Piccadilly, or so far east as Bloomsbury, lest I should meet Sister Mildred or be recognized by the old boarders.

I had no key to my lodgings, but when I returned home I knocked at the front door (which was at the top of a short flight of steps from the pavement) and then a string was pulled in the cellar-kitchen in which the family of my landlady lived, whereupon the bolt was shot back and the door opened of itself.

Finding it necessary to account for myself here as at the boarding-house, I had adhered to my former name, but said I was the widow of a commander lately lost, at sea, which was as near to the truth as I dared venture.

I had also made no disguise of the fact that I was expecting a child, a circumstance which secured me much sympathy from the kind-hearted souls who were now my neighbours.

They were all womanly women, generally the wives of men working in the milk factory, and therefore the life of our street was very regular.

At five in the morning you heard the halting step of the old "knocker up," who went up and down the street tapping at the bedroom windows with a long pole like a fishing-rod. A little before six you heard the clashing of many front doors and the echoing footsteps of the men going to their work. At half-past seven you heard the whoop of the milkman and the rattling of his cans. At half-past eight you heard the little feet of the children, like the pattering of rain, going off to the Board School round the corner. And a little after four in the afternoon you heard the wild cries of the juvenile community let loose from lessons, the boys trundling iron hoops and the girls skipping to a measured tune over a rope stretched from parapet to parapet.

After that, our street hummed like a bee-hive, with the women, washed and combed, standing knitting at their open doors or exchanging confidences across the areas until darkness fell and each of the mothers called her children into bed, as an old hen in the farmyard clucks up her chickens.

These good creatures were very kind to me. Having satisfied themselves from observation of my habits that I was "respectable," they called me "our lady"; and I could not help hearing that I was "a nice young thing," though it was a little against me that I did not go to church or chapel, and had confessed to being a Catholic--for several of our families (including that of my landlady) were members of the Welsh Zion Chapel not far away.

Such was the life of the little human cage to which I had confined myself, but I had an inner life that was all my own and very sweet to me.

During the long hours of every day in which I was alone I occupied myself in the making of clothes for my baby--buying linen and flannel and worsted, and borrowing patterns from my Welsh landlady.

This stimulated my tenderness towards the child that was to come, for the heart of a young mother is almost infantile, and I hardly know whether to laugh or cry when I think of the childish things I did and thought and said to myself in those first days when I was alone in my room in that back street in Bayswater.

Thus long before baby was born I had christened her. At first I wished to call her Mary, not because I cared for that name myself, but because Martin had said it was the most beautiful in the world. In the end, however, I called her Isabel Mary (because Isabel was my mother's name and she had been a far better woman than I was), and as I finished my baby's garments one by one I used to put them away in their drawer, saying to myself, "That's Isabel Mary's binder," or "Isabel Mary's christening-robe" as the case might be.

I dare say it was all very foolish. There are tears in my eyes when I think of it now, but there were none then, for though there were moments when, remembering Martin, I felt as if life were for ever blank, I was almost happy in my poor surroundings, and if it was a cage I had fixed myself in there was always a bird singing inside of it--the bird that sang in my own bosom.

"When Isabel Mary comes everything will he all right," I used to think.

This went on for many weeks and perhaps it might have gone on until my time was full but for something which, occurring under my eyes, made me tremble with the fear that the life I was living and the hope I was cherishing were really very wrong and selfish.

Of my landlady, Mrs. Williams, I saw little. She was a rather hard but no doubt heavily-laden woman, who had to "do" for a swarm of children, besides two young men lodgers who lived in the kitchen and slept in the room behind mine. Her husband was a quiet man (a carter at the dairy) whom I never saw at all except on the staircase at ten o'clock at night, when, after winding the tall clock on the landing, he went upstairs to bed in his stocking feet.

But the outstanding member of the family for me was a shock-headed girl of fourteen called Emmerjane, which was a running version of Emma Jane.

I understood that Emmerjane was the illegitimate daughter of Mrs. Williams's dead sister, and that she had been born in Carnarvon, which still shimmered in her memory in purple and gold.

Emmerjane was the drudge of the family, and I first saw her in the street at dusk, mothering a brood of her little cousins, taking Hughie by one hand and Katie by the other and telling Gwennie to lay hold of Davie lest he should be run over by the milk vans.

Afterwards she became my drudge also--washing my floor, bringing up my coals, and cleaning my grate, for sixpence a week, and giving me a great deal of information about my neighbours for nothing.

Thus she told me, speaking broad cockney with a Welsh accent, that the people opposite were named Wagstaffe and that the creaking noise I heard was that of a mangle, which Mrs. Wagstaffe had to keep because her husband was a drunkard, who stole her money and came home "a-Saturday nights, when the public-houses turned out, and beat her somethink shockin'," though she always forgave him the next day and then the creaking went on as before.

But the greatest interest of this weird little woman, who had a premature knowledge of things a child ought not to know, was in a house half-way down the street on the other side, where steam was always coming from the open door to the front kitchen.

The people who lived there were named Jones. Mrs. Jones "washed" and had a bed-ridden old mother (with two shillings from the Guardians) and a daughter named Maggie.

Maggie Jones, who was eighteen, and very pretty, used to work in the dairy, but the foreman had "tiken advantage of her" and she had just had a baby.

This foreman was named Owen Owens and he lived at the last number on our side, where two unmarried sisters "kept house" for him and sat in the "singing seat" at Zion.

Maggie thought it was the sisters' fault that Owen Owens did not marry her, so she conceived a great scheme for "besting" them, and this was the tragedy which, through Emmerjane's quick little eyes and her cockney-Welsh tongue, came to me in instalments day by day.

When her baby was a month old Maggie dressed it up "fine" and took it to the photographers for its "card di visit." The photographs were a long time coming, but when they came they were "heavenly lovely" and Maggie "cried to look at them."

Then she put one in an envelope and addressed it to Owen Owens, and though it had only to cross the street, she went out after dark to a pillar-box a long way off lest anybody should see her posting it.

Next day she said, "He'll have it now, for he always comes home to dinner. He'll take it up to his bedroom, look you, and stand it on the washstand, and if either of those sisters touch it he'll give them what's what."

After that she waited anxiously for an acknowledgment, and every time the postman passed down our street her pretty pale face would be at the door, saying, "Anything for me to-day?" or "Are you _sure_ there's nothing for me, postman?"

At length a letter came, and Maggie Jones trembled so much that she dared not open it, but at last she tripped up to her room to be "all of herself," and then . . . then there was a "wild screech," and when Emmerjane ran upstairs Maggie was stretched out on the floor in a dead faint, clutching in her tight hand the photograph which Owen Owens had returned with the words, written in his heavy scrawl across the face--_Maggie Jones's bastard_.

It would be impossible to say how this incident affected me. I felt as if a moral earthquake had opened under my feet.

What had I been doing? In looking forward to the child that was to come to me I had been thinking only of my own comfort--my own consolation.

But what about the child itself?

If my identity ever became known--and it might at any moment, by the casual recognition of a person in the street--how should the position of my child differ from that of this poor girl?

A being born out of the pale of the law, as my husband would say it must be, an outcast, a thing of shame, without a father to recognise it, and with its mother's sin to lash its back for ever!

When I thought of that, much as I had longed for the child that was to be a living link between Martin and me, I asked myself if I had any right to wish for it.

I felt I had no right, and that considering my helpless position the only true motherly love was to pray that my baby might be still-born.

But that was too hard. It was too terrible. It was like a second bereavement. I could not and would not do it.

"Never, never, never!" I told myself.

EIGHTY-SIXTH CHAPTER

Thinking matters out in the light of Maggie Jones's story, I concluded that poverty was at the root of nearly everything. If I could stave off poverty no real harm could come to my child.

I determined to do so. But there was only one way open to me at present--and that was to retrench my expenses.

I did retrench them. Persuading myself that I had no real need of this and that, I reduced my weekly outlay.

This gave me immense pleasure, and even when I saw, after a while, that I was growing thin and pale, I felt no self-pity of any sort, remembering that I had nobody to look well for now, and only the sweet and glorious duty before me of providing for my child.

I convinced myself, too, that my altered appearance was natural to my condition, and that all I needed was fresh air and exercise, therefore I determined to walk every day in the Park.

I did so once only.

It was one of those lovely mornings in early spring, when the air and the sky of London, after the long fog and grime of winter, seem to be washed by showers of sunshine.

I had entered by a gate to a broad avenue and was resting (for I was rather tired) on a seat under a chestnut tree whose glistening sheaths were swelling and breaking into leaf, when I saw a number of ladies and gentlemen on horseback coming in my direction.

I recognised one of them instantly. It was Mr. Vivian, and a beautiful girl was riding beside him. My heart stood still, for I thought he would see me. But he was too much occupied with his companion to do so.

"Yes, by Jove, it's killing, isn't it?" he said, in his shrill voice, and with his monocle in his mole-like eye, he rode past me, laughing.

After that I took my walks in the poorer streets behind Bayswater, but there I was forced back on my old problem, for I seemed to be always seeing the sufferings of children.

Thank God, children as a whole are happy. They seem to live in their hearts alone, and I really and truly believe that if all the doors of the rich houses of the West End of London were thrown open to the poor children of the East End they would stay in their slums and alleys.

But some of them suffer there for all that, especially the unfortunate ones who enter the world without any legal right to be here, and I seemed to be coming upon that kind everywhere.

One evening I saw a tiny boy of five sheltering from the rain under a dripping and draughty railway arch, and crying as if his little heart would break. I tried to comfort him and could not, but when a rather shame-faced young woman came along, as if returning from her work, he burst out on her and cried:

"Oh, muvver, she's been a-beating of me awrful."

"Never mind, Johnny," said the young woman, kneeling on the wet pavement to dry the child's eyes. "Don't cry, that's a good boy."

It needed no second sight to look into the heart of that tragedy, and the effect of it upon me was to make me curtail my expenditure still further.

Looking back on those days I cannot but wonder that I never tried to find employment. But there was one delicate impediment then--my condition, which was becoming visible, I thought, to people in the street, and causing some of them, especially women, to look round at me. When this became painful I discontinued my walks altogether, and sent Emmerjane on my few errands.

Then my room became my world.

I do not think I ever saw a newspaper. And knowing nothing of what was going on, beyond the surge and swell of the life of London as it came to me when I opened my window. I had now, more than ever, the sense of living in a dungeon on a rock in the middle of the sea.

Having no exercise I ate less and less. But I found a certain joy in that, for I was becoming a miser for my child's sake, and the only pain I suffered was when I went to my drawer, as I did every day, and looked at my rapidly diminishing store.

I knew that my Welsh landlady was beginning to call me _close_, meaning mean; but that did not trouble me in the least, because I told myself that every penny I saved out of my own expenses was for my child, to keep her from poverty and all the evils and injustices that followed in its train.

As my appointed time drew near my sleep was much broken; and sometimes in the middle of the night, when I heard a solitary footstep going down the street I would get up, draw aside one of my blinds, and see a light burning in some bedroom window opposite, and afterwards hear the muffled cry of the small new being who had come as another immigrant into our chill little world.

But I made no arrangements for myself until my Welsh landlady came up to my room one day and asked if I had settled with a doctor. When I answered no, she held up her hands and cried:

"Good gracious! Just as I thought. Thee'st got to lose no time, though."

Happily there was a doctor in our street nearly every day, and if I wished it she would call him up to me. I agreed and the doctor came next morning.

He was a tall, elderly man with cold eyes, compressed lips, and a sour expression, and neither his manner nor his speech gave any hint of a consciousness (which I am sure every true doctor must have) that in coming to a woman in my condition he was entering one of the sacred chambers of human life.

He asked me a few abrupt questions, told me when he would come again, and then spoke about his fee.

"My fee is a guinea and I usually get it in advance," he said, whereupon I went to my drawer, and took out a sovereign and a shilling, not without a certain pang at seeing so much go in a moment after I had been saving so long.

The doctor had dropped the money into his waistcoat pocket with oh! such a casual air, and was turning to go, when my Welsh landlady said:

"Her's not doing herself justice in the matter, of food, doctor."

"Why, what do you eat?" asked the doctor, and as well as I could, out of my dry and parched throat, I told him.

"Tut! tut! This will never do," he said. "It's your duty to your child to have better food than that. Something light and nourishing every day, such as poultry, fish, chicken broth, beef-tea, and farinaceous foods generally."

I gasped. 'What was the doctor thinking about?

"Remember," he said, with his finger up, "the health of the child is intimately dependent on the health of the mother. When the mother is in a morbid state it affects the composition of the blood, and does great harm to the health of the offspring, both immediately and in after life. Don't forget now. Good day!"

That was a terrible shock to me. In my great ignorance and great love I had been depriving myself for the sake of my child, and now I learned that I had all the time been doing it a grave and perhaps life-long injury!

Trying to make amends I sent out for some of the expensive foods the doctor had ordered me, but when they were cooked I found to my dismay that I had lost the power of digesting them.

My pain at this discovery was not lessened next day when my Welsh landlady brought up a nurse whom I had asked her to engage for me.

The woman was a human dumpling with a discordant voice, and her first interest, like that of the doctor, seemed to centre in her fee.

She told me that her usual terms were a guinea for the fortnight, but when she saw my face fall (for I could not help thinking how little I had left) she said:

"Some ladies don't need a fortnight, though. Mrs. Wagstaffe, for instance, she never has no more than five days, and on the sixth she's back at her mangle. So if five will do, ma'am, perhaps ten and six won't hurt you."

I agreed, and the nurse was rolling her ample person out of my room when my Welsh landlady said:

"But her's not eating enough to keep a linnet, look you."

And then my nurse, who was what the doctor calls a croaker, began on a long series of stories of ladies who, having "let themselves down" had died, either at childbirth or soon afterwards.

"It's _after_ a lady feels it if she has to nurse her baby," said the nurse, "and I couldn't be responsible neither for you nor the child if you don't do yourself justice."

This was a still more terrible possibility--the possibility that I might die and leave my child behind me. The thought haunted me all that day and the following night, but the climax came next morning, when Emmerjane, while black-leading my grate, gave me the last news of Maggie Jones.

Maggie's mother had been "a-naggin' of her to get work," asking if she had not enough mouths to feed "without her bringin' another."

Maggie had at first been afraid to look for employment, thinking everybody knew of her trouble. But after her mother had put the young minister from Zion on to her to tell her to be "obejent" she had gone out every day, whether the weather was good or bad or "mejum."

This had gone on for three months (during which Maggie used to stay out late because she was afraid to meet her mother's face) until one wet night, less than a week ago, she had come home drenched to the skin, taken to her bed, "sickened for somethink" and died.

Three days after Emmerjane told me this story a great solemnity fell on our street.

It was Saturday, when the children do not go to school, but, playing no games, they gathered in whispering groups round the house with the drawn blinds, while their mothers stood bareheaded at the doors with their arms under their aprons and their hidden hands over their mouths.

I tried not to know what was going on, but looking out at the last moment I saw Maggie Jones's mother, dressed in black, coming down her steps, with her eyes very red and her hard face (which was seamed with labour) all wet and broken up.

The "young minister" followed (a beardless boy who could have known nothing of the tragedy of a woman's life), and stepping into the midst of the group of the congregation from Zion, who had gathered there with their warm Welsh hearts full of pity for the dead girl, he gave out a Welsh hymn, and they sang it in the London street, just as they had been used to do at the cottage doors in the midst of their native mountains:

"_Bydd myrdd o ryfeddodau Ar doriad boreu wawr_."

I could look no longer, so I turned back into my room, but at the next moment I heard the rumble of wheels and knew that Maggie Jones was on her way to her last mother of all--the Earth.

During the rest of that day I could think of nothing but Maggie's child, and what was to become of it, and next morning when Emmerjane came up she told me that the "young minister" was "a-gettin' it into the 'ouse."

I think that was the last straw of my burden, for my mind came back with a swift rebound from Maggie Jones's child to my own.

The thought of leaving my baby behind now terrified and appalled me. It brought me no comfort to think that though I was poor my father was rich, for I knew that if he ever came to know of my child's existence he would hate it and cast it off, as the central cause of the downfall of his plans.

Yet Martin's child alone, and at the mercy of the world! It could not and must not be!

Then came a fearful thought. I fought against it. I said many "Hail Marys" to protect myself from it. But I could not put it away.

Perhaps my physical condition was partly to blame. Others must judge of that. It is only for me to say, in all truth and sincerity, what I felt and thought when I stood (as every woman who is to be a mother must) at the door of that dark chamber which is Life's greatest mystery.

I thought of how Martin had been taken from me, as Fate (perhaps for some good purpose still unrevealed) had led me to believe.

I thought of how I had comforted myself with the hope of the child that was coming to be a link between us.

I thought of the sweet hours I had spent in making my baby's clothes; in choosing her name; in whispering it to myself, yes, and to God, too, every night and every morning.

I thought of how day by day I had trimmed the little lamp I kept burning in the sanctuary within my breast where my baby and I lived together.

I thought of how this had taken the sting out of death and victory out of the grave. And after that I told myself that, however sweet and beautiful, _all this had been selfishness and I must put it away_.

Then I thought of the child itself, who--conceived in sin as my Church would say, disinherited by the law, outlawed by society, inheriting my physical weaknesses, having lost one of its parents and being liable to lose the other--was now in danger of being left to the mercies of the world, banned from its birth, penniless and without a protector, to become a drudge and an outcast or even a thief, a gambler, or a harlot.

This was what I thought and felt.

And when at last I knew that I had come to the end of my appointed time I knelt down in my sad room, and if ever I prayed a fervent prayer, if ever my soul went up to God in passionate supplication, it was that the child I had longed for and looked forward to as a living link with my lost one _might be born dead_.

"Oh God, whatever happens to me, let my baby be born dead--I pray, I beseech Thee."

Perhaps it was a wicked prayer. God knows. He will be just.

EIGHTY-SEVENTH CHAPTER

It was Saturday, the seventh of June. The summer had been a cold one thus far; the night was chill and heavy rain was beating against the window-pane.

There was a warm fire in my room for the first time for several months; the single gas jet on the window side of the mantelpiece had been turned low, and the nurse, in list slippers, was taking my little flannel and linen garments out of the chest of drawers and laying them on the flat steel fender.

I think I must have had intervals of insensibility, for the moments of consciousness came and went with me, like the diving and rising of a sea-bird in the midst of swelling waves.

At one such moment I became aware that the doctor and my Welsh landlady, as well as my nurse, were in the room, and that they were waiting for the crisis and fearing for my life.

I heard them talking in low voices which made a drumming noise in my ears, like that which the sea makes when it is rolling into a cave.

"She's let herself down so low, pore thing, that I don't know in the world what's to happen to her."

"As God is my witness, look you, I never saw anybody live on so little."

"I'm not afraid of the mother. I'm more afraid of the child, if you ask me."

Then the drumming noise would die out, and I would only hear something within myself saying:

"Oh God, oh God, that my child may be born dead."

At another moment I heard, above the rattle of the rain, the creaking of the mangle in the cellar-kitchen on the other side of the street.

At still another moment I heard the sound of quarrelling in the house opposite. A woman was screaming, children were shrieking, and a man was swearing in a thick hoarse voice.

I knew what had happened--it was midnight, the "public-houses had turned out," and Mr. Wagstaffe had came home drunk.

The night passed heavily. I heard myself (as I had done before) calling on Martin in a voice of wild entreaty:

"Martin! Martin!"

Then remembering that he was gone I began again to pray. I heard myself praying to the Blessed Virgin:

"Oh, Mother of my God, let my child . . ."

But a voice which seemed to come from far away interrupted me.

"Hush, bâch, hush! It will make it harder for thee."

At length peace came. It seemed to me that I was running out of a tempestuous sea, with its unlimited loneliness and cruel depth, into a quiet harbour.

There was a heavenly calm, in which I could hear the doctor and the nurse and my Welsh landlady talking together in cheerful whispers.

I knew that everything was over, and with the memory of the storm I had passed through still in my heart and brain. I said:

"Is it dead?"

"Dead?" cried the nurse in a voice several octaves higher than usual. "Dear heart no, but alive and well. A beautiful little girl!"

"Yes, your baby is all right, ma'am," said the doctor, and then my Welsh landlady cried:

"Why did'st think it would be dead, bach? As I am a Christian woman thee'st got the beautifullest baby that ever breathed."

I could bear no more. The dark thoughts of the days before were over me still, and with a groan I turned to the wall. Then everything was wiped out as by an angel's wing, and I fell into a deep sleep.

When I awoke my dark thoughts were vanishing away like a bad dream in the morning. The rain had ceased, the gas had been put out, and I could see by the glow on the peonies of the wall-paper that the sun was shining with a soft red light through the holland blinds of my windows.

I heard the sparrows chirping on the sills outside; I heard the milkman rattling his cans; I heard the bells of a neighbouring church ringing for early communion.

I closed my eyes and held my breath and listened to the sounds in my own room. I heard the kettle singing over the fire; I heard somebody humming softly, and beating a foot on the floor in time to the tune and then I heard a low voice (it was Emmerjane's) saying from somewhere near my bed:

"I dunno but what she's awake. Her breathing ain't a-goin' now."

Then I turned and saw the nurse sitting before the fire with something on her lap. I knew what it was. It was my child, and it was asleep. In spite of my dark thoughts my heart yearned for it.

And then came the great miracle.

My child awoke and began to cry. It was a faint cry, oh! so thin and weak, but it went thundering and thundering through me. There was a moment of awful struggle, and then a mighty torrent of love swept over me.

It was Motherhood.

My child! Mine! Flesh of my flesh! Oh God! Oh God!

All my desire for my baby's death to save it from the pains of life was gone, and my heart, starved so long, throbbed with tenderness. I raised myself in bed, in spite of my nurse's protest, and cried to her to give me my baby.

"Give her to me. Give her to me."

"By-and-by, by-and-by," said the nurse.

"Now, now! I can wait no longer."

"But you must take some food first. Emmerjane, give her that glass of milk and water."

I drank the milk just to satisfy them, and then held out my arms for my child.

"Give her to me--quick, quick!"

"Here she is then, the jewel!"

Oh! the joy of that moment when I first took my baby in my arms, and looked into her face, and saw my own features and the sea-blue eyes of Martin! Oh the rapture of my first eager kiss!

I suppose I must have been rough with my little cherub in the fervour of my love, for she began to cry again.

"There! there!" said the nurse. "Be good now, or I must take baby away."

But heaven had taught me another lesson, and instantly, instinctively, I put my baby to my breast. Instantly and instinctively, too, my baby turned to it with its little mouth open and its little fingers feeling for the place.

"Oh God! My God! Oh Mother of my God!"

And then in that happiness that is beyond all earthly bliss--the happiness of a mother when she first clasps her baby to her breast--I began to cry.

I had not cried for months--not since that night in Ellan which I did not wish to remember any more--but now my tears gushed out and ran down my face like rain.

I cried on Martin once more--I could not help it. And looking down at the closed eyes of my child my soul gushed out in gratitude to God, who had sent me this for all I had suffered.

"Hush, hush! You will do yourself a mischief and it will be bad for the milk," said the nurse.

After that I tried to control myself. But I found a fierce and feverish delight in suckling my child. It seemed as if every drop my baby drew gave me a spiritual as well as a physical joy--cooling my blood and my brain and wiping out all my troubles.

Oh mystery of mysteries! Oh miracle of miracles!

My baby was at my breast and my sufferings were at an end.

EIGHTY-EIGHTH CHAPTER

That was a long, long day of happiness.

It was both very long and very short, for it passed like a dream.

What wonderful happenings were crowded into it!

First the nurse, from the dizzy heights of her greater experience and superior knowledge, indulged my infantile anxieties by allowing me to look on while baby was being bathed, and rewarded me for "being good" by many praises of my baby's beauty.

"I've nursed a-many in my time," she said, "but I don't mind saying as I've never had a bonnier babby on my knee. Look at her legs now, so white and plump and dimpled. Have you _ever_ seen anythink so putty?"

I confessed that I never had, and when nurse showed me how to fix the binder, and put on the barrow-coat without disturbing baby while asleep, I thought her a wonderful woman.

Emmerjane, who had with difficulty been kept out of the room last night and was now rushing breathlessly up and down stairs, wished to hold baby for a moment, and at length out of the magnificence of my generosity I allowed her to do so, only warning her, as she loved her life, to hold tight and not let baby fall.

"How'd you mean?" said the premature little mother. "_Me_ let her fall? Not much!"

Every hour, according to the doctor's orders, I gave baby the breast. I do not know which was my greatest joy--to feast my eyes on her while she sucked and to see her little head fall back with her little mouth open when she had had enough, or to watch her when she stretched herself and hiccoughed, and then grasped my thumb with her little tight fingers.

Oh, the wild, inexpressible delight of it!

Every hour had its surprise. Every few minutes had their cause of wonder.

It rather hurt me when baby cried, and I dare say my own foolish lip would drop at such moments, but when I saw that there were no tears in her eyes, and she was only calling for her food, I pleaded with nurse to let me give her the breast again.

The sun shone all day long, and though the holland window blinds were kept down to subdue the light, for my sake and perhaps for baby's, I thought my room looked perfectly beautiful. It might be poor and shabby, but flights of angels could not have made it more heavenly than it was in my eyes then.

In the afternoon nurse told me I must take some sleep myself, but I would not sleep until baby slept, so she had to give me my cherub again, and I sat up and rocked her and for a while I sang--as softly as I could--a little lullaby.

It was a lullaby I had learned at Nemi from the Italian women in embroidered outside stays, who so love their children; and though I knew quite well that it had been written for the Mother of all Mothers, who, after she had been turned away from every door, had been forced to take refuge in a stable in Bethlehem, I was in such an ecstasy of spiritual happiness that I thought it no irreverence to change it a little and to sing it in my London lodging to my human child.

"_Sleep, little baby, I love thee, I love thee, Sleep, little Queen, I am bending above thee_."

I dare say my voice was sweet that day--a mother's voice is always sweet--for when Emmerjane, who had been out of the room, came back to it with a look of awed solemnity, she said:

"Well, I never did! I thought as 'ow there was a' angel a-come into this room."

"So there is, and here she is," I said, beaming down on my sleeping child.

But the long, short, blissful day came to an end at last, and when night fell and I dropped asleep, there were two names of my dear ones on my lips, and if one of them was the name of him who (as I thought) was in heaven, the other was the name of her who was now lying in my arms.

I may have been poor, but I felt like a queen with all the riches of life in my little room.

I may have sinned against the world and the Church, but I felt as if God had justified me by His own triumphant law.

The whole feminine soul in me seemed to swell and throb, and with my baby at my breast I wanted no more of earth or heaven.

I was still bleeding from the bruises of Fate, but I felt healed of all my wounds, loaded with benefits, crowned with rewards.

Four days passed like this, varied by visits from the doctor and my Welsh landlady. Then my nurse began to talk of leaving me.

I did not care. In my ignorance of my condition, and the greed of my motherly love, I was not sorry she was going so soon. Indeed, I was beginning to be jealous of her, and was looking forward to having my baby all to myself.

But nurse, as I remember, was a little ashamed and tried to excuse herself.

"If I hadn't promised to nurse another lady, I wouldn't leave you, money or no money," she said. "But the girl" (meaning Emmerjane) "is always here, and if she isn't like a nurse she's 'andy."

"Yes, yes, I shall be all right," I answered.

On the fifth day my nurse left me, and shocking as that fact seems to me now, I thought little of it then.

I was entirely happy. I had nothing in the world except my baby, and my baby had nothing in the world except me. I was still in the dungeon that had seemed so dreadful to me before--the great dungeon of London to one who is poor and friendless.

But no matter! I was no longer alone, for there was one more inmate in my prison-house--my child.

SIXTH PART

I AM LOST

_"Is it nothing to you, ye that pass by . . . ?"_

MEMORANDUM BY MARTIN CONRAD

I hate to butt in where I may not be wanted, but if the remainder of my darling's story is to be understood I must say what was happening in the meantime to me.

God knows there was never a day on which I did not think of my dear one at home, wondering what was happening to her, and whether a certain dark fact which always lay at the back of my mind as a possibility was actually coming to pass.

But she would be brave--I know that quite well--and I saw plainly that, if I had to get through the stiff job that was before me, I must put my shadowy fears away and think only of the dangers I was sure about.

The first of these was that she might suppose our ship was lost, so as soon as we had set up on old Erebus the wooden lattice towers which contained our long-distance electric apparatus, I tried to send her that first message from the Antarctic which was to say we had not been shipwrecked.

It was a thrilling moment. Exactly at the stroke of midnight on January 21, while the midnight sun was shining with its dull sullen glow, the whole of our company having gathered round, the wireless man prepared to despatch my message.

As we were not sure of our machinery I had drawn up the words to suit any place into which they might fall if they missed their intended destination:

"South Pole Expedition safe. All well. Send greetings to dear ones at home."

For some forty seconds the sparks crackled out their snappy signals into the crisp night air, and then the settled calm returned, and we stood in breathless silence like beings on the edge of a world waiting for the answer to come as from another planet.

It came. After a few minutes we heard from our magnetic detector the faint sound of the S signals, and then we broke into a great cheer. It was not much, but it was enough; and while our scientific staff were congratulating themselves that electric-wave telegraphy was not inhibited by long distance, or by the earth's curvature over an arc of a great circle, I was thinking of my dear one--that one way or another my message would reach her and she would be relieved.

Then in splendid health and spirits--dogs, ponies, and men all A1--we started on our journey, making a bee-line for the Pole.

Owing to the heavy weights we had to transport our progress was slow, much slower than we had expected; and though the going was fair and we kept a steady pace, travelling a good deal by night, it was not until the end of March that we reached Mount Darwin, which I had fixed on for the second of our electric power stations.

By this time winter was approaching, the nights were beginning to be dark and cold, and the altitude (8000 ft.) was telling on some of us.

Nevertheless our second installation got finished about the last week in April, and again we gathered round (not quite such a hearty company as before) while the wireless man spoke to the operator we had left on Erebus.

Again the electrical radiations went crackling into space, and again we gave a cheer when the answer came back--all well and instruments in perfect order.

Then, late as it was, we began on the last stage of our journey, which we knew would be a hard one. Three hundred geographical miles in front; temperature down to minus 40°; the sun several weeks gone, and nothing before us but thickening twilight, cold winds, snow, the rare aurora and the frequent moon.

But the worst fact was that our spirits were low, and do what I would to keep a good heart and cheer up the splendid fellows who had come with me, I could not help feeling the deepening effect of that sunless gloom.

In spite of this, I broke camp on April 25, and started straight as a die for the South.

It was a stiff fight over the upper glacier in latitude 85, with its razor-shaped ice, full of snow-covered crevasses, and three days out two of our best men fell into one of the worst of them.

I saw the accident from a dozen yards away, and running up I lay on my stomach and shouted down, but it was a black bottomless gulf and not a sound or a sign came back to me.

This cast a still deeper gloom on our company, who could not be cheered up, though I kept telling them we should be on the great plateau soon, please God, and then we should have a clear road to the Pole.

We were not much better on top though, for the surface was much broken up, and in that brewing place of the winds there seemed to be nothing but surging seas of cumulus cloud and rolling waves of snow.

The Polar march was telling on us badly. We were doing no more than seven miles at a stretch. So to help my shipmates to keep up their spirits (and perhaps to give a bit of a "heise" to my own) I had to sing all day long--though my darling is right that I have no more voice than a corn-crake.

Sometimes I sang "Ramsey Town," because it did not want much music, but generally "Sally's the gel for me," because it had a rattling chorus. The men all joined in (scientific experts included), and if the angels took any heed of us, I think it must have touched them up to look down on our little company of puny men singing away as we trudged through that snowy wilderness which makes a man feel so small.

But man can only do his best, and as Father Dan (God bless his old heart!) used to say, the angels can do no more. We were making middling hard work of it in the 88th parallel, with a temperature as low as 50 degrees of frost, when a shrieking, blinding blizzard came sweeping down on us from the south.

I thought it might blow itself out, but it didn't, so we struck camp in a broad half-circle, building igloos (snow huts) with their backs (like rain-beaten cattle) to the storm.

There we lay nine days--and it is not worth while now to say how much some of our men suffered from frozen fingers, and more from falling spirits.

Sometimes I heard them saying (in voices that were intended to be loud enough for me to hear) it would have been better to have built winter quarters on the north of Darwin and settle there until the return of summer. And at other times I heard them counting the distance to the Pole--a hundred geographical miles, making twenty days' march at this season, with the heavy weights we had to carry, and the dwindling of our dogs and ponies, for we had killed a lot of them for food.

But I would not give in, for I felt that to go back without finishing my job would break my heart; and one day when old Treacle said, "No use, guv'nor, let's give it best," I flew at him like a hunted tiger.

All the same I was more than a bit down myself, for there were days when death was very near, and one night it really broke me up to hear a big strapping chap saying to the man who shared his two-man sack, "I shouldn't care a whiff if it wasn't for the wife and the kiddies."

God knows I had my own anchor at home, and sometimes it had a devil of a tug at me. I fought myself hard, though, and at last in my desire to go on and my yearning to go back to my dear one, I made an awful proposal, such as a man does not much like to think of after a crisis is over.

"Shipmates," I said, "it isn't exactly my fault that we are here in the middle of winter, but here we are, and we must make the best of it. I am going forward, and those who want to go with me can go. But those who don't want to go can stay; and so that no one may have it on his conscience that he has kept his comrades back, whether by weakness or by will, I have told the doctor to serve out a dose of something to every man, that he may end it whenever he wants to."

To my surprise that awful proposal was joyfully received; and never so long as I live shall I forget the sight o' O'Sullivan going round the broad circle of my shipmates in the blue gloom of that noonday twilight and handing something to every one of them, while nobody spoke, and Death seemed to look us in the face.

And now I come to the incident for which I have told this story.

I could not get a wink of sleep that night for thinking of the brave fellows I had doomed to death by their own hands (for that was what it came to), because their souls were starving and they were thinking of home.

My soul was starving too, and whether it was the altitude (now 11,000 ft.) that was getting into my head, and giving me that draught in the brain which only travellers in frozen regions know, or the Power higher than Nature which speaks to a man in great solitudes when life is low, I cannot say, but as God is my witness, I was hearing again the voices of my dear ones so far away.

Sometimes they were the voices of my old people in Ellan, but more frequently, and most importunately, it was Mary's voice, calling me by my name, and crying to me for help as if she were in the shadow of some threatening danger.

"Martin! Martin! Martin!"

When this idea took clear possession of me--it was about three a.m. and the hurricane was yowling like a wounded dog--the answering thought came quick. I must go back. No matter at what cost or sacrifice--I must go back.

It was in vain I reflected that the trouble which threatened my darling (whatever it was, and I thought I knew) might be all over before I reached her side--I must go back.

And even when I reminded myself that I was within twenty days' march of that last point of my journey which was to be the crown and completion of it all, I also remembered that my dear one was calling me, and I had no choice but to obey.

Next morning, in the first light of the dim Antarctic glow, I crept out of my snow hut to look south with powerful glasses in order to make sure that there was no reason why I should change my mind.

There was none. Although the snow had ceased the blizzard was blowing a hundred miles an hour in cutting gusts, so with a bleeding heart (and yet a hot one) I told Treacle to call rip our company, and when they stood round me in the shelter of my hut I said:

"Shipmates, I have been thinking things over during the night, and I see them differently now. Nature is stronger than man, and the nature that is inside of us sometimes hits us harder than that which is without. I think it is that way with us here, and I believe there isn't a man of you who wouldn't go forward with me if he had nobody to think of except himself. . . . Well, perhaps _I_ have somebody to think of, too, so we'll stick together, shipmates, and whatever regrets there may be, or disappointments, or heart-breakings, we'll . . . we'll go back home."

I think it says something for the mettle my men were made of that there was never a cheer after I said that, for they could see what it cost me to say it. But by God, there was a shout when I added:

"We've drawn a blank this time, boys, but we'll draw a winner yet, and I ask you to swear that you'll come back with me next year, please God, to finish the work we've begun."

Then we gripped hands in that desolate place, and took our solemn oath, and God knows we meant to keep it.

It did not take long to strike camp, I can tell you. The men were bustling about like boys and we had nothing to think of now but the packing of the food and the harnessing of the dogs and ponies, for we were leaving everything else behind us.

At the last moment before we turned northward I planted the Union Jack on the highest hummock of snow, and when we were a hundred yards off I looked back through the gloom and saw it blowing stiffly in the wind.

I don't think I need tell how deeply that sight cut me, but if life has another such moment coming for me all I have to say is that I hope I may die before I live to see it--which is Irish, but most damnably true.

That was twelve o'clock noon on the eighth day of June and anybody may make what he likes of what I say, but as nearly as I can calculate the difference of time between London and where we were in the 88th latitude it was the very hour of my dear one's peril.

M.C.

[END OF MARTIN CONRAD'S MEMORANDUM]

EIGHTY-NINTH CHAPTER

Two weeks passed and if I suffered from getting up too soon I was never conscious of it.

Once or twice, perhaps, in the early days I felt a certain dizziness and had to hold on for a moment to the iron rail of my bedstead, but I was too much occupied with the tender joys of motherhood to think much about myself.

Bathing, dressing, undressing, and feeding my baby were a perpetual delight to me.

What a joy it all was!

There must he something almost animal, even voluptuous, in mothers' love, for there was nothing I liked so much as having baby naked on my knee and devouring its sweet body all over with kisses--putting its little fat hands and even its little fat feet into my mouth.

There must be something almost infantile, too, for sometimes after I had talked to my darling with a flood of joyous chatter I would even find myself scolding her a little, and threatening what I would do if she did not "behave."

Oh, mysterious laws of motherhood! Only God can fathom the depths of them.

It was just as if sixteen years of my life had rolled back, and I was again a child in my mother's room playing with my dolls under the table. Only there was something so wonderful now in the sweet eyes that looked up at me, that at certain moments I would fall into a long reverie and my heart would be full of adoration.

What lengths I went to!

It was the height of the London season when baby came; and sometimes at night, looking through my window, I saw the tail-end of the long queue of carriages and electric broughams which stretched to the end of the street I lived in, from the great houses fronting the Park where balls and receptions were being held until the early hours of morning. But I never envied the society ladies they were waiting for. On the contrary I pitied them, remembering they were childless women for the most part and thinking their pleasures were hollow as death compared with mine.

I pitied the rich mothers too--the mothers who banish their babies to nurseries to be cared for by servants, and I thought how much more blessed was the condition of poor mothers like myself who kept all that sweetness to themselves.

How happy I was! No woman coming into a fortune was ever so happy. I sang all day long. Sometimes it was the sacred music of the convent in which each note, with its own glory of sound, wraps one's heart round as with a rainbow, but more frequently it was "Ramsey Town" or "Sally's the gel for me," which were only noisy nonsense but dear to me by such delicious memories.

My neighbours would come to their doors to listen, and when I had stopped I would hear them say:

"Our lady is a 'appy 'cart, isn't she?"

I suppose it was because I was so happy that my looks returned to me, though I did not know it was so until one morning, after standing a moment at the window, I heard somebody say:

"Our lady seems to be prettier than ever now her baby has come."

I should not have been a woman if I could have resisted that, so I ran to the glass to see if it was true, and it was.

The ugly lines that used to be in my cheeks had gone, my hair had regained its blue-black lustre, and my eyes had suddenly become bright like a darkened room when the shutters are opened and the sunshine streams into it.

But the coming of baby did better for me than that. It brought me back to God, before whom I now felt so humble and so glad, because he had transformed the world for me.

Every Catholic will know why I could not ask for the benediction of the Church after childbirth; but he will also know why I was in a fever of anxiety to have my baby baptized at the earliest possible moment. It was not that I feared her death (I never thought of that in those days), but because I lived in dread of the dangers which had darkened my thoughts before she was born.

So when baby was nearly a fortnight old I wrote to the Rector of a neighbouring Catholic Church asking when I might bring her to be baptized, and he sent me a printed reply, giving the day and hour, and enclosing a card to be filled up with her name and all other particulars.

What a day of joy and rapture was that of my baby's baptism! I was up with the sun on the morning appointed to take her to church and spent hours and hours in dressing her.

How lovely she looked when I had finished! I thought she was the sweetest thing in the world, sweeter than a rosebud under its sparkling web of dew when the rising sun is glistening on it.

After I had put on all the pretty clothes I had prepared for her before she was born--the christening robe and the pelisse and the knitted bonnet with its pink ribbons and the light woollen veil--I lifted her up to the glass to look at herself, being such a child myself and so wildly, foolishly happy.

"That old Rector won't see anything equal to her _this_ summer morning anyway," I thought.

And then the journey to church!

I have heard that unmarried mothers, going out for the first time after their confinement, feel ashamed and confused, as if every passer-by must know their shameful secret. I was a kind of unmarried mother myself, God help me, but I had no such feeling. Indeed I felt proud and gay, and when I sailed out with my baby in my arms I thought all the people in our street were looking at me, and I am sure I wanted to say "Good morning" to everybody I met on my way.

The church was not in a joyous quarter. It stood on the edge of a poor and very populous district, with a flaunting public-house immediately opposite. When I got to it I found a number of other mothers (all working women), with their babies and the godfathers and godmothers they had provided for them, waiting at the door.

At this sight I felt very stupid, for I had been thinking so much about other things (some of them vain enough perhaps) that I had forgotten the necessity for sponsors; and I do not know what I should have done at that last moment if the sacristan had not come to my relief--finding me two old people who, for a fee of a shilling each, were willing to stand godmother and godfather to my darling.

Then the priest came out of the church in his white surplice and stole, and we all gathered in the porch for the preliminary part of the sacrament.

What an experience it was! Never since my marriage had I been in a state of such spiritual exaltation.

The sacristan, showing me some preference, had put me in the middle of the row, immediately in front of the priest, so what happened to the other children I do not know, having eyes and ears for nothing but the baptism of my own baby.

There were some mistakes, but they did not trouble me, although one was a little important.

When the priest said, "What name give you this child?" I handed the Rector's card to the sacristan, and whispered "Isabel Mary" to the godmother, but the next thing I heard was:

"Mary Isabel, what dost thou ask of the Church of God?"

But what did it matter? Nothing mattered except one thing--that my darling should be saved by the power of the Holy Sacrament from the dark terrors which threatened her.

Oh, it is a fearful and awful thing, the baptism of a child, if you really and truly believe in it. And I did--from the bottom of my heart and soul I believed in it and trusted it.

In my sacred joy I must have cried nearly all the time, for I had taken baby's bonnet off, I remember, and holding it to my mouth I found after a while that I was wetting it with my tears.

When the exorcisms were over, the priest laid the end of his stole over baby's shoulder and led her (as our prayer books say) into the church, and we all followed to the baptistery, where I knelt immediately in front of the font, with the old godmother before me, the other mothers on either side, and a group of whispering children behind.

The church was empty, save for two charwomen who were sweeping the floor of the nave somewhere up by the dark and silent altar; and when the sacristan closed the outer door there was a solemn hush, which was broken only by the priest's voice and the godparents' muttered responses.

"Mary Isabel, dost thou renounce Satan?"

"I do renounce him."

"And all his works?"

"I do renounce them."

"And all his pomps?"

"I do renounce them."

The actual baptism was like a prayer to me. I am sure my whole soul went out to it. And though I may have been a sinful woman unworthy to be churched, I know, and God knows, that no chaste and holy nun ever prayed with a purer heart than I did then, kneeling there with my baby's bonnet to my mouth.

"Mary Isabel, I baptize thee in the name of the Father + and of the Son + and of the Holy Ghost.+"

Except that baby cried a little when the water was poured on her head (as she had cried when the salt was put on her tongue), I knew no more after that until I saw the candle in the godfather's hand (which signified that my child had been made a Child of Light) and heard the priest say:

"Go in peace and the Lord be with thee."

Then I awoke as from a trance. There was a shuffling of feet. The priest was going away. The solemn rite was at an end.

I rose from my knees, put a little money in the plate which the sacristan held out to me, gave a shilling to each of the two old sponsors, took baby back into my arms, and sat down in a pew to put on her bonnet and veil.

The spiritual exaltation which had sustained me lasted until I reached the street where the other mothers and their friends were laughing and joking, in voices that had to be pitched high over the rattle of the traffic, about going to the house opposite to "wet the baby's head."

But I think something of the celestial light of the sacrament must have been on my face still when I reached home, for I remember that as I knocked at the door, and waited for the rope from the kitchen to open it, I heard one of my neighbours say:

"Our lady has taken a new lease of life, hasn't she?"

I thought I had--a great new lease of physical and spiritual life.

But how little did I know what Fate had in store for me!

NINETIETH CHAPTER

I was taking off baby's outdoor things when my Welsh landlady came up to ask how I had got on, and after I had told her she said:

And now thee'st got to get the jewel registered."

"Registered?"

"Within three weeks. It's the law, look you."

That was the first thing that frightened me. I had filled up truthfully enough the card which the Rector had sent me, because I knew that the register of my Church must be as sacred as its confessional.

But a public declaration of my baby's birth and parentage seemed to be quite another matter--charged with all the dangers to me, to Martin, and above all to my child, which had overshadowed my life before she was born.

More than once I felt tempted to lie, to make a false declaration, to say that Martin had been my husband and Isabel was my legitimate child.

But at length I resolved to speak the truth, the plain truth, telling myself that God's law was above man's law, and I had no right to be ashamed.

In this mood I set off for the Registry Office. It was a long way from where I lived, and carrying baby in my arms I was tired when I got there.

I found it to be a kind of private house, with an open vestibule and a black-and-white enamelled plate on the door-post, saying "Registry of Births and Deaths."

In the front parlour (which reminded me of Mr. Curphy's office in Holmtown) there was a counter by the door and a large table covered with papers in the space within.

Two men sat at this table, an old one and a young one, and I remember that I thought the old one must have been reading aloud from a newspaper which he held open in his hand, for as I entered the young one was saying:

"Extraordinary! Perfectly extraordinary! And everybody thought they were lost, too!"

In the space between the door and the counter two women were waiting. Both were poor and obviously agitated. One had a baby in her arms, and when it whimpered for its food she unbuttoned her dress and fed it openly. The other woman, whose eyes were red as if she had been crying, wore a coloured straw hat over which, in a pitiful effort to assume black, she had stretched a pennyworth of cheap crêpe.

In his own good time the young man got up to attend to them. He was a very ordinary young clerk in a check suit, looking frankly bored by the dull routine of his daily labour, and palpably unconscious of the fact that every day and hour of his life he was standing on the verge of the stormiest places of the soul.

Opening one of two registers which lay on the counter (the Register of Births) he turned first to the woman with the child. Her baby, a boy, was illegitimate, and in her nervousness she stumbled and stammered, and he corrected her sharply.

Then opening the other register (the Register of Deaths) he attended to the woman in the crêpe. She had lost her little girl, two years old, and produced a doctor's certificate. While she gave the particulars she held a soiled handkerchief to her mouth as if to suppress a sob, but the young clerk's composure remained undisturbed.

I do not know if it was the agitation of the two poor women that made me nervous, but when they were gone and my turn had come, I was hot and trembling.

The young clerk, however, who was now looking at me for the first time, had suddenly become respectful. With a bow and a smile he asked me if I wished to register my child, and when I answered yes he asked me to be good enough to step up to the counter.

"And what is your baby's name, please?" he asked.

I told him. He dipped his pen in his metal ink-pot, shook some drops back, made various imaginary flourishes over his book and wrote:

"Mary Isabel."

"And now," he said, with another smile, "the full name, profession, and place of residence of the father."

I hesitated for a moment, and then, making a call on my resolution, I said:

"Martin Conrad, seaman, deceased."

The young clerk looked up quickly.

"Did you say Martin Conrad, ma'am?" he asked, and as well as I could for a click in my throat I answered:

"Yes."

He paused as if thinking; then with the same flourish as before he wrote that name also, and after he had done so, he twisted his face about to the old man, who was sitting behind him, and said, in a voice that was not meant to reach me:

"Extraordinary coincidence, isn't it?"

"Extraordinary!" said the old man, who had lowered his newspaper and was looking across at me over the rims of his spectacles.

"And now," said the young clerk, "your own name and your maiden name if you please."

"Mary O'Neill."

The young clerk looked up at me again. I was holding baby on my left arm and I could see that his eye caught my wedding ring.

"Mary Conrad, maiden name O'Neill, I presume?" he said.

I hesitated once more. The old temptation was surging back upon me. But making a great pull on my determination to tell the truth (or what I believed to be the truth) I answered:

"No, Mary O'Neill simply."

"Ah!" said the young clerk, and I thought his manner changed instantly.

There was silence for some minutes while the young clerk filled up his form and made the copy I was to carry away.

I heard the scratching of the young clerk's pen, the crinkling of the old man's newspaper, the hollow ticking of a round clock on the wall, the dull hum of the traffic in the streets, and the thud-thud-thudding in my own bosom.

Then the entry was read out to me and I was asked to sign it.

"Sign here, please," said the young clerk in quite a different tone, pointing to a vacant line at the bottom of the hook, and I signed with a trembling hand and a feeling of only partial consciousness.

I hardly know what happened after that until I was standing in the open vestibule, settling baby on my arm afresh for my return journey, and telling myself that I had laid a stigma upon my child which would remain with her as long as she lived.

It was a long, long way back, I remember, and when I reached home (having looked neither to the right nor left, nor at anything or anybody, though I felt as if everybody had been looking at me) I had a sense of dimness of sight and of aching in the eyeballs.

I did not sing very much that day, and I thought baby was rather restless.

Towards nightfall I had a startling experience.

I was preparing Isabel for bed, when I saw a red flush, like a rash, down the left side of her face.

At first I thought it would pass away, but when it did not I called my Welsh landlady upstairs to look at it.

"Do you see something like a stain on baby's face?" I asked, and then waited breathlessly for her answer.

"No . . . Yes . . . Well," she said, "now that thee'st saying so . . . perhaps it's a birthmark."

"A birthmark?"

"Did'st strike thy face against anything when baby was coming?"

I made some kind of reply, I hardly know what, but the truth, or what I thought to be the truth, flashed on me in a moment.

Remembering my last night at Castle Raa, and the violent scene which had occurred there, I told myself that the flush on baby's face was the mark of my husband's hand which, making no impression upon me, had been passed on to my child, and would remain with her to the end of her life, as the brand of her mother's shame and the sign of what had been called her bastardy.

How I suffered at the sight of it! How time after time that night I leaned over my sleeping child to see if the mark had passed away! How again and again I knelt by her side to pray that if sin of mine had to be punished the punishment might fall on me and not on my innocent babe!

At last I remembered baby's baptism and told myself that if it meant anything it meant that the sin in which my child had been born, the sin of those who had gone before her (if sin it was), had been cast out of her soul with the evil spirits which had inspired them.

"_This sign of the Holy Cross + which we make upon her forehead do thou, accursed devil, never dare to violate_."

God's law had washed my darling white! What could man's law--his proud but puny morality--do to injure her? It could do nothing!

That comforted me. When I looked at baby again the flush had gone and I went to bed quite happy.

NINETY-FIRST CHAPTER

I think it must have been the morning of the next day when the nurse who had attended me in my confinement came to see how I was going along.

I told her of the dimness of my sight and the aching of my eyeballs, whereupon she held up her hands and cried:

"There now! What did I tell you? Didn't I say it is _after_ a lady feels it?"

The moral of her prediction was that, being in a delicate state of health, and having "let myself low" before baby was born, it was my duty to wean her immediately.

I could not do it.

Although the nurse's advice was supported by my Welsh landlady (with various prognostications of consumption and rickets), I could not at first deny myself the wild joy of nursing my baby.

But a severer monitor soon came to say that I must. I found that my money was now reduced to little more than two pounds, and that I was confronted by the necessity (which I had so long put off) of looking for employment.

I could not look for employment until I had found a nurse for my child, and I could not find a nurse until my baby could do without me, so when Isabel was three weeks old I began to wean her.

At first I contented myself with the hours of night, keeping a feeding-bottle in bed, with the cow's milk warmed to the heat of my own body. But when baby cried for the breast during the day I could not find it in my heart to deny her.

That made the time of weaning somewhat longer than it should have been, but I compromised with my conscience by reducing still further my meagre expenses.

Must I tell how I did so?

Although it was the month of July there was a snap of cold weather such as sometimes comes in the middle of our English summer, and yet I gave up having a fire in my room, and for the cooking of my food I bought a small spirit stove which cost me a shilling.

This tempted me to conduct which has since had consequences, and I am half ashamed and half afraid to speak of it. My baby linen being little I had to wash it frequently, and having no fire I . . . dried it on my own body.

Oh, I see now it was reckless foolishness, almost wilful madness, but I thought nothing of it then. I was poor and perhaps I was proud, and I could not afford a fire. And then a mother's love is as deep as the sea, and there was nothing in the wide world I would not have done to keep my darling a little longer beside me.

Baby being weaned at last I had next to think of a nurse, and that was a still more painful ordeal. To give my child to another woman, who was to be the same as a second mother to her, was almost more than I could bear to think about.

I _had_ to think of it. But I could only do so by telling myself that, when I put baby out to nurse, I might arrange to see her every morning and evening and as often as my employment permitted.

This idea partly reconciled me to my sacrifice, and I was in the act of drawing up a newspaper advertisement in these terms when my landlady came to say that the nurse knew of somebody who would suit me exactly.

Nurse called the same evening and told me a long story about her friend.

She was a Mrs. Oliver, and she lived at Ilford, which was at the other end of London and quite on the edge of the country. The poor woman, who was not too happily married, had lost a child of her own lately, and was now very lonely, being devoted to children.

This pleased me extremely, especially (God forgive me!), the fact that Mrs. Oliver was a bereaved mother and lived on the edge of the country.

Already in my mind's eye I saw her sitting on sunny days under a tree (perhaps in an orchard) with Isabel in her arms, rocking her gently and singing to her softly, and almost forgetting that she was not her own baby whom she had lost . . . though that was a two-edged sword which cut me both ways, being a sort of wild joy with tears lurking behind it.

So I took a note of Mrs. Oliver's address (10 Lennard's Row, Lennard's Green, Ilford) and wrote to her the same night, asking her terms and stating my own conditions.

A reply came the following day. It was a badly-written and misspelt letter, which showed me that Mrs. Oliver must be a working woman (perhaps the wife of a gardener or farm-labourer, I thought), though that did not trouble me in the least, knowing by this time how poor people loved their children.

_"The terms is fore shillins a weke," she wrote, "but i am that lonelie sins my own littel one lef me i wood tike your swete darling for nothin if I cud afford it and you can cum to see her as offen as you pleas_."

In my ignorance and simplicity this captured me completely, so I replied at once saying I would take baby to Ilford the next day.

I did all this in a rush, but when it came to the last moment I could scarcely part with my letter, and I remember that I passed three pillar-boxes in the front street before I could bring myself to post it.

I suppose my eyes must have been red when I returned home, for my Welsh landlady (whom I had taken into my confidence about my means) took me to task for crying, telling me that I ought to thank God for what had happened, which was like a message from heaven, look you, and a dispensation of Providence.

I tried to see things in that light, though it was difficult to do so, for the darker my prospects grew the more radiant shone the light of the little angel by whose life I lived, and the harder it seemed to live without her.

"But it isn't like losing my child altogether, is it?" I said.

"'Deed no, and 'twill he better for both of you," said my landlady.

"Although Ilford is a long way off I can go there every day, can't I'!"

"'Deed thee can, if thee'st not minding a journey of nine miles or more."

"And if I can get a good situation and earn a little money I may be able to have baby back and hire somebody to nurse her, and so keep her all to myself."

"And why shouldn't thee?" said my Welsh landlady. "Thee reading print like the young minister and writing letters like a copybook!"

So in the fierce bravery of motherly love I dried my eyes and forced back my sobs, and began to pack up my baby's clothes, and to persuade myself that I was still quite happy.

My purse was very low by this time. After paying my rent and some other expenses I had only one pound and a few shillings left.

NINETY-SECOND CHAPTER

At half past seven next morning I was ready to start on my journey.

I took a hasty glance at myself in the glass before going out, and I thought my eyes were too much like the sky at daybreak--all joyful beams with a veil of mist in front of them.

But I made myself believe that never since baby was born had I been so happy. I was sure I was doing the best for her. I was also sure I was doing the best for myself, for what could be so sweet to a mother as providing for her child?

My Welsh landlady had told me it was nine miles to Ilford, and I had gathered that I could ride all the way in successive omnibuses for less than a shilling. But shillings were scarce with me then, so I determined to walk all the way.

Emmerjane, by her own urgent entreaty, carried baby as far as the corner of the Bayswater Road, and there the premature little woman left me, after nearly smothering baby with kisses.

"Keep straight as a' arrow and you can't lose your wye," she said.

It was one of those beautiful mornings in late July when the air is fresh and the sun is soft, and the summer, even in London, has not yet had time to grow tired and dusty.

I felt as light as the air itself. I had put baby's feeding-bottle in my pocket and hung her surplus linen in a parcel about my wrist, so I had nothing to carry in my arms except baby herself, and at first I did not feel her weight.

There were not many people in the West-End streets at that early hour, yet a few were riding in the Park, and when I came to the large houses in Lancaster Gate I saw that though the sun was shining on the windows most of the blinds were down.

I must have been walking slowly, for it was half past eight when I reached the Marble Arch. There I encountered the first cross-tide of traffic, but somebody, seeing baby, took me by the arm and led me safely over.

The great "Mediterranean of Oxford Street" was by this time running at full tide. People were pouring out of the Tube and Underground stations and clambering on to the motor-buses. But in the rush nobody hustled or jostled me. A woman with a child in her arms was like a queen--everybody made way for her.

Once or twice I stopped to look at the shops. Some of the dressmakers' windows were full of beautiful costumes. I did not covet any of them. I remembered the costly ones I had bought in Cairo and how little happiness they had brought me. And then I felt as if the wealth of the world were in my arms.

Nevertheless the whole feminine soul in me awoke when I came upon a shop for the sale of babies' clothes. Already I foresaw a time when baby, dressed in pretty things like these, would be running about Lennard's Green and plucking up the flowers in Mrs. Oliver's garden.

The great street was very long and I thought it would never end. But I think I must have been still fresh and happy while we passed through the foreign quarter of Soho, for I remember that, when two young Italian waiters, standing at the door of their café, asked each other in their own language which of us (baby or I) was "the bambino," I turned to them and smiled.

Before I came to Chancery Lane, however, baby began to cry for her food, and I was glad to slip down a narrow alley into Lincoln's Inn Fields and sit on a seat in the garden while I gave her the bottle. It was then ten o'clock, the sun was high and the day was becoming hot.

The languid stillness of the garden after the noise and stir of the streets tempted me to stay longer than I had intended, and when I resumed my journey I thought the rest must have done me good, but before I reached the Holborn Viaduct fatigue was beginning to gain on me.

I saw that I must be approaching some great hospital, for hospital nurses were now passing me constantly, and one of them, who was going my way, stepped up and asked me to allow her to carry baby. She looked so sweet and motherly that I let her do so, and as we walked along we talked.

She asked me if I was going far, and I said no, only to the other end of London, the edge of the country, to Ilford.

"Ilford!" she cried. "Why, that's miles and miles away. You'll have to 'bus it to Aldgate, then change for Bow, and then tram it through Stratford Market."

I told her I preferred to walk, being such a good walker, and she gave me a searching look, but said no more on that subject.

Then she asked me how old baby was and whether I was nursing her myself, and I answered that baby was six weeks and I had been forced to wean her, being supposed to be delicate, and besides . . .

"Ah, perhaps you are putting her out to nurse," she said, and I answered yes, and that was the reason I was going to Ilford.

"I see," she said, with another searching look, and then it flashed upon me that she had formed her own conclusions about what had befallen me.

When we came to a great building in a side street on the left, with ambulance vans passing in and out of a wide gateway, she said she was sorry she could not carry baby any further, because she was due in the hospital, where the house-doctor would be waiting for her.

"But I hope baby's nurse will be a good one. They're not always that, you know."

I was not quite so happy when the hospital nurse left me. The parcel on my wrist was feeling heavier than before, and my feet were beginning to drag. But I tried to keep a good heart as I faced the crowded thoroughfares--Newgate with its cruel old prison, the edge of St. Paul's, and the corner of St. Martin's-le-Grand, and so on into Cheapside.

Cheapside itself was almost impassable. Merchants, brokers, clerks, and city men generally in tall silk hats were hurrying and sometimes running along the pavement, making me think of the river by my father's house, whose myriad little waves seemed to my fancy as a child to be always struggling to find out which could get to Murphy's Mouth the first and so drown itself in the sea.

People were still very kind to me, though, and if anybody brushed me in passing he raised his hat; and if any one pushed me accidentally he stopped to say he was sorry.

Of course baby was the talisman that protected me from harm; and what I should have done without her when I got to the Mansion house I do not know, for that seemed to be the central heart of all the London traffic, with its motor-buses and taxi-cabs going in different directions and its tremendous tides of human life flowing every way.

But just as I was standing, dazed and deafened on the edge of a triangle of streets, looking up at a great building that was like a rock on the edge of a noisy sea, and bore on its face the startling inscription, "The Earth is the Lord's and the fulness thereof," a big policeman, seeing me with baby in my arms, held up his hand to the drivers and shouted to the pedestrians ("Stand a-one side, please"), and then led me safely across, as if the Red Sea had parted to let us pass.

It was then twelve o'clock and baby was once more crying for her food, so I looked for a place in which I might rest while I gave her the bottle again.

Suddenly I came upon what I wanted. It seemed to be a garden, but it was a graveyard--one of the graveyards of the old London churches, enclosed by high buildings now, and overlooked by office windows.

Such a restful place, so green, so calm, so beautiful! Lying there in the midst of the tumultuous London traffic, it reminded me of one of the little islands in the middle of our Ellan glens, on which the fuchsia and wild rose grow while the river rolls and boils about it.

I had just sat down on a seat that had been built about a gnarled and blackened old tree, and was giving baby her food, when I saw that a young girl was sitting beside me.

She was about nineteen years of age, and was eating scones out of a confectioner's bag, while she read a paper-covered novel. Presently she looked at baby with her little eyes, which were like a pair of shiny boot buttons, and said:

"That your child?"

I answered her, and then she asked:

"Do you like children?"

I answered her again, and asked her if she did not like them also.

"Can't say I'm particularly gone on them," she said, whereupon I replied that that was probably because she had not yet had much experience.

"Oh, haven't I? Perhaps I haven't," she said, and then with a hard little laugh, she added "Mother's had nine though."

I asked if she was a shop assistant, and with a toss of her head she told me she was a typist.

"Better screw and your evenings off," she said, and then she returned to the subject of children.

One of her chums in the office who used to go out with her every night to the music-halls got into trouble a year or two ago. As a consequence she had to marry. And what was the result? Never had her nose out of the wash-tub now!

The story was crude enough, yet it touched me closely.

"But couldn't she have put her baby out to nurse and get another situation somewhere?" I asked.

"Matter o' luck," said the girl. "Some can. Some can't. That's their look out. Firms don't like it. If they find you've got a child they gen'r'lly chuck you."

In spite of myself I was a little down when I started on my journey again. I thought the parcel was cutting my wrist and I felt my feet growing heavier at every step.

Was Maggie Jones's story the universal one?

If a child were born beyond the legal limits, was it a thing to hide away and be ashamed of?

And could it be possible that man's law was stronger than God's law after all?

NINETY-THIRD CHAPTER

I had walked so slowly and stopped so often that it was two o'clock in the afternoon when I passed through Aldgate.

I was then faint for want of food, so I looked out for a tea-shop or restaurant.

I passed several such places before I found the modest house I wanted. Then I stepped into it rather nervously and took the seat nearest the door.

It was an oblong room with red plush seats along the walls behind a line of marble-topped tables. The customers were all men, chiefly clerks and warehousemen, I thought, and the attendants were girls in black frocks and white aprons.

There seemed to be a constant fire of free-and-easy flirtation going on between them. At one table a man in a cloth cap was saying to the girl who had served him:

"What's the damage, dearie?"

"One roast, one veg, two breads--'levenpence, and no liberties, mister."

"Sunday off, Em'ly?" said a youth in a red tie at another table, and being told it was, he said:

"Then what do you say to 'oppin' up to 'Endon and 'aving a day in a boat?"

I had to wait some time before anybody came to attend to me, but at length a girl from the other end of the room, who had taken no part in these amatory exchanges, stepped up and asked what I wanted.

I ordered a glass of cold milk and a scone for myself and a pint of hot milk to replenish baby's bottle.

The girl served me immediately, and after rinsing and refilling the feeding-bottle she stood near while the baby used it.

She had quiet eyes and that indefinable expression of yearning tenderness which we sometimes see in the eyes of a dear old maid who has missed her motherhood.

The shop had been clearing rapidly; and as soon as the men were gone, and while the other girls were sitting in corners to read penny novelettes, my waitress leaned over and asked me if I did not wish to go into the private room to attend to baby.

A moment afterwards I followed her into a small apartment at the end of the shop, and there a curious thing occurred.

She closed the door behind us and asked me in an eager whisper to allow her to see to baby.

I tried to excuse myself, but she whispered:

"Hush! I have a baby of my own, though they know nothing about it here, so you can safely trust me."

I did so, and it was beautiful to see the joy she had in doing what was wanted, saying all sorts of sweet and gentle things to my baby (though I knew they were meant for her own), as if the starved mother-heart in her were stealing a moment of maternal tenderness.

"There!" she said, "She'll be comfortable now, bless her!"

I asked about her own child, and, coming close and speaking in a whisper, she told me all about it.

It was a girl and it would be a year old at Christmas. At first she had put it out to nurse in town, where she could see it every evening, but the foster-mother had neglected it, and the inspector had complained, so she had been compelled to take it away. Now it was in a Home in the country, ten miles from Liverpool Street, and it was as bonny as a peach and as happy as the day is long.

"See," she whispered, taking a card from her breast, after a furtive glance towards the door. "I sent two shillings to have her photograph taken and the Matron has just sent it."

It was the picture of a beautiful baby girl, and I found it easy to praise her.

"I suppose you see her constantly, don't you?" I said.

The girl's face dropped.

"Only on visiting days, once a month, and not always that," she answered.

"But how can you live without seeing her oftener?" I asked.

"Matter o' means," she said sadly. "I pay five shillings a week for her board, and the train is one-and-eight return, so I have to be careful, you see, and if I lost my place what would happen to baby?"

I was very low and tired and down when I resumed my walk. But when I thought for a moment of taking omnibuses for the rest of my journey I remembered the waitress's story and told myself that the little I had belonged to my child, and so I struggled on.

But what a weary march it was during the next two hours! I was in the East End now, and remembering the splendour of the West, I could scarcely believe I was still in London.

Long, mean, monotonous streets, running off to right and left, miles on miles of them without form or feature, or any trace of nature except the blue strips of sky overhead.

Such multitudes of people, often badly dressed and generally with set and anxious faces, hasting to and fro, hustling, elbowing, jostling each other along, as if driven by some invisible power that was swinging an unseen scourge.

No gracious courtesy here! A woman with a child in her arms was no longer a queen. Children were cheap, and sometimes it was as much as I could do to save myself from being pushed off the pavement.

The air seemed to smell of nothing but ale and coarse tobacco. And then the noise! The ceaseless clatter of carts, the clang of electric cars, the piercing shrieks of the Underground Railway coming at intervals out of the bowels of the earth like explosions out of a volcano, and, above all, the raucous, rasping, high-pitched voices of the people, often foul-mouthed, sometimes profane, too frequently obscene.

A cold, grey, joyless, outcast city, cut off from the rest of London by an invisible barrier more formidable than a wall; a city in which the inhabitants seemed to live cold, grey, joyless lives, all the same that they joked and laughed; a city under perpetual siege, the siege of Poverty, in the constant throes of civil war, the War of Want, the daily and hourly fight for food.

If there were other parts of the East End (and I am sure there must be) where people live simple, natural, human lives, I did not see them that day, for my course was down the principal thoroughfares only.

Those thoroughfares, telescoping each other, one after another, seemed as if they would never come to an end.

How tired I was! Even baby was no longer light, and the parcel on my wrist had become as heavy as lead.

Towards four o'clock I came to a broad parapet which had strips of garden enclosed by railings and iron seats in front of them. Utterly exhausted, my arms aching and my legs limp, I sank into one of these seats, feeling that I could walk no farther.

But after a while I felt better, and then I became aware that another woman was sitting beside me.

When I looked at her first I thought I had never in my life seen anything so repulsive. She was asleep, and having that expressionless look which sleep gives, I found it impossible to know whether she was young or old. She was not merely coarse, she was gross. The womanhood in her seemed to be effaced, and I thought she was utterly brutalised and degraded.

Presently baby, who had also been asleep, awoke and cried, and then the woman opened her eyes and looked at the child, while I hushed her to sleep again.

There must be something in a baby's face that has a miraculous effect on every woman (as if these sweet angels, fresh from God, make us all young and all beautiful), and it was even so at that moment.

Never shall I forget the transfiguration in the woman's face when she looked into the face of my baby. The expression of brutality and degradation disappeared, and through the bleared eyes and over the coarsened features there came the light of an almost celestial smile.

After a while the woman spoke to me. She spoke in a husky voice which seemed to be compounded of the effects of rum and raw night air.

"That your'n," she said.

I answered her.

"Boy or gel?"

I told her.

"'Ow old?"

I told her that too.

The woman was silent for a moment, and then, with a thickening of the husky voice, she said:

"S'pose you'll say I'm a bleedin' liar, but I 'ad a kid as putty as that onct--puttier. It was a boy. The nobbiest little b---- as you ever come acrost. Your'n is putty, but it ain't in it with my Billie, not by a long chalk."

I asked her what had become of her child.

"Lawst 'im," she said. "Used to give sixpence a week to the woman what 'ad 'alf the 'ouse with me to look after 'im while I was workin' at the fact'ry. But what did the bleedin' b---- do? Blimey, if she didn't let 'im get run over by the dray from the brewery."

"Killed?" I said, clutching at baby.

The woman nodded without speaking.

I asked her how old her child had been.

"More'n four," she said. "Just old enough to run a arrand. It was crool. Hit me out, I can tell you. That kid was all I had. Apple o' my eye, in a manner of speakin'. When it was gone there wasn't much encouragement, was there? The Favver from the Mission came jawin' as 'ow Jesus 'ad taken 'im to 'Imself. Rot! When they put 'im down in old Bow I didn't care no more for nothin'. Monse and monse I walked about night and day, and the bleedin' coppers was allus on to me. They got their own way at last. I took the pneumonier and was laid up at the London. And when I got out I didn't go back to the fact'ry neither."

"What did you do?" I asked.

The woman laughed--bitterly, terribly.

"Do? Don't you _know_?"

I shook my head. The woman looked hard at me, and then at the child.

"Look here--are you a good gel?" she said.

Hardly knowing what she meant I answered that I hoped so

"'Ope? Don't you know _that_ neither?"

Then I caught her meaning, and answered faintly:

"Yes."

She looked searchingly into my eyes and said:

"I b'lieve you. Some gels is. S'elp me Gawd I don't know how they done it, though."

I was shuddering and trembling, for I was catching glimpses, as if by broken lights from hell, of the life behind--the wrecked hope, the shattered faith, the human being hunted like a beast and at last turned into one.

Just at that moment baby awoke and cried again. The woman looked at her with the same look as before--not so much a smile as a sort of haggard radiance.

Then leaning over me she blew puffs of alcoholic breath into baby's face, and stretching out a coarse fat finger she tickled her under the chin.

Baby ceased to cry and began to smile. Seeing this the woman's eyes sparkled like sunshine.

"See that," she cried. "S'elp me Jesus, I b'lieve I could 'ave been good meself if I'd on'y 'ad somethink like this to keer for."

I am not ashamed to say that more than once there had been tears in my eyes while the woman spoke, though her blasphemies had corrupted the air like the gases that rise from a dust-heap. But when she touched my child I shuddered as if something out of the 'lowest depths had tainted her.

Then a strange thing happened.

I had risen to go, although my limbs could scarcely support me, and was folding my little angel closely in my arms, when the woman rose too and said:

"You wouldn't let me carry your kiddie a bit, would you?"

I tried to excuse myself, saying something, I know not what The woman looked at me again, and after a moment she said:

"S'pose not. On'y I thought it might make me think as 'ow I was carryin' Billie."

That swept down everything.

The one remaining window of the woman's soul was open and I dared not close it.

I looked down at my child--so pure, so sweet, so stainless; I looked up at the woman--so foul, so gross, so degraded.

There was a moment of awful struggle and then . . . the woman and I were walking side by side.

And the harlot was carrying my baby down the street.

NINETY-FOURTH CHAPTER

At five o'clock I was once more alone.

I was then standing (with baby in my own arms now) under the statue which is at the back of Bow Church.

I thought I could walk no farther, and although every penny I had in my pocket belonged to Isabel (being all that yet stood between her and want) I must borrow a little of it if she was to reach Mrs. Oliver's that night.

I waited for the first tram that was going in my direction, and when it came up I signalled to it, but it did not stop--it was full.

I waited for a second tram, but that was still more crowded.

I reproached myself for having come so far. I told myself how ill-advised I had been in seeking for a nurse for my child at the farthest end of the city. I reminded myself that I could not hope to visit her every day if my employment was to be in the West, as I had always thought it would be. I asked myself if in all this vast London, with its myriads of homes, there had been no house nearer that could have sheltered my child.

Against all this I had to set something, or I think my very heart would have died there and then. I set the thought of Ilford, on the edge of the country, with its green fields and its flowers. I set the thought of Mrs. Oliver, who would love my child as tenderly as if she were her own little lost one.

I dare say it was all very weak and childish, but it is just when we are done and down, and do not know what we are doing, that Providence seems to be directing us, and it was so with me at that moment.

The trams being full I had concluded that Fate had set itself against my spending any of Isabel's money, and had made up my mind to make a fierce fight over the last stage of my journey, when I saw that a little ahead of where I was standing the road divided into two branches at an acute angle, one branch going to the right and the other to the left.

Not all Emmerjane's instructions about keeping "as straight as a' arrow" sufficed to show me which of the two roads to take and I looked about for somebody to tell me.

It was then that I became aware of a shabby old four-wheeled cab which stood in the triangular space in front of the statue, and of the driver (an old man, in a long coachman's coat, much worn and discoloured, and a dilapidated tall hat, very shiny in patches) looking at me while he took the nose-bag off his horse--a bony old thing with its head hanging down.

I stepped up to him and asked my way, and he pointed it out to me--to the right, over the bridge and through Stratford Market.

I asked how far it was to Ilford.

"Better nor two mile _I_ call it," he answered.

After that, being so tired in brain as well as body, I asked a foolish question--how long it would take me to get there.

The old driver looked at me again, and said:

"'Bout a 'our and a 'alf I should say by the looks of you--and you carryin' the biby."

I dare say my face dropped sadly as I turned away, feeling very tired, yet determined to struggle through. But hardly had I walked twenty paces when I heard the cab coming up behind and the old driver crying:

"'Old on, missie."

I stopped, and to my surprise he drew up by my side, got down from his box, opened the door of his cab and said:

"Ger in."

I told him I could not afford to ride.

"Ger in," he said again more loudly, and as if angry with himself for having to say it.

Again I made some demur, and then the old man said, speaking fiercely through his grizzly beard:

"Look 'ere, missie. I 'ave a gel o' my own lost somewheres, and I wouldn't be ans'rable to my ole woman if I let you walk with a face like that."

I don't know what I said to him. I only know that my tears gushed out and that at the next moment I was sitting in the cab.

What happened then I do not remember, except that the dull rumble of the wheels told me we were passing over a bridge, and that I saw through the mist before my eyes a sluggish river, a muddy canal, and patches of marshy fields.

I think my weariness and perhaps my emotion, added to the heavy monotonous trotting of the old horse, must have put me to sleep, for after a while I was conscious of a great deal of noise, and of the old driver twisting about and shouting in a cheerful voice through the open window at the back of his seat:

"Stratford Market."

After a while we came to a broad road, full of good houses, and then the old driver cried "Ilford," and asked what part of it I wished to go to.

I reached forward and told him, "10 Lennard's Row, Lennard's Green," and then sat back with a lighter heart.

But after another little while I saw a great many funeral cars passing us, with the hearses empty, as if returning from a cemetery. This made me think of the woman and her story, and I found myself unconsciously clasping my baby closer.

The cortèges became so numerous at last that to shut out painful sights I closed my eyes and tried to think of pleasanter things.

I thought, above all, of Mrs. Oliver's house, as I had always seen it in my mind's eye--not a pretentious place at all, only a little humble cottage but very sweet and clean, covered with creepers and perhaps with roses.

I was still occupied with these visions when I felt the cab turn sharply to the left. Then opening my eyes I saw that we were running down a kind of alley-way, with a row of very mean little two-storey houses on the one side, and on the other, a kind of waste ground strewn with broken bottles, broken iron pans, broken earthenware and other refuse, interspersed with tufts of long scraggy grass, which looked the more wretched because the sinking sun was glistening over it.

Suddenly the cab slowed down and stopped. Then the old man jumped from his box and opening his cab door, said:

"Here you are, missie. This is your destingnation."

There must have been a moment of semi-consciousness in which I got out of the cab, for when I came to full possession of myself I was standing on a narrow pavement in front of a closed door which bore the number 10.

At first I was stunned. Then my heart was in my mouth and it was as much as I could do not to burst out crying. Finally I wanted to fly, and I turned back to the cab, but it had gone and was already passing round the corner.

It was six o'clock. I was very tired. I was nine miles from Bayswater. I could not possibly carry baby back. What _could_ I do?

Then, my brain being unable to think, a mystic feeling (born perhaps of my life in the convent) came over me--a feeling that all that had happened on my long journey, all I had seen and everything that had been said to me, had been intended to prepare me for (and perhaps to save me from) the dangers that were to come.

I think that gave me a certain courage, for with what strength of body and spirit I had left (though my heart was in my mouth still) I stepped across the pavement and knocked at the door.

MEMORANDUM BY MARTIN CONRAD

My great-hearted, heroic little woman!

All this time I, in my vain belief that our expedition was of some consequence to the world, was trying to comfort myself with the thought that my darling must have heard of my safety.

But how could I imagine that she had hidden herself away in a mass of humanity--which appears to be the most impenetrable depths into which a human being can disappear?

How could I dream that, to the exclusion of all such interests as mine, she was occupied day and night, night and day, with the joys and sorrows, the raptures and fears of the mighty passion of Motherhood, which seems to be the only thing in life that is really great and eternal?

Above all, how could I believe that in London itself, in the heart of the civilised and religious world, she was going through trials which make mine, in the grim darkness of the Polar night, seem trivial and easy?

It is all over now, and though, thank God, I did not know at the time what was happening to my dear one at home, it is some comfort to me to remember that I was acting exactly as if I did.

From the day we turned hack I heard my darling's voice no more. But I had a still more perplexing and tormenting experience, and that was a dream about her, in which she was walking on a crevassed glacier towards a precipice which she could not see because the brilliant rays of the aurora were in her eyes.

Anybody may make what he likes of that on grounds of natural law, and certainly it was not surprising that my dreams should speak to me in pictures drawn from the perils of my daily life, but only one thing matters now--that these experiences of my sleeping hours increased my eagerness to get back to my dear one.

My comrades were no impediment to that, I can tell you. With their faces turned homewards, and the wind at their backs, they were showing tremendous staying power, although we had thirty and forty below zero pretty constantly, with rough going all the time, for the snow had been ruckled up by the blizzard to almost impassable heaps and hummocks.

On reaching our second installation at Mount Darwin I sent a message to the men at the foot of Mount Erebus, telling them to get into communication (through Macquarie Island) with the captain of our ship in New Zealand, asking him to return for us as soon as the ice conditions would permit; and this was the last of our jobs (except packing our instruments tight and warm) before we started down the "long white gateway" for our quarters at the Cape.

With all the heart in the world, though, our going had to be slow. It was the middle of the Antarctic winter, when absolute night reigned for weeks and we had nothing to alleviate the darkness but the light of the scudding moon, and sometimes the glory of the aurora as it encircled the region of the unrisen sun.

Nevertheless my comrades sang their way home through the sullen gloom. Sometimes I wakened the echoes of those desolate old hills myself with a stave of "Sally's the gel," although I was suffering a good deal from my darker thoughts of what the damnable hypocrisies of life might be doing with my darling, and my desire to take my share of her trouble whatever it might be.

The sun returned the second week in August. Nobody can know what relief that brought us except those who have lived for months without it. To see the divine and wonderful thing rise up like a god over those lone white regions is to know what a puny thing man is in the scheme of the world.

I think all of us felt like that at sight of the sun, though some (myself among the rest) were thinking more of it as a kind of message from friends at home. But old Treacle, I remember, who had stood looking at it in awed solemnity, said:

"Well, I'm d----!"

After that we got on famously until we reached Winter Quarters, where we found everybody well and everything in order, but received one piece of alarming intelligence--that the attempt to get into wireless communication with our ship had failed, with the result that we should have to wait for her until the time originally appointed for her return.

That did not seem to matter much to my shipmates, who, being snugly housed from blinding blizzards, settled down to amuse themselves with sing-songs and story-tellings and readings.

But, do what I would, to me the delay was dreadful, and every day, in the fever of my anxiety to get away as soon as the ice permitted, I climbed the slopes of old Erebus with O'Sullivan, to look through powerful glasses for what the good chap called the "open wather."

Thank God, our wooden house was large enough to admit of my having a cabin to myself, for I should have been ashamed of my comrades hearing the cries that sometimes burst from me in the night.

It is hard for civilised men at home, accustomed to hold themselves under control, to realise how a man's mind can run away from him when he is thousands of miles separated from his dear ones, and has a kind of spiritual certainty that evil is befalling them.

I don't think I am a bigger fool than most men in that way, but I shiver even yet at the memory of all the torment I went through during those days of waiting, for my whole life seemed to revolve before me and I accused myself of a thousand offences which I had thought dead and buried and forgotten.

Some of these were trivial in themselves, such as hot and intemperate words spoken in childhood to my good old people at home, disobedience or ingratitude shown to them, with all the usual actions of a naughty boy, who ought to have been spanked and never was.

But the worst of them concerned my darling, and came with the thought of my responsibility for the situation in which I felt sure she found herself.

A thousand times I took myself to task for that, thinking what I ought and ought not to have done, and then giving myself every bad name and my conduct every damning epithet.

Up and down my cabin I would walk with hands buried in my pockets, revolving these thoughts and working myself up, against my will, to a fever of regret and self-accusation.

Talk about Purgatory--the Purgatory of dear old Father Dan! That was to come after death--mine came before, and by the holy saints, I had enough of it.

Two months passed like this; and when the water of the Sound was open and our ship did not appear, mine was not the only heart that was eating itself out, for the spirits of my shipmates had also begun to sink.

In the early part of the Antarctic spring there had been a fearful hurricane lasting three days on the sea, with a shrieking, roaring chorus of fiends outside, and the conviction now forced itself on my men that our ship must have gone down in the storm.

Of course I fought this notion hard, for my last hopes were based on not believing it. But when after the lapse of weeks I could hold out no longer, and we were confronted by the possibility of being held there another year (for how were our friends to know before the ice formed again that it was necessary to send relief?), I faced the situation firmly--measuring out our food and putting the men on shortened rations, twenty-eight ounces each and a thimbleful of brandy.

By the Lord God it is a fearful thing to stand face to face with slow death. Some of my shipmates could scarcely bear it. The utter solitude, the sight of the same faces and the sound of the same voices, with the prospect of nothing else, seemed to drive most of them nearly mad.

There was no sing-songing among them now, and what speaking I overheard was generally about the great dinners they had eaten, or about their dreams, which were usually of green fields and flower-beds and primroses and daisies--daisies, by heaven, in a world that was like a waste!

As for me I did my best to play the game of never giving up. It was a middling hard game, God knows, and after weeks of waiting a sense of helplessness settled down on me such as I had never known before.

I am not what is called a religious man, but when I thought of my darling's danger (for such I was sure it was) and how I was cut off from her by thousands of miles of impassable sea, there came an overwhelming longing to go with my troubles to somebody stronger than myself.

I found it hard to do that at first, for a feeling of shame came over me, and I thought:

"You coward, you forgot all about God when things were going well with you, but now that they are tumbling down, and death seems certain, you whine and want to go where you never dreamt of going in your days of ease and strength."

I got over that, though--there's nothing except death a man doesn't get over down there--and a dark night came when (the ice breaking from the cliffs of the Cape with a sound that made me think of my last evening at Castle Raa) I found myself folding my hands and praying to the God of my childhood, not for myself but for my dear one, that He before whom the strongest of humanity were nothing at all, would take her into His Fatherly keeping.

"Help her! Help her! _I_ can do no more."

It was just when I was down to that extremity that it pleased Providence to come to my relief. The very next morning I was awakened out of my broken sleep by the sound of a gun, followed by such a yell from Treacle as was enough to make you think the sea-serpent had got hold of his old buttocks.

"The ship! The ship! Commander! Commander! The ship! The ship!"

And, looking out of my little window I saw him, with six or seven other members of our company, half naked, just as they had leapt out of their bunks, running like savages to the edge of the sea, where the "Scotia," with all flags flying (God bless and preserve her!), was steaming slowly up through a grinding pack of broken ice.

What a day that was! What shouting! What hand-shaking! For O'Sullivan it was Donnybrook Fair with the tail of his coat left out, and for Treacle it was Whitechapel Road with "What cheer, old cock?" and an unquenchable desire to stand treat all round.

But what I chiefly remember is that the moment I awoke, and before the idea that we were saved and about to go home had been fully grasped by my hazy brain, the thought flashed to my mind:

"Now you'll hear of _her!_"

M.C.

[END OF MARTIN CONRAD'S MEMORANDUM]

NINETY-FIFTH CHAPTER

The door of No. 10 was opened by a rather uncomely woman of perhaps thirty years of age, with a weak face and watery eyes.

This was Mrs. Oliver, and it occurred to me even at that first sight that she had the frightened and evasive look of a wife who lives under the intimidation of a tyrannical husband.

She welcomed me, however, with a warmth that partly dispelled my depression and I followed her into the kitchen.

It was the only room on the ground floor of her house (except a scullery) and it seemed sweet and clean and comfortable, having a table in the middle of the floor, a sofa under the window, a rocking-chair on one side of the fireplace, a swinging baby's cot on the other side, and nothing about it that was not homelike and reassuring, except two large photographs over the mantelpiece of men stripped to the waist and sparring.

"We've been looking for you all day, ma'am, and had nearly give you up," she said.

Then she took baby out of my arms, removed her bonnet and pelisse, lifted her barrow-coat to examine her limbs, asked her age, kissed her on the arms, the neck and the legs, and praised her without measure.

"And what's her name, ma'am?"

"Mary Isabel, but I wish her to be called Isabel."

"Isabel! A beautiful name too! Fit for a angel, ma'am. And she _is_ a little angel, bless her! Such rosy cheeks! Such a ducky little mouth! Such blue eyes--blue as the bluebells in the cemet'ry. She's as pretty as a waxwork, she really is, and any woman in the world might be proud to nurse her."

A young mother is such a weakling that praise of her child (however crude) acts like a charm on her, and in spite of myself I was beginning to feel more at ease, when Mrs. Oliver's husband came downstairs.

He was a short, thick-set man of about thirty-five, with a square chin, a very thick neck and a close-cropped red bullet head, and he was in his stocking feet and shirt-sleeves as if he had been dressing to go out for the evening.

I remember that it flashed upon me--I don't know why--that he had seen me from the window of the room upstairs, driving up in the old man's four-wheeler, and had drawn from that innocent circumstance certain deductions about my character and my capacity to pay.

I must have been right, for as soon as our introduction was over and I had interrupted Mrs. Oliver's praises of my baby's beauty by speaking about material matters, saying the terms were to be four shillings, the man, who had seated himself on the sofa to put on his boots said, in a voice that was like a shot out of a blunderbus:

"Five."

"How'd you mean, Ted?" said Mrs. Oliver, timidly. "Didn't we say four?"

"Five," said the man again, with a still louder volume of voice.

I could see that the poor woman was trembling, but assuming the sweet air of persons who live in a constant state of fear, she said:

"Oh yes. It _was_ five, now I remember."

I reminded her that her letter had said four, but she insisted that I must be mistaken, and when I told her I had the letter with me and she could see it if she wished, she said:

"Then it must have been a slip of the pen in a manner of speaking, ma'am. We allus talked of five. Didn't we, Ted?"

"Certainly," said her husband, who was still busy with his boots.

I saw what was going on, and I felt hot and angry, but there seemed to be nothing to do except submit.

"Very well, we'll say five then," I said.

"Paid in advance," said the man, and when I answered that that would suit me very well, he added:

"A month in advance, you know."

By this time I felt myself trembling with indignation, as well as quivering with fear, for while I looked upon all the money I possessed as belonging to baby, to part with almost the whole of it in one moment would reduce me to utter helplessness, so I said, turning to Mrs. Oliver:

"Is that usual?"

It did not escape me that the unhappy woman was constantly studying her husband's face, and when he glanced up at her with a meaning look she answered, hurriedly:

"Oh yes, ma'am, quite usual. All the women in the Row has it. Number five, she has twins and gets a month in hand with both of them. But we'll take four weeks and I can't say no fairer than that, can I?"

"But why?" I asked.

"Well, you see, ma'am, you're . . . you're a stranger to us, and if baby was left on our hands . . . Not as we think you'd leave her chargeable as the saying is, but if you were ever ill, and got a bit back with your payments . . . we being only pore people. . . ."

While the poor woman was floundering on in this way my blood was boiling and I was beginning to ask her if she supposed for one moment that I meant to desert my child, when the man, who had finished the lacing of his boots, rose to his feet, and said:

"You don't want yer baiby to be give over to the Guardians for the sake of a week or two, do you?"

That settled everything. I took out my purse and with a trembling hand laid my last precious sovereign on the table.

A moment or two after this Mr. Oliver, who had put on his coat and a cloth cap, made for the door.

"Evenin', ma'am," he said, and with what grace I could muster I bade him good-bye.

"You aren't a-going to the 'Sun' to-night, are you, Ted?" asked Mrs. Oliver.

"Club," said the man, and the door clashed behind him.

I breathed more freely when he was gone, and his wife (from whose face the look of fear vanished instantly) was like another woman.

"Goodness gracious," she cried, with a kind of haggard hilarity, "where's my head? Me never offering you a cup of tea, and you looking so white after your journey."

I took baby back into my arms while she put on the kettle, set a black tea-pot on the hob to warm, laid a piece of tablecloth and a thick cup and saucer on the end of the table, and then knelt on the fender to toast a little bread, talking meantime (half apologetically and half proudly) about her husband.

He was a bricklayer by trade, and sometimes worked at the cemetery which I could see at the other side of the road (behind the long railings and the tall trees), but was more generally engaged as a sort of fighting lieutenant to a Labour leader whose business it was to get up strikes. Before they were married he had been the "Light Weight Champion of Whitechapel," and those were photos of his fights which I could see over the mantelpiece, but "he never did no knocking of people about now," being "quiet and matrimonual."

In spite of myself my heart warmed to the woman. I wonder it did not occur to me there and then that, living in constant dread of her tyrannical husband, she would always be guilty of the dissimulation I had seen an example of already and that the effect of it would be reflected upon my child.

It did not. I only told myself that she was clearly fond of children and would be a kind nurse to my baby. It even pleased me, in my foolish motherly selfishness, that she was a plain-featured person, whom baby could never come to love as she would, I was sure, love me.

I felt better after I had taken tea, and as it was then seven o'clock, and the sun was setting horizontally through the cypresses of the cemetery, I knew it was time to go.

I could not do that, though, without undressing baby and singing her to sleep. And even then I sat for a while with an aching heart, and Isabel on my knee, thinking of how I should have to go to bed that night, for the first time, without her.

Mrs. Oliver, in the meantime, examining the surplus linen which I had brought in my parcel, was bursting into whispered cries of delight over it, and, being told I had made the clothes myself, was saying:

"What a wonderful seamstress you might be if you liked, ma'am."

At length the time came to leave baby, and no woman knows the pain of that experience who has not gone through it.

Though I really believed my darling would be loved and cared for, and knew she would never miss me, or yet know that I was gone (there was a pang even in that thought, and in every other kind of comforting), I could not help it, that, as I was putting my cherub into her cot, my tears rained down on her little face and awakened her, so that I had to kneel by her side and rock her to sleep again.

"You'll be good to my child, won't you, Mrs. Oliver?" I said.

"'Deed I will, ma'am," the woman replied.

"You'll bath her every day, will you not?"

"Night and morning. I allus does, ma'am."

"And rinse out her bottle and see that she has nice new milk fresh from the cow?"

"Sure as sure, ma'am. But don't you fret no more about the child, ma'am. I've been a mother myself, ma'am, and I'll be as good to your little angel as if she was my own come back to me."

"God bless you," I said in a burst of anguish, and after remaining a moment longer on my knees by the cot (speaking with all my heart and soul, though neither to nurse nor to baby) I rose to my feet, dashed the tears from my eyes, and ran out of the house.

NINETY-SIXTH CHAPTER

I knew that my eyes were not fit to be seen in the streets, so I dropped my dark veil and hurried along, being conscious of nothing for some time except the clang of electric cars and the bustle of passers-by, to whom my poor little sorrow was nothing at all.

But I had not gone far--I think I had not, though my senses were confused and vague--before I began to feel ashamed, to take myself to task, and to ask what I had to cry about.

If I had parted from my baby it was for her own good, and if I had paid away my last sovereign I had provided for her for a month, I had nothing to think of now except myself and how to get work.

I never doubted that I should get work, or that I should get it immediately, the only open question being what work and where.

Hitherto I had thought that, being quick with my pen, I might perhaps become secretary to somebody; but now, remembering the typist's story ("firms don't like it"), and wishing to run no risks in respect of my child, I put that expectation away and began to soar to higher things.

How vain they were! Remembering some kind words the Reverend Mother had said about me at the convent (where I had taken more prizes than Alma, though I had never mentioned it before) I told myself that I, too, was an educated woman. I knew Italian, French and German, and having heard that some women could make a living by translating books for publishers I thought I might do the same.

Nay, I could even write books myself. I was sure I could--one book at all events, about friendless girls who have to face the world for themselves, and all good women would read it (some good men also), because they would see that it must be true.

Oh, how vain were my thoughts! Yet in another sense they were not all vanity, for I was not thinking of fame, or what people would say about what I should write, but only what I should get for it.

I should get money, not a great deal perhaps, yet enough for baby and me, that we might have that cottage in the country, covered with creepers and roses, where Isabel would run about the grass by and by, and pluck the flowers in the garden.

"So what have _you_ got to cry about, you ridiculous thing," I thought while I hurried along, with a high step now, as if my soul had been in my feet.

But a mother's visions of the future are like a mirage (always gleaming with the fairy palaces which her child is to inhabit some day), and I am not the first to find her shadows fade away.

I must have been walking for some time, feeling no weariness at all, when I came to the bridge by Bow Church. There I had intended to take a tram, but not being tired I went on farther, thinking every stage I could walk would be so much money to the good.

I was deep in the Mile End Road, when a chilling thought came to me. It was the thought of the distance that would divide me from my child, making my visits to her difficult, and putting it out of my power to reach her quickly (perhaps even to know in time) if, as happened to children, she became suddenly and dangerously ill.

I remembered the long line of telescoping thoroughfares I had passed through earlier in the day (with their big hospitals, their big breweries, their big tabernacles, their workmen's lodging-houses, their Cinema picture palaces, their Jewish theatres, and their numberless public houses); and then the barrier of squalid space which would divide me from baby, if I obtained employment in the West End, seemed to be immeasurably greater and more frightening than the space that had divided me from Martin when he was at the other end of the world.

Not all the allurements of my dream were sufficient to reconcile me to such a dangerous separation.

"It's impossible," I thought. "Quite impossible."

Insensibly my rapid footsteps slackened. When I reached that part of the Mile End Road in which the Jewish tailors live, and found myself listening to a foreign language which I afterwards knew to be Yiddish, and looking at men with curls at each side of their sallow faces, slithering along as if they were wearing eastern slippers without heels, I stopped, without knowing why, at the corner of a street where an Italian organ-man was playing while a number of bright-eyed Jewish children danced.

I was still looking on, hardly thinking of what I saw, when my eyes fell on an advertisement, pasted on the window of a sausage-and-ham shop at the corner. In large written characters it ran:

_Seamstress Wanted. Good Wages. Apply No. ---- Washington Street_.

How little are the things on which our destiny seems to hang! In a moment I was remembering what Mrs. Oliver had said about my being a good seamstress; and, almost before I knew what I was about, I was hurrying up the side street and knocking with my knuckles at an open door.

A rather fat and elderly Jewess, covered with rings and gold chains, and wearing a manifest black wig, came from a room at one side of the lobby. I explained my errand, and after she had looked me over in a sort of surprise, as if I had not been the kind of person she expected, she said, in a nasal and guttural voice:

"Vait! My daughter, she speaks very vell Ainglish."

Then turning her head over her shoulder, she pitched her voice several octaves higher and cried, "Miriam," whereupon there came tripping downstairs a Jewish girl of about eighteen, with large black eyes, thick black hair, and such a dear good face.

I repeated my application, and after the girl had interpreted my request to her mother, I was asked into the lobby, and put through a kind of catechism.

Was I a seamstress? No, but I wished to become one. Had I aiver vorked on vaistcoats? I hadn't, but I could do anything with my needle.

Perhaps the urgency of my appeal, and more probably the pressure of her own need, weighed with the Jewess, for after reflection, and an eager whisper from her daughter (who was looking at me with kindling eyes), she said,

"Very vell, ve'll see what she can do."

I was then taken into a close and stuffy room where a number of girls (all Jewish as I could see) were working on sections of waistcoats which, lying about on every side, looked like patterns for legs of mutton. One girl was basting, another was pressing, and a third was sewing button-holes with a fine silk twist round bars of gimp.

This last was the work which was required of me, and I was told to look and see if I could do it. I watched the girl for a moment and then said:

"Let me try."

Needle and twist and one of the half vests were then given to me, and after ten minutes I had worked my first button-hole and handed it back.

The daughter praised it warmly, but the mother said:

"Very fair, but a leedle slow."

"Let me try again," I said, and my trembling fingers were so eager to please that my next button-hole was not only better but more quickly made.

"Beautiful!" said the daughter. "And mamma, only think, she's quicker than Leah, already. I timed them."

"I muz call your vader, dough," said the Jewess, and she disappeared through the doorway.

While I stood talking to the younger Jewess, who had, I could see, formed as quick an attachment for me as I for her, I heard another nasal and guttural voice (a man's) coming towards us from the hall.

"Is she von of our people?"

"Nein! She's a Skihoah"--meaning, as I afterwards learned, a non-Jewish girl.

Then a tall, thin Jew entered the room behind the elderly Jewess. I had never before and have never since seen such a patriarchal figure. With his long grey beard and solemn face he might have stood for Moses in one of the pictures that used to hang on the walls of the convent--except for his velvet skull-cap and the black alpaca apron, which was speckled over with fluffy bits of thread and scraps of cloth and silk.

He looked at me for a moment with his keen eyes, and after his wife had shown him my work, and he had taken a pinch of snuff and blown his nose on a coloured handkerchief with the sound of a trumpet, he put me through another catechism.

I was trembling lest he should make intimate inquiries, but beyond asking my name, and whether I was a Christian, he did not concern himself with personal questions.

"Vat vages do you vant?" he asked.

I told him I should be pleased to take whatever was paid to other girls doing work of the same kind.

"Ach no! Dese girls are full-timers. You are only a greener [meaning a beginner] so you vill not expect anything like so much."

At that his daughter repeated her assurance that I was quicker than the girl she had called Leah; but the Jew, with an air of parental majesty, told her to be silent, and then said that as I was an "improver" he could only take me "on piece," naming the price (a very small one) per half-dozen buttons and buttonholes, with the condition that I found my own twist and did the work in my own home.

Seeing that I should be no match for the Jew at a bargain, and being so eager to get to work at any price, I closed with his offer, and then he left the room, after telling me to come back the next day.

"And vhere do you lif, my dear?" said the Jewess.

I told her Bayswater, making some excuse for being in the East End, and getting as near to the truth as I dare venture, but feeling instinctively, after my sight of the master of the house, that I dared say nothing about my child.

She told me I must live nearer to my work, and I said that was exactly what I wished to do--asking if she knew where I could find a room.

Fortunately the Jewess herself had two rooms vacant at that moment, and we went upstairs to look at them.

Both were at the top of the house, and one of them I could have for two shillings a week, but it was dark and cheerless, being at the back and looking into the space over the yards in which the tenants dried their washing on lines stretched from pulleys.

The other, which would cost a shilling a week more, was a lean slit of a room, very sparsely furnished, but it was to the front, and looked down into the varied life of the street, so I took it instantly and asked when I could move in.

"Ven you like," said the Jewess. "Everyding is ready."

So, early next morning I bade farewell to my good Welsh landlady (who looked grave when I told her what I was going to do) and to Emmerjane (who cried when I kissed her smudgy face) and, taking possession of my new home, began work immediately in my first and only employment.

Perhaps it was a deep decline after the splendours of my dreams, but I did not allow myself to think about that. I was near to Ilford and I could go to see Isabel every day.

Isabel! Isabel! Isabel! Everything was Isabel, for now that Martin was gone my hopes and my fears, my love and my life, revolved on one axis only--my child.

NINETY-SEVENTH CHAPTER

My employer was a Polish Jew, named Israel Abramovitch.

He had come to England at the time of the religious persecution in the Holy Cities of Russia, set himself up in his trade as a tailor in a garret in Whitechapel, hired a "Singer," worked with "green" labour for "slop" warehouses, and become in less than twenty years the richest foreign Jew in the East End of London, doing some of the "best bespoke" work for the large shops in the West and having the reputation (as I afterwards found) of being the greatest of Jewish "sweaters."

In spite of this, however, he was in his own way a deeply religious man. Strict, severe, almost superstitious in obeying the Levitical laws and in practising the sad and rather gloomy symbolism of his faith. A famous Talmudist, a pillar of the synagogue, one of the two wardens of the Chevra in Brick Lane, and consequently a great upholder of moral rectitude.

His house seemed to be a solid mass of human beings, chiefly Jewish girls, who worked all day, and sometimes (when regulations could be evaded or double gangs engaged) all night, for the Jew drove everybody at high speed, not excepting his wife, who cooked the food and pressed the clothes at the same time.

In this hive of industry I needed no spur to make me work.

Every morning Mrs. Abramovitch brought up a thick pile of vests to my room, and every evening she took them down again, after counting my earnings with almost preternatural rapidity and paying me, day by day, with unfailing promptitude.

At the end of my first week I found I had made ten shillings. I was delighted, but after I had paid for my room and my food there was not enough for baby's board, so the second week I worked later in the evenings, and earned fourteen shillings. This was still insufficient, therefore I determined to take something from the other end of the day.

"Morning will be better," I thought, remembering the painful noises at night, especially about midnight, when people were being thrown out of a public-house higher up the street, where there was a placard in the window saying the ale sold there could be guaranteed to "make anybody drunk for fourpence."

Unfortunately (being a little weak) I was always heavy in the mornings, but by great luck my room faced the east, so I conceived the idea of moving my bed up to the window and drawing my blinds to the top so that the earliest light might fall on my face and waken me.

This device succeeded splendidly, and for many weeks of the late summer and early autumn I was up before the sun, as soon as the dawn had broadened and while the leaden London daylight was filtering through the smoke of yesterday.

By this means I increased my earnings to sixteen shillings, and, as my fingers learned to fly over their work, to seventeen and even eighteen.

That was my maximum, and though it left a narrow margin for other needs it enabled me at the end of a month to pay another pound for baby's board and to put away a little towards her "shortening," which Mrs. Oliver was always saying must be soon.

I had to stick close to maintain this average, and I grudged even the time occupied in buying and eating my food, though that was not a long process in the Mile End Road, which is full of shops where things can be bought ready cooked. After the first week I did not even need to go out for them, for they were brought round to my room every morning, thus enabling me to live without leaving my work.

It was a stiff life, perhaps, but let nobody think I looked upon myself as a slave. Though I worked so hard I felt no self-pity. The thought that I was working for my child sweetened all my labours. It was such a joy to think that baby depended upon me for everything she wanted.

Being so happy in those days I sang a great deal, though naturally not in the middle of the day, when our house was going like a mill-wheel, but in the early mornings before the electric trams began to clang, or the hawkers with their barrows to shout, and when there was no sound even in the East End except that ceaseless tramp, tramp, tramp in the front street which always made me think of the children of Israel in Egypt drawing burdens for Pharaoh.

Throwing open my window I sang all sorts of things, but, being such a child myself and so fond of make-believe, I loved best to sing my lullaby, and so pretend that baby was with me in my room, lying asleep behind me in my bed.

"_Sleep, little baby, I love thee, I love thee, Sleep, little Queen, I am bending above thee_."

I never knew that I had any other audience than a lark in a cage on the other side of the street (perhaps I was in a cage myself, though I did not think of that then) which always started singing when I sang, except the washerwomen from a Women's Shelter going off at four to their work at the West End, and two old widows opposite who sewed Bibles and stitched cassocks, which being (so Miriam told me) the worst-paid of all sweated labour compelled them to be up as early as myself.

It was not a very hopeful environment, yet for some time, in my little top room, I was really happy.

I saw baby every day. Between six and nine every night, I broke off work to go to Ilford, saying nothing about my errand to anybody, and leaving the family of the Jew to think it was my time for recreation.

Generally I "trammed" it from Bow Church, because I was so eager to get to my journey's end, but usually I returned on foot, for though the distance was great I thought I slept better for the walk.

What joyful evenings those were!

Perhaps I was not altogether satisfied about the Olivers, but that did not matter very much. On closer acquaintance I found my baby's nurse to be a "heedless" and "feckless" woman; and though I told myself that all allowances must be made for her in having a bad husband, I knew in my secret heart that I was deceiving myself, and that I ought to listen to the voices that were saying "Your child is being neglected."

Sometimes it seemed to me that baby had not been bathed--but that only gave me an excuse for bathing her myself.

Sometimes I thought her clothes were not as clean as they might be--but that only gave me the joy of washing them.

Sometimes I was sure that her feeding-bottle had not been rinsed and her milk was not quite fresh--but that only gave me the pleasure of scalding the one and boiling the other.

More than once it flashed upon me that I was paying Mrs. Oliver to do all this--but then what a deep delight it was to be mothering my own baby!

Thus weeks and months passed--it is only now I know how many, for in those days Time itself had nothing in it for me except my child--and every new day brought the new joy of watching my baby's development.

Oh, how wonderful it all was! To see her little mind and soul coming out of the Unknown! Out of the silence and darkness of the womb into the world of light and sound!

First her sense of sight, with her never-ending interest in her dear little toes! Then her senses of touch and hearing, and the gift of speech, beginning with a sort of crow, and ending in the "ma-ma-ma" which the first time I heard it went prancing through and through me and was more heavenly to my ears than the music of the spheres!

What evenings of joy I had with her!

The best of them (God forgive me!) were the nights when the bricklayer had got into some trouble by "knocking people about" at the "Rising Sun" and his wife had to go off to rescue him from the police.

Then, baby being "shortened," I would prop her up in her cot while I sang "Sally" to her; or if that did not serve, and her little lip continued to drop, I both sang and danced, spreading my skirts and waltzing to the tune of "Clementina" while the kettle hummed over the fire and the bricklayer's kitchen buzzed softly like a hive of bees.

Oh dear! Oh dear! I may have been down in the depths, yet there is no place so dark that it may not be brightened by a sunbeam, and my sunbeam was my child.

And then Martin--baby was constantly making me think of him. Devouring her with my eyes, I caught resemblances every day--in her eyes, her voice, her smile, and, above all, in that gurgling laugh that was like water bubbling out of a bottle.

I used to talk to her about him, pouring all my sentimental secrets into her ears, just as if she understood, telling her what a great man her father had been and how he loved both of us--_would_ have done if he had lived longer.

I dare say it was very foolish. Yet I cannot think it was all foolishness. Many and many a time since I have wondered if the holy saints, who knew what had really happened to Martin, were whispering all this in my ear as a means of keeping my love for him as much alive as if he had been constantly by my side.

The climax came when Isabel was about five months old, for then the feeling about baby and Martin reached another and higher phase.

I hardly dare to speak of it, lest it should seem silly when it was really so sacred and so exalted.

The idea I had had before baby was born, that she was being sent to console me (to be a link between my lost one and me), developed into the startling and rapturous thought that the very soul of Martin had passed into my child.

"So Martin is not dead at all," I thought, "not really dead, because he lives in baby."

It is impossible to say how this thought stirred me; how it filled my heart with thankfulness; how I prayed that the little body in which the soul of my Martin had come to dwell might grow beautiful and strong and worthy of him; how I felt charged with another and still greater responsibility to guard and protect her with my life itself if need be.

"Yes, yes, my very life itself," I thought.

Perhaps this was a sort of delirium, born of my great love, my hard work, and my failing strength. I did not know, I did not care.

All that mattered to me then was one thing only--that whereas hitherto I had thought Martin was so far gone from me that not Time but only Eternity would bring us together, now I felt that he was coming back and back to me--nearer and nearer and nearer every day.

MEMORANDUM BY MARTIN CONRAD

My dear, noble little woman was right in more ways than she knew.

At that very time I was in literal truth hurrying home to her as fast as the fastest available vessel could carry me.

As soon as we had boarded the _Scotia_ at the Cape and greeted our old shipmates, we shouted for our letters.

There were some for all of us and heaps for me, so I scuttled down to my cabin, where I sorted the envelopes like a pack of cards, looking for the small delicate hand that used to write my letters and speeches.

To my dismay it was not there, and realizing that fact I bundled the letters into a locker and never looked at them again until we were two days out--when I found they were chiefly congratulations from my committee, the proprietor of my newspaper, and the Royal Geographical Society, all welcome enough in their way, but Dead Sea fruit to a man with an empty, heaving heart.

Going up on deck I found every face about me shining like the aurora, for the men had had good news all round, one having come into a fortune and another into the fatherhood of twins, and both being in a state of joy and excitement.

But all the good fellows were like boys. Some of them (with laughter seasoned by a few tears) read me funny bits out of their wives' letters--bits too that were not funny, about having "a pretty fit of hysterics" at reading bad news of us and "wanting to kiss the newsboy" when he brought the paper contradicting it.

I did my best to play the game of rejoicing, pretending I had had good news also, and everything was going splendid. But I found it hard enough to keep it going, especially while we were sailing back to the world, as we called it, and hearing from the crew the news of what had happened while we had been away.

First, there was the reason for the delay in the arrival of the ship, which had been due not to failure of the wireless at our end, but to a breakdown on Macquarie Island.

And then there was the account of the report of the loss of the _Scotia_ in the gale going out, which had been believed on insufficient evidence (as I thought), but recorded in generous words of regret that sent the blood boiling to a man's face and made him wish to heaven they could be true.

We were only five or six days sailing to New Zealand, but the strain to me was terrible, for the thought was always uppermost:

"Why didn't she write a word of welcome to reach me on my return to civilisation?"

When I was not talking to somebody that question was constantly haunting me. To escape from it I joined the sports of my shipmates, who with joyful news in their hearts and fresh food in their stomachs were feeling as good as new in spite of all they had suffered.

But the morning we smelt land, the morning the cloud banks above the eastern horizon came out hard and fast and sure (no dreamland this time), I stood at the ship's bow, saying nothing to anybody, only straining my eyes for the yet distant world we were coming back to out of that desolate white waste, and thinking:

"Surely I'll have news from her before nightfall."

There was a big warm-hearted crowd on the pier at Port Lyttelton. Treacle said, "Gawd. I didn't know there was so many people in the world, Guv'nor;" and O'Sullivan, catching sight of a pretty figure under a sunshade, tugged at my arm and cried (in the voice of an astronomer who has discovered a planet), "Commanther! Commanther! A _girl!_"

Almost before we had been brought to, a company of scientific visitors came aboard; but I was more concerned about the telegrams that had come at the same moment, so hurrying down to my cabin I tore them open like a vulture riving its prey--always looking at the signatures first and never touching an envelope without thinking:

"Oh God, what will be inside of it?"

There was nothing from my dear one! Invitations to dine, to lecture, to write books, to do this and that and Heaven knows what, but never a word from her who was more to me than all the world besides.

This made me more than ever sure of the "voices" that had called me back from the 88th latitude, so I decided instantly to leave our ship in New Zealand, in readiness for our next effort, and getting across to Sydney to take the first fast steamer home.

The good people at Port Lyttelton were loath to let us go. But after I had made my excuses, ("crazy to get back to wives and sweethearts, you know") they sent a school of boys (stunning little chaps in Eton suits) to sing us off with "Forty Years On"--which brought more of my mother into my eyes than I knew to be left there.

At Sydney we had the same experience--the same hearty crowds, the same welcome, the same invitations, to which we made the same replies, and then got away by a fast liner which happened to be ready to sail.

On the way "back to the world" I had slung together a sort of a despatch for the newspaper which had promoted our expedition (a lame, limping thing for want of my darling's help to make it go), saying something about the little we had been able to do but more about what we meant, please God, to do some day.

"She'll see that, anyway, and know we're coming back," I thought.

But to make doubly sure I sent two personal telegrams, one to my dear one at Castle Raa and the other to my old people at home, asking for answers to Port Said.

Out on the sea again I was tormented by the old dream of the crevassed glacier; and if anybody wonders why a hulking chap who had not been afraid of a ninety-mile blizzard in the region of the Pole allowed himself to be kept awake at night by a buzzing in the brain, all I can say is that it was so, and I know nothing more about it.

Perhaps my recent experience with the "wireless" persuaded me that if two sticks stuck in the earth could be made to communicate with each other over hundreds of miles, two hearts that loved each other knew no limitations of time or space.

In any case I was now so sure that my dear one had called me home from the Antarctic that by the time we reached Port Said, and telegrams were pouring in on me, I had worked myself up to such a fear that I dared not open them.

From sheer dread of the joy or sorrow that might be enclosed in the yellow covers, I got O'Sullivan down in my cabin to read my telegrams, while I scanned his face and nearly choked with my own tobacco smoke.

There was nothing from my dear one! Nothing from my people at home either!

O'Sullivan got it into his head that I was worrying about my parents, and tried to comfort me by saying that old folks never dreamt of telegraphing, but by the holy immaculate Mother he'd go bail there would be a letter for me before long.

There was.

We stayed two eternal days at Port Said while the vessel was taking coal for the rest of the voyage, and almost at the moment of sailing a letter arrived from Ellan, which, falling into O'Sullivan's hands first, sent him flying through the steamer and shouting at the top of his voice:

"Commanther! Commanther!"

The passengers gave room for him, and told me afterwards of his beaming face. And when he burst into my cabin I too felt sure he had brought me good news, which he had, though it was not all that I wanted.

"The way I was sure there would be a letter for you soon, and by the holy St. Patrick and St. Thomas, here it is," he cried.

The letter was from my father, and I had to brace myself before I could read it.

It was full of fatherly love, motherly love, too, and the extravagant pride my dear good old people had of me ("everybody's talking of you, my boy, and there's nothing else in the newspapers"); but not a word about my Mary--or only one, and that seemed worse than none at all.

"You must have heard of the trouble at Castle Raa. Very sad, but this happy hour is not the time to say anything about it."

Nothing more! Only reams and reams of sweet parental chatter which (God forgive me!) I would have gladly given over and over again for one plain sentence about my darling.

Being now more than ever sure that some kind of catastrophe had overtaken my poor little woman, I telegraphed to her again, this time (without knowing what mischief I was making) at the house of Daniel O'Neill--telling myself that, though the man was a brute who had sacrificed his daughter to his lust of rank and power and all the rest of his rotten aspirations, he was her father, and, if her reprobate of a husband had turned her out, he must surely have taken her in.

"Cable reply to Malta. Altogether too bad not hearing from you," I said.

A blind, hasty, cruel telegram, but thank God she never received it!

M.C.

[END OF MARTIN CONRAD'S MEMORANDUM]

NINETY-EIGHTH CHAPTER

Day by day it became more and more difficult for me to throw dust in my own eyes about the Olivers.

One evening on reaching their house a little after six, as usual, I found the front door open, the kitchen empty save for baby, who, sitting up in her cot, was holding quiet converse with her toes, and the two Olivers talking loudly (probably by pre-arrangement) in the room upstairs.

The talk was about baby, which was "a noosance," interfering with a man's sleep by night and driving him out of his home by day. And how much did they get for it? Nothing, in a manner of speaking. What did the woman (meaning me) think the "bleedin' place" was--"a philanthropic institooshun" or a "charity orginisation gime"?

After this I heard the bricklayer thunder downstairs in his heavy boots and go out of the house without coming into the kitchen, leaving his wife (moral coward that he was) to settle his account with me.

Then Mrs. Oliver came down, with many sighs, expressed surprise at seeing me and fear that I might have overheard what had been said in the room above.

"Sorry to say I've been having a few words with Ted, ma'am, and tell you the truth it was about you."

Ted had always been against her nursing, and she must admit it wasn't wise of a woman to let her man go to the public-house to get out of the way of a crying child; but though she was a-running herself off her feet to attend to the pore dear, and milk was up a penny, she had growd that fond of my baby since she lost her own that she couldn't abear to part with the jewel, and perhaps if I could pay a little more--Ted said seven, but she said six, and a shilling a week wouldn't hurt me--she could over-persuade him to let the dear precious stay.

I was trembling with indignation while I listened to the woman's whining (knowing well I was being imposed upon), but I was helpless and so I agreed.

My complacency had a bad effect on the Olivers, who continued to make fresh extortions, until their demands almost drove me to despair.

I thought a climax had been reached when one night a neighbour came to the door and, calling Mrs. Oliver into the lobby, communicated some news in a whisper which brought her back with a frightened face for her cloak and hat, saying "something was a matter with Ted" and she must "run away quick to him."

When she returned an hour or two later she was crying, and with sobs between her words she told me that Ted (having taken a drop too much) had "knocked somebody about" at the "Sun." As a consequence he had fallen into the hands of the police, and would be brought before the magistrate the following morning, when, being unable to pay the fine, he would have to "do time"--just as a strike was a-coming on, too, and he was expecting good pay from the Strike Committee.

"And what is to happen to me and the baby while my 'usband is in prison?" she said.

I knew it was an act of weakness, but, thinking of my child and the danger of its being homeless, I asked what the amount of the fine would probably be, and being told ten-and-six, I gave the money, though it was nearly all I had in the world.

I paid for my weakness, though, and have reason to remember it.

The extortions of the Olivers had brought me to so narrow a margin between my earnings and expenses that I lay awake nearly all that night thinking what I could do to increase the one or reduce the other. The only thing I found possible was to change to cheaper quarters. So next morning, with a rather heavy heart, I asked Mrs. Abramovitch if the room at the back of the house was still empty, and hearing that it was I moved into it the same day.

That was a small and not a very wise economy.

My new room was cheerless as well as dark, with no sights but the clothes that were drying from the pulley-lines and no sounds but the whoops of the boys of the neighbourhood playing at "Red Indians" on the top of the yard walls.

But it was about the same as the other in size and furniture, and after I had decorated it with my few treasures--the Reverend Mother's rosary, which I hung on the head of the bed, and my darling mother's miniature, which I pinned up over the fire--I thought it looked bright and homelike.

All this time, too, I was between the nether and the upper mill-stone.

My employer, the Jew (though he must have seen that I was sweating myself much more than the law would have allowed him to sweat me), could not forgive himself when he found that I was earning more by "piece" than he would have had to pay me by the day, or resist the temptation to square accounts with me at the earliest possible opportunity.

Unfortunately, his opportunity came only too quickly, and it led (however indirectly) to the most startling fact that has ever, perhaps, entered into a woman's life.

I had not been more than three months at the Jew's house when the Jewish festivals came round--New Year's Day, the Day of Atonement, and the Feast of Tabernacles--which, falling near together and occupying many days, disturbed his own habits of work entirely.

One of the tasks he reserved for himself was that of taking the best paid of his "best-bespoke" back to the large shops in the West End, and waiting for the return orders. But finding that the festivals interfered with these journeys, he decided that they should be made by me, who was supposed to know the West End (having lived in it) and to present a respectable appearance.

I was reluctant to undertake the new duty, for though the Jew was to pay me a few shillings a week for it, I saw I could earn more in the time with my needle. But when he laid his long, hairy forefinger on the side of his nose and said with a significant smile:

"You vill be gradeful, and convenience your employer, mine child," I agreed.

Thus it came to pass that not only during the Jewish festivals, but for months after they were over, I carried a rather large black bag by tram or rail to the district that lies at the back of Piccadilly and along Oxford Street as far west as the Marble Arch.

I had to go whenever called upon and to wait as long as wanted, so that in the height of the tailoring season I was out in the West End at all irregular hours of night, and even returned to my lodgings on one or two occasions in the raw sunshine of the early mornings.

The one terror of my West End journeys was that I might meet Sister Mildred. I never did. In the multitude of faces which passed through the streets, flashing and disappearing like waves under the moon at sea, I never once caught a glimpse of a face I knew.

But what sights I saw for all that! What piercing, piteous proofs that between the rich and the poor there is a great gulf fixed!

The splendid carriages driving in and out of the Park; the sumptuously dressed ladies strolling through Bond Street; the fashionable church paraders; the white plumes and diamond stars which sometimes gleamed behind the glow of the electric broughams gliding down the Mall.

"I used to be a-toffed up like that onct," I heard an old woman who was selling matches say as a lady in an ermine coat stepped out of a theatre into an automobile and was wrapped round in a tiger-skin rug.

Sometimes it happened that, returning to the East End after the motor 'buses had ceased to ply, I had to slip through the silent Leicester Square and the empty Strand to the Underground Railway on the Embankment.

Then I would see the wretched men and women who were huddled together in the darkness on the steps to the river (whose ever-flowing waters must have witnessed so many generations of human wreckage), and, glancing up at the big hotels and palatial mansions full of ladies newly returned from theatres and restaurants in their satin slippers and silk stockings, I would wonder how they could lie in their white beds at night in rooms whose windows looked down on such scenes.

But the sight that stirred me most (though it did not awaken my charity, which shows what a lean-souled thing I was myself) was that of the "public women," the street-walkers, as I used to call them, whom I saw in Piccadilly with their fine clothes and painted faces, sauntering in front of the clubs or tripping along with a light step and trying to attract the attention of the men.

I found no pathos in the position of such women. On the contrary, I had an unspeakable horror and hatred and loathing of them, feeling that no temptation, no poverty, no pressure that could ever be brought to bear upon a woman in life or in death excused her for committing so great a wrong on the sanctity of her sex as to give up her womanhood at any call but that of love.

"Nothing could make me do it," I used to think, "nothing in this world."

But O God! how little I knew then what is in a woman's heart to do when she has a child to live for, and is helpless and alone!

I cannot expect anybody to forgive me for what I did (or attempted to do), and now that the time has come to tell of it my hand trembles, and body and soul seem to be quivering like a flame.

May God (who has brought everything to such a glorious end) have mercy on me and forgive me, and help me to be true!

NINETY-NINTH CHAPTER

The worst consequence of my West End journeys was that my nightly visits to Ilford were fewer than before, and that the constant narrowing of the margin between my income and my expenses made it impossible for me to go there during the day.

As a result my baby received less and less attention, and I could not be blind to the fact that she was growing paler and thinner.

At length she developed a cough which troubled me a great deal. Mrs. Oliver made light of it, saying a few pennyworths of paregoric would drive it away, so I hurried off to a chemist, who recommended a soothing syrup of his own, saying it was safer and more effectual for a child.

The syrup seemed to stop the cough but to disturb the digestion, for I saw the stain of curdled milk on baby's bib and was conscious of her increasing weakness.

This alarmed me very much, and little as I knew of children's ailments, I became convinced that she stood in need of more fresh air, so I entreated Mrs. Oliver to take her for a walk every day.

I doubt if she ever did so, for as often as I would say:

"Has baby been out to-day, nurse?" Mrs. Oliver would make some lame excuse and pass quickly to another subject.

At last, being unable to bear the strain any longer, I burst out on the woman with bitter reproaches, and then she broke down into tears and explained everything. She was behind with her rent, the landlord was threatening, and she dared not leave the house for a moment lest he should lock her out altogether.

"I don't mind telling you, it's all along of Ted, ma'am. He's on strike wages but he spends it at the 'Sun.' He has never been the man to me--never once since I married him. I could work and keep the house comfortable without him, but he wouldn't let me a-be, because he knows I love, him dear. Yes, I do, I love him dear," she continued, breaking into hysterical sobs, "and if he came home and killed me I could kiss him with my last breath."

This touched me more than I can say. A sense of something tragic in the position of the poor woman, who knew the character of the man she loved as well as the weakness which compelled her to love him, made me sympathise with her for the first time, and think (with a shuddering memory of my own marriage) how many millions of women there must be in the world who were in a worse position than myself.

On returning to my room that night I began to look about to see if I had anything I could sell in order to help Mrs. Oliver, and so put an end to the condition that kept my baby a prisoner in her house.

I had nothing, or next to nothing. Except the Reverend Mother's rosary (worth no more than three or four shillings) I had only my mother's miniature, which was framed in gold and set in pearls, but that was the most precious of all my earthly possessions except my child.

Again and again when I looked at it in my darkest hours I had found new strength and courage. It had been like a shrine to me--what the image of the Virgin was in happier days--and thinking of all that my darling mother had done and suffered and sacrificed for my sake when I was myself a child, I felt that I could never part with her picture under the pressure of any necessity whatever.

"Never," I thought, "never under any circumstances."

It must have been about a week after this that I went to Ilford on one of those chill, clammy nights which seem peculiar to the East End of London, where the atmosphere, compounded of smoke and fog and thin drizzling rain; penetrates to the bone and hangs on one's shoulders like a shroud.

Thinking of this, as I thought of everything, in relation to baby, I bought, as I was passing a hosier's shop, a pair of nice warm stockings and a little woollen jacket.

When I reached the Olivers' I found, to my surprise, two strange men stretched out at large in the kitchen, one on the sofa and the other in the rocking-chair, both smoking strong tobacco and baby coughing constantly.

Before I realised what had happened Mrs. Oliver called me into the scullery, and, after closing the door on us, she explained the position, in whispers broken by sobs.

It was the rent. These were the bailiff's men put into possession by the landlord, and unless she could find two pounds ten by nine o'clock to-morrow morning, she and her husband would be sold up and turned into the street.

"The home as I've been scraping and pinching to keep together!" she cried. "For the sake of two pound ten! . . . You couldn't lend us that much, could you?"

I told her I could not, but she renewed her entreaties, asking me to think if I had not something I could pawn for them, and saying that Ted and she would consider it "a sacred dooty" to repay.

Again I told her I had nothing--I was trying not to think of the miniature--but just at that moment she caught sight of the child's jacket which I was still holding in my hand, and she fell on me with bitter reproaches.

"You've money enough to spend on baby, though. It's crool. Her living in lukshry and getting new milk night and day, and fine clothes being bought for her constant, and my pore Ted without a roof to cover him in weather same as this. It breaks my heart. It do indeed. Take your child away, ma'am. Take her to-night, afore we're turned out of house and home to-morrow morning."

Before the hysterical cries with which Mrs. Oliver said this had come to an end I was on my way back to my room at the Jew's. But it was baby I was thinking of in relation to that cold, clammy night--that it would be impossible to take her out in it (even if I had somewhere to take her to, which I had not) without risk to her health and perhaps her life.

With trembling fingers and an awful pain at my heart I took my mother's miniature from the wall and wrapped it up in tissue paper.

A few minutes afterwards I was back in the damp streets, walking fast and eagerly, cutting over the lines of the electric trams without looking for the crossings.

I knew where I was going to--I was going to a pawnbroker's in the Mile End Waste which I had seen on my West End journeys. When I got there I stole in at a side door, half-closing my eyes as I did so, by that strange impulse which causes us to see nothing when we do not wish to be seen.

I shall never forget the scene inside. I think it must have left a scar on my brain, for I see it now in every detail--the little dark compartment; the high counter; the shelves at the back full of parcels, like those of a left-luggage room at a railway station; the heavy, baggy, big-faced man in shirt-sleeves with a long cigar held between his teeth at the corner of his frothy mouth; and then my own hurried breathing; my thin fingers opening the tissue paper and holding out the miniature; the man's coarse hands fumbling it; his casual air as he looked at it and cheapened it, as if it had been a common thing scarcely worthy of consideration.

"What's this 'ere old-fashion'd thing? Portrait of your great-grandmother? Hum! Not 'arf bad-looking fice, neither."

I think my eyes must have been blazing like hot coals. I am sure I bit my lips (I felt them damp and knew they were bleeding) to prevent myself from flinging out at the man in spite of my necessity. But I did my best to control my trembling mouth, and when he asked me how much I wanted on the miniature I answered, with a gulp in my throat:

"Two pounds ten, if you please, sir."

"Couldn't do it," said the pawnbroker.

I stood speechless for a moment, not knowing what to say next, and then the pawnbroker, with apparent indifference, said:

"I'll give you two ten for it out and out."

"You mean I am to _sell_ . . ."

"Yus, take it or leave it, my dear."

It is no use saying what I suffered at that moment. I think I became ten years older during the few minutes I stood at that counter.

But they came to an end somehow, and the next thing I knew was that I was on my way back to Ilford; that the damp air had deepened into rain; that miserable and perhaps homeless beings, ill-clad and ill-fed, were creeping along in the searching cold with that shuffling sound which bad boots make on a wet pavement; and that I was telling myself with a fluttering heart that the sheltering wings of my beautiful mother in heaven had come to cover my child.

On reaching the Olivers', hot and breathless, I put three gold coins, two sovereigns and a half-sovereign, on to the table to pay off the broker's men.

They had been settling themselves for the night, and looked surprised and I thought chagrined, but took up the money and went away.

As they were going off one of them called me to the door, and in the little space at the foot of the stairs he said, tipping his fingers towards the cot:

"If that's your kiddie, miss, I recommend you to get it out o' this 'ere place quick--see?"

I stayed an hour or two longer because I was troubled about baby's cough; and before I left, being still uneasy, I did what I had never done before--wrote my address at the Jew's house, so that I could be sent for if I was ever wanted.

ONE HUNDREDTH CHAPTER

When I awoke next morning the last word of the broker's man seemed to be ringing in my ears.

I knew it was true; I knew I ought to remove baby from the house of the Olivers without another day's delay, but I was at a loss to know what to do with her.

To bring her to my own room at the Jew's was obviously impossible, and to advertise for a nurse for my child was to run the risk of falling into the toils of somebody who might do worse than neglect her.

In my great perplexity I recalled the waitress at the restaurant whose child had been moved to a Home in the country, and for some moments I thought how much better it would be that baby should be "bonny and well" instead of pale and thin as she was now. But when I reflected that if I took her to a public institution I should see her only once a month, I told myself that I could not and would not do so.

"I'll work my fingers to the bone first," I thought.

Yet life makes a fearful tug at a woman when it has once got hold of her, and, strangely enough, it was in the Jew's house that I first came to see that for the child's own sake I must part with her.

Somewhere about the time of my moving into the back room my employer made a kind of bower of branches and evergreens over the lead-flat roof of an outhouse in his back-yard--a Succah, as Miriam called it, built in honour of the Feast of Tabernacles, as a symbol of the time when the Israelites in the Wilderness dwelt in booths.

In this Succah the Jew's family ate all their meals during the seven or eight days of the Jewish feast, and one morning, as I sat at work by my open window, I heard Miriam after breakfast reading something from the Books of Moses.

It was the beautiful story of Jacob parting with Benjamin in the days of the famine, when there was corn in Egypt only--how the poor old father in his great love could not bring himself to give up his beloved son, although death threatened him; how Judah pleaded with Jacob to send the boy with him into the far country lest they should all die, "both we and thou and also our little ones;" and how at last Jacob said, "If it must be so, do this," but "if I be bereaved of my children, I am bereaved."

It would be hard to say how deeply this story moved me while I listened from my room above. And now that I thought of it again, I saw that I was only sacrificing my child to my selfish love of her, and therefore the duty of a true mother was to put her into a Home.

It would not be for long. The work I was doing was not the only kind I was capable of. After I had liberated myself from the daily extortions of the Olivers I should be free to look about for more congenial and profitable employment; and then by and by baby and I might live together in that sweet cottage in the country (I always pictured it as a kind of Sunny Lodge, with roses looking in at the window of "Mary O'Neill's little room") which still shone through my dreams.

I spent some sleepless nights in reconciling myself to all this, and perhaps wept a little, too, at the thought that after years of separation I might be a stranger to my own darling. But at length I put my faith in "the call of the blood" to tell her she was mine, and then nothing remained except to select the institution to which my only love and treasure was to be assigned.

Accident helped me in this as in other things. One day on my westward journey a woman who sat beside me in the tram, and was constantly wiping her eyes (though I could see a sort of sunshine through her tears), could not help telling me, out of the overflowing of her poor heart, what had just been happening to her.

She was a widow, and had been leaving her little girl, three years old, at an orphanage, and though it had been hard to part with her, and the little darling had looked so pitiful when she came away, it would be the best for both of them in the long run.

I asked which orphanage it was, and she mentioned the name of it, telling me something about the founder--a good doctor who had been a father to the fatherless of thousands of poor women like herself.

That brought me to a quick decision, and the very next morning, putting on my hat and coat, I set off for the Home, which I knew where to find, having walked round it on my way back from the West End and heard the merry voices of happy children who were playing behind a high wall.

I hardly know whether to laugh or cry when I think of the mood in which I entered the orphanage. In spite of all that life had done to me, I really and truly felt as if I were about to confer an immense favour upon the doctor by allowing him to take care of my little woman.

Oh, how well I remember that little point of time!

My first disappointment was to learn that the good doctor was dead, and when I was shown into the office of his successor (everything bore such a businesslike air) I found an elderly man with a long "three-decker" neck and a glacial smile, who, pushing his spectacles up on to his forehead, said in a freezing voice:

"Well, ma'am, what is _your_ pleasure?"

After a moment of giddiness I began to tell him my story--how I had a child and her nurse was not taking proper care of her; how I was in uncongenial employment myself, but hoped soon to get better; how I loved my little one and expected to be able to provide for her presently; and how, therefore, if he would receive her for a while, only a little while, on the understanding, the clear and definite understanding, that I could take her away as soon as I wished to. . . .

Oh dear! Oh dear:

I do not know what there was in my appearance or speech which betrayed me, but I had got no further than this when the old gentleman said sharply:

"Can you provide a copy of the register of your child's birth to show that it is legitimate?"

What answer I made I cannot recollect, except that I told the truth in a voice with a tremor in it, for a memory of the registry office was rolling back on me and I could feel my blushes flushing into my face.

The result was instantaneous. The old gentleman touched a bell, drew his spectacles down on to his nose, and said in his icy tones:

"Don't take illegitimate children if we can help it."

It was several days before I recovered from the deep humiliation of this experience. Then (the exactions of the Olivers quickening my memory and at the same time deadening my pride) I remembered something which I had heard the old actress say during my time at the boarding-house about a hospital in Bloomsbury for unfortunate children--how the good man who founded it had been so firm in his determination that no poor mother in her sorrow should be put to further shame about her innocent child that he had hung out a basket at the gate at night in which she could lay her little one, if she liked, and then ring a bell and hide herself away.

It wasn't easy to reconcile oneself to such philanthropy, but after a sleepless night, and with rather a sickening pang of mingled hope and fear, I set off for this hospital.

It was a fine Sunday morning. The working-men in the East End were sitting at their doors smoking their pipes and reading their Sunday papers; but when I reached the West all the church bells were ringing, and people wearing black clothes and shiny black gloves were walking with measured steps through the wide courtyard that led to the chapel.

I will not say that I did not feel some qualms at entering a Protestant church, yet as soon as I had taken my seat and looked up at the gallery of the organ, where the children sat tier on tier, so quaint and sweet--the boys like robins in their bright red waistcoats, and the girls like rabbits in their mob-caps with fluted frills--and the service began, and the fresh young voices rose in hymns of praise to the good Father of us all, I thought Of nothing except the joy of seeing Isabel there some day and hearing her singing in the choir.

When the service was over I asked for the secretary and was shown into his room.

I dare say he was a good man, but oh! why will so many good people wear such wintry weather in their faces that merely to look at them pierces a poor woman to the soul?

Apologising for the day, I told my story again (my head a little down), saying I understood that it was no barrier to a child in that orphanage that she had been born outside the pale of the law.

"On the contrary," said the secretary, "that is precisely the kind of child this house is intended for."

But when I went on to say that I assumed they still observed the wish of the founder that no questions of any kind should be asked about a child's birth or parentage, he said no, they had altered all that. Then he proceeded to explain that before a child could be received the mother must now go before a committee of gentlemen to satisfy them of her previous good character, and that the father of her baby had deserted both of them.

More than that, he told me that on being received the child was immediately re-registered and given a new name, in order that it might be cut off from the sin of its parents and the contamination of their shame.

It would be impossible for me to describe the feelings with which I listened to the secretary while he said all this, with the cast-metal face of a man who was utterly unconscious of the enormity of the crime he was describing.

"Before a committee of gentlemen?" I asked.

"That is so."

"Who are to ask her all those questions?"

"Yes."

"And then they are to change her baby's name?"

"Yes."

"Is she told what the new name is to be?"

"No, but she is given a piece of parchment containing a number which corresponds with the name in our books."

I rose to my feet, flushing up to the eyes I think, trembling from head to foot I know, and, forgetting who and what I was and why I was there--a poor, helpless, penniless being seeking shelter for her child--I burst out on the man in all the mad wrath of outraged motherhood.

"And you call this a Christian institution!" I said. "You take a poor woman in her hour of trouble and torture her with an inquisition into the most secret facts of her life, in public, and before a committee of men. And then you take her child, and so far as she is concerned you bury it, and give her a ticket to its grave. A hospital? This is no hospital. It is a cemetery. And yet you dare to write over your gates the words of our Lord--our holy and loving and blessed Lord--who said, 'Suffer little children. . . .'"

But what is the use of repeating what I said then (perhaps unjustly) or afterwards in the silence of my own room and the helpless intoxication of my rage?

It was soon stamped out of me.

By the end of another week I was driven to such despair by the continued extortions of the Olivers that, seeing an advertisement in the Underground Railway of a Home for children in the country (asking for subscriptions and showing a group of happy little people playing under a chestnut-tree in bloom), I decided to make one more effort.

"They can't all be machines," I thought, "with the founders' hearts crushed out of them."

The day was Friday, when work was apt to heap up at the Jew's, and Mrs. Abramovitch had brought vests enough to my room to cover my bed, but nevertheless I put on my hat and coat and set out for the orphanage.

It was fifteen miles on the north side of London, so it cost me something to get there. But I was encouraged by the homelike appearance of the place when I reached it, and still more by finding that it was conducted by women, for at last, I thought, the woman-soul would speak to me.

But hardly had I told my story to the matron, repeating my request (very timidly this time and with such a humble, humble heart) that I might be allowed to recover my child as soon as I found myself able to provide for her, than she stopped me and said:

"My dear young person, we could have half the orphan children in London on your terms. Before we accept such a child as yours we expect the parent to give us a legal undertaking that she relinquishes all rights in it until it is sixteen years of age."

"Sixteen? Isn't that rather severe on a mother?" I said.

"Justly severe," said the matron. "Such women should be made to maintain their children, and thus realise that the way of transgressors is hard."

How I got back to London, whether by rail or tram or on foot, or what happened on the way (except that darkness was settling down on me, within and without), I do not know. I only know that very late that night, as late as eleven o'clock, I was turning out of Park Lane into Piccadilly, where the poor "public women" with their painted faces, dangling their little hand-bags from their wrists, were promenading in front of the gentlemen's clubs and smiling up at the windows.

These were the scenes which had formerly appalled me; but now I was suddenly surprised by a different feeling, and found myself thinking that among the women who sinned against their womanhood there might be some who sold themselves for bread to keep those they loved and who loved them.

This thought was passing through my mind when I heard a hollow ringing laugh from a woman who was standing at the foot of a flight of steps talking to a group of three gentlemen whose white shirt fronts beneath their overcoats showed that they were in evening dress.

Her laughter was not natural. It had no joy in it, yet she laughed and laughed, and feeling as if I _knew_ (because life had that day trampled on me also), I said to myself:

"That woman's heart is dead."

This caused me to glance at her as I passed, when, catching a side glimpse of her face, I was startled by a memory I could not fix.

"Where and when have I seen that woman's face before?" I thought.

It seemed impossible that I could have seen it anywhere. But the woman's resemblance to somebody I had known, coupled with her joyless laughter, compelled me to stop at the next corner and look back.

By this time the gentlemen, who had been treating her lightly (O God, how men treat such women!), had left her and, coming arm-in-arm in my direction, with their silk hats tilted a little back, were saying:

"Poor old Aggie! She's off!" "Completely off!" "Is it drink, I wonder?"

And then, seeing me, they said:

"Gad, here's a nice little gal, though!" "No rouge, neither!" "By Jove, no! Her face is as white as a waterlily!"

Seeing that they were wheeling round, and fearing they were going to speak to me, I moved back and so came face to face with the woman, who was standing where they had left her, silent now, and looking after the men with fierce eyes under the fair hair that curled over her forehead.

Then in a moment a memory from the far past swept over me, and I cried, almost as if the name had been forced out of me:

"Sister Angela!"

The woman started, and it seemed for a moment as if she were going to run away. Then she laid hold of me by the arm and, looking searchingly into my face, said:

"Who are you? . . . I know. You are Mary O'Neill, aren't you?"

"Yes."

"I knew you were. I read about your marriage to that . . . that man. And now you are wondering why I am here. Well, come home with me and see."

It was not until afterwards that I knew by what mistake about my presence in that place Angela thought she must justify herself in my eyes (mine!); but taking me by the hand, just as she used to do when I was a child, she led, almost pulled, me down Piccadilly, and my will was so broken that I did not attempt to resist her.

We crossed Piccadilly Circus, with its white sheet of electric light, and, turning into the darker thoroughfares on the northern side of it, walked on until, in a narrow street of the Italian quarter of Soho, we stopped at a private door by the side of a café that had an Italian name on the window.

"This is where we live. Come in," said Angela, and I followed her through a long empty lobby and up three flights of bare stairs.

While we ascended, there was the deadened sound, as from the café, of men singing (in throbbing voices to mandolines and guitars) one of the Italian songs which I remembered to have heard from the piazza outside the convent on that night when Sister Angela left me in bed while she went off to visit the chaplain:

"_Oh bella Napoli, Oh suol beato Onde sorridere volle il creato._"

"The Italian Club," said Angela. "Only one flight more. Come!"

ONE HUNDRED AND FIRST CHAPTER

At length Angela opened, with a key from her satchel, a door on the top landing, and we entered a darkened room which was partly in the roof.

As we stepped in I heard rapid breathing, which told me that we were in a sick chamber, and then a man's voice, very husky and weak, saying:

"Is that you, Agnes?"

"It's only me, dear," said Angela..

After a moment she turned up the solitary gas-jet, which had been burning low, and I saw the shadowy form of a man lying in a bed that stood in a corner. He was wasted with consumption, his long bony hands were lying on the counterpane, his dark hair was matted over his forehead as from sweat, but I could not mistake the large, lively grey eyes that looked out of his long thin face. It was Father Giovanni.

Angela went up to him and kissed him, and I could see that his eyes lighted with a smile as he saw her coming into the room.

"There's somebody with you, isn't there?" he said.

"Yes. Who do you think it is?"

"Who?"

"Don't you remember little Margaret Mary at the Sacred Heart?"

"Is this she?"

"Yes," said Angela, and then in a hoarse, angry voice the man said:

"What has she come here for?"

Angela told him that I had seen her on Piccadilly, and being a great lady now, I (Oh heaven!) was one of the people who came out into the streets at midnight to rescue lost ones.

"She looked as if she wondered what had brought me down to that life, so I've fetched her home to see."

I was shocked at Angela's mistake, but before I could gather strength or courage to correct her Giovanni was raising himself in bed and saying, with a defiant air, his eyes blazing like watch-fires:

"She does it for me, if you want to know. I've been eleven months ill--she does it all for me, I tell you."

And then, in one of those outbursts of animation which come to the victims of that fell disease, he gave me a rapid account of what had happened to them since they ran away from Rome--how at first he had earned their living as a teacher of languages; how it became known that he was an unfrocked and excommunicated priest who had broken his vows, and then his pupils had left him; how they had struggled on for some years longer, though pursued by this character as by a malignant curse; and how at length his health had quite broken down, and he would have starved but for Agnes (Angela being her nun's name), who had stuck to him through everything.

While the sick man said this in his husky voice, Angela was sitting on the bed by his side with her arm about his waist, listening to him with a sort of pride and looking at me with a kind of triumph.

"I dare say you wonder why I didn't try to get work," she said. "I _could_ have got it if I had wanted to. I could have got it at the Italian laundry. But what was two shillings a day to a man who was ordered new milk and fresh eggs five times every twenty-four hours, not to speak of the house rent?"

"She ought to have let me die first," said Giovanni, and then, looking at me again with his large, glittering, fierce eyes, he said:

"_You_ think she ought to have let me die, don't you?"

"No, no, no," I said--it was all I _could_ say, for their mistake about myself was choking me.

Perhaps my emotion appeased both of them, for after a moment Angela beat out Giovanni's pillow and straightened his counterpane, and then told him to lie down and be quiet, while she brought a chair for me and took off her things in her own bedroom.

But hardly had she gone into an adjoining chamber when the sick man raised himself again and, reaching over in my direction, told me in a hoarse whisper the story of the first night of her present way of life--how the doctor had said he must be removed to the hospital; how Agnes would not part with him; how the landlord had threatened to turn them out; and how at last, after sitting with her head in her hands the whole evening, Aggie had got up and gone out and, coming back at midnight, had thrown two sovereigns on the table and said, "There you are, Giovanni--that's our rent and your eggs and milk for one week, anyway."

By this time Angela had returned to the room (her paint and rouge washed off, and her gay clothes replaced by a simple woollen jacket over a plain underskirt), and she began to beat up an egg, to boil some milk, to pour out a dose of medicine, and to do, with all a good woman's tact, a good woman's tenderness, the little services of which an invalid stands in need.

Oh heavens, how beautiful it was--fearfully, awfully tragically beautiful!

I was deeply moved as I sat in silence watching her; and when at length Giovanni, who had been holding her hand in his own long, bony ones and sometimes putting it to his lips, dropped off to sleep (tired out, perhaps, by talking to me), and she, drawing up to where I sat by the end of the bed, resumed her self-defence, saying in a whisper that ladies like me could not possibly understand what a woman would do, in spite of herself, when the life of one she loved was threatened, I could bear her mistake no longer, but told her of my real condition--that I was no longer a lady, that I had run away from my husband, that I had a child, and was living as a poor seamstress in the East End of London.

Angela listened to my story in astonishment; and when I had come to an end she was holding my hand and looking into my eyes with just that look which she had when she put me to bed for the first time at school, and, making her voice very low, told me to be a good child of the Infant Jesus.

"It's nearly one o'clock. You can't go back to the East End to-night," she whispered.

"Oh, I must, I must," I said, getting up and making for the door. But before I had reached it my limbs gave way, whether from the strain of emotion or physical weakness, and if it had not been for Angela I should have dropped to the floor.

After that she would hear of no excuses. I must stay until morning. I could sleep in her own bed in the other room, and she could lay a mattress for herself on the floor by the side of Giovanni's. There would be no great sacrifice in that. It was going to be one of Giovanni's bad nights, and she was likely to be up and down all the time anyway.

Half an hour later I was in bed in a little room that was separated by a thin papered partition from the room of the poor consumptive, and Angela, who had brought me a cup of hot milk, was saying in a whisper:

"He's very bad. The doctor says he can't last longer than a week. Sister Veronica (you remember her, she's Mildred Bankes that used to be) tried to get him into a home for the dying. It was all arranged, too, but at the last moment he wouldn't go. He told them that, if they wanted to separate him from Agnes, they had better bring his coffin because he would be dead before they got him to the door."

When she had gone I lay a long time in the dark, listening to the sounds on the other side of the partition.

Giovanni awoke with an alarming fit of coughing, and in the querulous, plaintive, fretful, sometimes angry tones which invalids have, he grumbled at Angela and then cried over her, saying what a burden he was to her, while she, moving about the room in her bare feet, coaxed and caressed him, and persuaded him to take his milk or his medicine.

Through all this I would hear at intervals the drumming noises of the singing downstairs, which sounded in my ears (as the singers were becoming more and more intoxicated) like the swirling and screeching of an ironical requiem for the dying man before he was dead:

"_Oh bella Napoli, Oh suol beato Onde sorridere volle il creato_."

But somewhere in those dead hours in which London sleeps everything became still, and my mind, which had been questioning the grim darkness on the worst of the world's tragedies (what a woman will do for those she loves), fell back on myself and I thought of the Christian institutions which had turned me from their doors, and then of this "street-walker" who had given up her own bed to me and was now lying in the next room on a mattress on the floor.

I could not help it if I felt a startling reverence for Angela, as a ministering angel faithful unto death, and I remembered that as I fell asleep I was telling myself that we all needed God's mercy, God's pardon, and that, God would forgive her because she had loved much.

But sleep was more tolerant still I dreamt that Angela died, and on reaching the gates of heaven all the saints of God met her, and after they had clothed her in a spotless white robe, one of them--it was the blessed Mary Magdalene--took her hand and said:

"Here is another of the holy martyrs."

I awoke from that dream with beads of perspiration on my forehead. But I dare not say what confused and terrible thoughts came next, except that they were about baby--what I might do myself if driven to the last extremity. When I slept and dreamt again, it was I who was dead, and it was my darling mother who met me and took me to the feet of the Blessed Virgin and said:

"Mother of all Mothers, who knows all that is in a mother's heart, this is my little daughter. She did not intend to do wrong. It was all for the sake of her child."

When I awoke in the morning, with the darkness shivering off through the gloom, this last dream was sitting upon me like a nightmare. It terrified me. I felt as if I were standing on the edge of a precipice and some awful forces were trying to push me over it.

The London sparrows were chirping on the skylight over my head, and I could faintly hear the Italian criers in the front street:

"Latte!" "Spazzina!" "Erbaggi freschi!"

In spite of myself (hating myself for it after all the tenderness that had been shown me), I could not overcome a feeling of shame at finding myself lying where I was, and I got up to run away that I might cleanse my soul of the evil thoughts which had come to me while there.

As I dressed I listened for a sound from the adjoining room. All was quiet now. The poor restless ones were at last getting a little rest.

A few minutes afterwards I passed on tiptoe through their room without looking towards the bed, and reaching the door to the staircase I opened it as noiselessly as I could.

Then I closed it softly after me, on so much suffering and so much love.

ONE HUNDRED AND SECOND CHAPTER

The sun was shining in the street. It was one of those clear, clean, frosty mornings when the very air of London, even in the worst places, seems to be washed by the sunlight from the sin and drink of the night before.

I was on my way to that church among the mews of Mayfair to which I had gone so frequently during the early days of my marriage when I was struggling against the mortal sin (as I thought it was) of loving Martin.

Just as I reached the church and was ascending the steps, a gorgeous landau with high-stepping horses and a powdered footman drew up at the bottom of them.

The carriage, which bore a coronet on the door, contained a lady in long furs, a rosy-faced baby-girl in squirrel skins with a large doll in her arms, and a nurse.

I could see that, like myself, the lady (a young mother) had come to confess, for as she rose from her seat she told the child to sit quiet and be good and she would not keep her long.

"Tum out soon, mummy, and dolly will lub you eber and eber," said the child.

The lady stooped and kissed the little one, and then, with a proud and happy look, stepped out of the carriage and passed into the church, while the door-keeper opened the vestibule door for her and bowed deeply.

I stood at the top of the steps for a moment looking back at the carriage, the horses, the footman, the nurse, and, above all, the baby-girl with her doll, and then followed the lady into the church.

Apparently mass was just over. Little spirelets of smoke were rising from the candles on the altar which the sacristan was putting out, a few communicants were still on their knees, and others with light yet echoing footsteps were making for the door.

The lady in furs had already taken her place at one of the confessional boxes, and as there seemed to be no other that was occupied by a priest, I knelt on a chair in the nave and tried to fix my mind on the prayers (once so familiar) for the examination of conscience before confession:

"_Oh, Lord Jesus Christ, dispel the darkness of my heart, that I may bewail my sins and rightly confess them_."

But the labouring of my spirit was like the flight of a bat in the daylight. Though I tried hard to keep my mind from wandering, I could not do so. Again and again it went back to the lady in furs with the coroneted carriage and the high-stepping horses.

She was about my own age, and she began to rise before my tightly closed eyes as a vision of what I might have been myself if I had not given up everything for love--wealth, rank, title, luxury.

God is my witness that down to that moment I had never once thought I had made any sacrifice, but now, as by a flash of cruel lightning, I saw myself as I was--a peeress who had run away from her natural condition and was living in the slums, working like any other work-girl.

Even this did not hurt me much, but when I thought of the rosy-faced child in the carriage, and then of my own darling at Mrs. Oliver's as I had seen her last, so thin and pale, and with her little bib stained by her curdled milk, a feeling I had never had before pierced to my very soul.

I asked myself if this was what God looked down upon and permitted--that because I had obeyed what I still believed to be the purest impulse of my nature, love, my child must be made to suffer.

Then something hard began to form in my heart. I told myself that what I had been taught to believe about God was falsehood and deception.

All this time I was trying to hush down my mind by saying my prayer, which called on the gracious Virgin Mary to intercede for me with my Redeemer, and the holy Saints of God to assist me.

"_Assist me by thy grace, that I may be able to declare my sins to the priest, thy Vicar_."

It was of no use. Every moment my heart was hardening, and what I had intended to confess about my wicked thoughts of the night before was vanishing away. At last I rose to my feet and, lifting my head, looked boldly up at the altar.

Just at that moment the young peeress, having finished her confession, went off with a light step and a cheerful face. Her kneeling-place at the confessional box was now vacant, yet I did not attempt to take it, and some minutes passed in which I stood biting my lips to prevent a cry. Then the priest parted his curtains and beckoned to me, and I moved across and stood stubbornly by the perforated brass grating.

"Father," I said, as firmly as I could, for my throat was fluttering, "I came here to make my confession, but something has come over me since I entered this church, and now I cannot."

"What has come over you, my child?" asked the priest.

"I feel that what is said about God in a place like this, that He is a kind and beneficent Father, who is just and merciful and pities the sufferings of His children, is untrue. It is all wrong and false. _God does not care_."

The priest did not answer me immediately, but after a moment of silence he said in a quivering voice:

"My child, I feel just like that myself sometimes. It is the devil tempting you. He is standing by your side and whispering in your ear, at this moment."

I shuddered, and the priest added:

"I see how it is, my daughter. You are suffering, and those you love are suffering too. But must you surrender your faith on that account? Look round at the pictures on these walls [the Stations of the Cross]. Think of the Great Sufferer, the Great Martyr, who in the hour of His death, at the malicious power of the world, cried, '_Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani_: My God, My God, why hast Thou forsaken Me?'"

I had dropped to my knees by now, my head was down, and my hands were clasped together.

"You are wrong, my child, if you think God does not care for you because He allows you to suffer. Are you rich? Are you prosperous? Have you every earthly blessing? Then beware, for Satan is watching for your soul. But are you poor? Are you going through unmerited trouble? Have you lost some one who was dearer to you than your heart of hearts? Then take courage, for our holy and blessed Saviour has marked you for His own."

I know nothing of that priest except his whispering voice, which, coming through the grating of the confessional, produced the effect of the supernatural, but I thought then, and I think now, that he must have been a great as well as a good man.

I perfectly recollect that, when I left the church and passed into the streets, it seemed as if his spirit went with me and built up in my soul a resolution that was bright with heavenly tears and sunshine.

Work! Work! Work! I should work still harder than before. No matter how mean, ill-paid, and uncongenial my work might be, I should work all day and all night if necessary. And since I had failed to get my child into an orphanage, it was clearly intended that I should keep her with me, for my own charge and care and joy.

This was the mood in which I returned to the house of the Jew.

It was Saturday morning, and though the broader thoroughfares of the East End were crowded and the narrower streets full of life, the Jew's house was silent, for it was the Jewish Sabbath.

As I went hurriedly upstairs I heard the Jew himself, who was dressing for the synagogue, singing his Sabbath hymn: _Lerho daudee likras kollo_--"Come, O friend, let us go forth to meet the Bride, let us receive the Sabbath with joy!"

Then came a shock.

When I reached my room I found, to my dismay, that the pile of vests which I had left on my bed on going out the day before had been removed; and just as I was telling myself that no one else except Mrs. Abramovitch had a key to my door I heard shuffling footsteps on the stair, and knew that her husband was coming up to me.

A moment afterwards the Jew stood in my doorway. He was dressed in his Sabbath suit and, free from the incongruous indications of his homely calling, the patriarchal appearance which had first struck me was even more marked than before. His face was pale, his expression was severe, and if his tongue betrayed the broken English of the Polish Jew, I, in my confusion and fear, did not notice it then.

My first thought was that he had come to reprove me for neglecting my work, and I was prepared to promise to make up for my absence. But at a second glance I saw that something had happened, something had become known, and that he was there to condemn and denounce me.

"You have been out all night," he said. "Can you tell me where you have been?"

I knew I could not, and though it flashed upon me to say that I had slept at the house of a friend, I saw that, if he asked who my friend was, and what, I should be speechless.

The Jew waited for my reply and then said:

"You have given us a name--can you say it is your true and right one?"

Again I made no answer, and after another moment the Jew said:

"Can you deny that you have a child whom you have hidden from our knowledge?"

I felt myself gasping, but still I did not speak.

"Can you say that it was lawfully born according to your Christian marriage?"

I felt the colour flushing into my face but I was still silent; and after a moment in which, as I could see, the stern-natured Jew was summing me up as a woman of double life and evil character, he said:

"Then it is true? . . . Very well, you will understand that from this day you cease to be in my service."

All this time my eyes were down, but I was aware that somebody else had come into the room. It was Miriam, and she was trying to plead for me.

"Father . . ." she began, but, turning hotly upon her, the Jew cried passionately:

"Go away! A true daughter of Israel should know better than to speak for such a woman."

I heard the girl going slowly down the stairs, and then the Jew, stepping up to me and speaking more loudly than before, said:

"Woman, leave my house at once, before you corrupt the conscience of my child."

Again I became aware that some one had come into the room. It was Mrs. Abramovitch, and she, too, was pleading for me.

"Israel! Calm thyself! Do not give way to injustice and anger. On Shobbos morning, too!"

"Hannah," said the Jew, "thou speakest with thy mouth, not thy heart. The Christian doth not deny that she hath given thee a false name, and is the adulterous mother of a misbegotten child. If she were a Jewish woman she would be summoned before the Beth Din, and in better days our law of Moses would have stoned her. Shall she, because she is a Christian, dishonour a good Jewish house? No! The hand of the Lord would go out against me."

"But she is homeless, and she hath been a good servant to thee, Israel. Give her time to find another shelter."

There was a moment of silence after that, and then the Jew said:

"Very well! It shall not be said that Israel Abramovitch knows not to temper justice with mercy."

And then, my face being still down, I heard him saying over my head:

"You may stay here another week. After that I wash my hands of thee."

With these hard words he turned away, and I heard him going heavily down the stairs. His wife stayed a little longer, saying something in a kind voice, which I did not comprehend, and then she followed him.

I do not think I had spoken a word. I continued to stand where the Jew had left me. After a while I heard him closing and locking the door of his own apartment, and knew that he was going off to his synagogue in Brick Lane in his tall silk hat worn on the back of his head like a skull-cap, and with his wife and daughter behind him, carrying his leather-bound prayer-book.

I hardly knew what else was happening. My heart was heaving like a dead body on a billow. All that the priest had said was gone. In its place there was a paralysing despair as if the wheels of life were rolling over me.

MEMORANDUM BY MARTIN CONRAD

My dear, long-suffering, martyred darling!

It makes my blood boil to see how the very powers of darkness, in the name of religion, morality, philanthropy and the judgment of God, were persecuting my poor little woman.

But why speak of myself at all, or interrupt my darling's narrative, except to say what was happening in my efforts to reach her?

While we were swinging along in our big liner over the heaving bosom of the Mediterranean the indefinable sense of her danger never left me day or night.

That old dream of the glacier and the precipice continued to haunt my sleep, with the difference that, instead of the aurora glistening in my dear one's eyes, there was now a blizzard behind her.

The miserable thing so tortured me as we approached Malta (where I expected to receive a reply to the cable I had sent from Port Said to the house of Daniel O'Neill) that I felt physically weak at the thought of the joy or sorrow ahead of me.

Though there was no telegram from my darling at Malta, there was one from the chairman of my committee, saying he was coming to Marseilles to meet our steamer and would sail the rest of the way home with us.

Indirectly this brought me a certain comfort. It reminded me of the