Marriage a la mode Part 28

The first days of June broke radiantly over the great gorge and the woods which surround it. One morning, early, between four and five o'clock, Daphne came in, to find Madeleine awake and comparatively at ease. Yet the preceding twenty-four hours had been terrible, and her nurses knew that the end could not be far off.

The invalid had just asked that her couch might be drawn as near to the window as possible, and she lay looking towards the dawn, which rose in fresh and windless beauty over the town opposite and the white splendour of the Falls. The American Fall was still largely in shadow; but the light struck on the fresh green of Goat Island and leaped in tongues of fire along the edge of the Horseshoe, turning the rapids above it to flame and sending shafts into the vast tower of spray that holds the centre of the curve. Nature was all youth, glitter and delight; summer was rushing on the gorge; the mingling of wood and water was at its richest and n.o.blest.

Madeleine turned her face towards the gorge, her wasted hands clasped on her breast. She beckoned Daphne with a smile, and Daphne knelt down beside her.

"The water!" said the whispering voice; "it was once so terrible. I am not afraid--now."

"No, darling. Why should you be?"

"I know now, I shall see him again."

Daphne was silent.

"I hoped it, but I couldn't be certain. That was so awful. Now--I am certain."

"Since you became a Catholic?"

She made a sign of a.s.sent.

"I couldn't be uncertain--I _couldn't_!" she added with fervour, looking strangely at Daphne. And Daphne understood that no voice less positive or self-confident than that of Catholicism, no religion less well provided with tangible rites and practices, could have lifted from the spirit the burden of that remorse which had yet killed the body.

A little later Madeleine drew her down again.

"I couldn't talk, Daphne--I was afraid; but I've written to you, just bit by bit, as I had strength. Oh, Daphne----!"

Then voice and strength failed her. Her eyes piteously followed her friend for a little, and then closed.

She lingered through the day; and at night when the June starlight was on the gorge, she pa.s.sed away, with the voice of the Falls in her dying ears. A tragic beauty--"beauty born of murmuring sound--had pa.s.sed into her face;" and that great plunge of many waters, which had been to her in life the symbol of anguish and guilt, had become in some mysterious way the comforter of her pain, the friend of her last sleep.

A letter was found for Daphne in the little box beside her bed.

It ran thus:

DAPHNE, DARLING,--

"It was I who first taught you that we may follow our own lawless wills, and that marriage is something we may bend or break as we will. But, oh! it is not so. Marriage is mysterious and wonderful; it is the supreme test of men and women. If we wrong it, and despise it, we mutilate the divine in ourselves.

"Oh, Daphne! it is a small thing to say 'Forgive!' Yet it means the whole world.--

"And you can still say it to the living. It has been my anguish that I could only say it to the dead.... Daphne, good-bye! I have fought a long, long fight, but G.o.d is master--I bless--I adore----"

Daphne sat staring at the letter through a mist of unwilling tears. All its phrases, ideas, preconceptions, were unwelcome, unreal to her, though she knew they had been real to Madeleine.

Yet the compulsion of the dead was upon her, and of her scene with Boyson. What they asked of her--Madeleine and Alfred Boyson--was of course out of the question; the mere thought of that humiliating word "forgiveness" sent a tingle of pa.s.sion through her. But was there no third course?--something which might prove to all the world how full of resource and generosity a woman may be?

She pondered through some sleepless hours; and at last she saw her way plain.

Within a week she had left New York for Europe.

CHAPTER XII

The ship on which Daphne travelled had covered about half her course. On a certain June evening Mrs. Floyd, walking up and down the promenade deck, found her attention divided between two groups of her fellow-travellers; one taking exercise on the same deck as herself; the other, a family party, on the steerage deck, on which many persons in the first cla.s.s paused to look down with sympathy as they reached the dividing rail aft.

The group on the promenade deck consisted of a lady and gentleman, and a boy of seven. The elders walked rapidly; holding themselves stiffly erect, and showing no sign of acquaintance with anyone on board. The child dragged himself wearily along behind them, looking sometimes from side to side at the various people pa.s.sing by, with eyes no less furtive than his mother's. She was a tall and handsome woman, with extravagantly marine clothes and much false hair. Her companion, a bulky and ill-favoured man, glanced superciliously at the ladies in the deck chairs, bestowing always a more attentive scrutiny than usual on a very pretty girl, who was lying reading midway down, with a white lace scarf draped round her beautiful hair and the harmonious oval of her face.

Daphne, watching him, remembered that she had see him speaking to the girl--who was travelling alone--on one or two occasions. For the rest, they were a notorious couple. The woman had been twice divorced, after misdoings which had richly furnished the newspapers; the man belonged to a financial cla.s.s with which reputable men of business a.s.sociate no more than they are obliged. The ship left them severely alone; and they retaliated by a manner clearly meant to say that they didn't care a bra.s.s farthing for the ship.

The group on the steerage deck was of a very different kind. It was made up of a consumptive wife, a young husband and one or two children. The wife's malady, recently declared, had led to their being refused admission to the States. They had been turned back from the emigrant station on Ellis Island, and were now sadly returning to Liverpool. But the courage of the young and sweet-faced mother, the devotion of her Irish husband, the charm of her dark-eyed children, had roused much feeling in an idle ship, ready for emotion. There had been a collection for them among the pa.s.sengers; a Liverpool shipowner, in the first cla.s.s, had promised work to the young man on landing; the mother was to be sent to a sanatorium; the children cared for during her absence. The family made a kind of nucleus round which whatever humanity--or whatever imitation of it--there was on board might gather and crystallize. There were other mournful cases indeed to be studied on the steerage deck, but none in which misfortune was so attractive.

As she walked up and down, or sat in the tea room catching fragments of the conversation round her, Daphne was often secretly angered by the public opinion she perceived, favourable in the one case, hostile in the other. How ignorant and silly it was--this public opinion. As to herself, she was soon aware that a few people on board had identified her and communicated their knowledge to others. On the whole, she felt herself treated with deference. Her own version of her story was clearly accepted, at least by the majority; some showed her an unspoken but evident sympathy, while her wealth made her generally interesting. Yet there were two or three in whom she felt or fancied a more critical att.i.tude; who looked at her coolly, and seemed to avoid her. Bostonian Pharisees, no doubt!--ignorant of all those great expansions of the female destiny that were going forward.

The fact was--she admitted it--that she was abnormally sensitive. These moral judgments, of different sorts, of which she was conscious, floating as it were in the life around her, which her mind isolated and magnified, found her smarting and sore, and would not let her be. Her irritable pride was touched at every turn; she hardly knew why. She was not to be judged by anybody; she was her own defender and her own judge.

If she was no longer a symbolic and sympathetic figure--like that young mother among her children--she had her own claims. In the secrecy of the mind she fiercely set them out.

The days pa.s.sed, however, and as she neared the English sh.o.r.es her resistance to a pursuing thought became fainter. It was, of course, Boyson's astonishing appeal to her that had let loose the Avenging G.o.ddesses. She repelled them with scorn; yet all the same they hurtled round her. After all, she was no monster. She had done a monstrous thing in a sudden brutality of egotism; and a certain crude state of law and opinion had helped her to do it, had confused the moral values and falsified her conscience. But she was not yet brutalized. Moreover, do what she would, she was still in a world governed by law; a world at the heart of which broods a power austere and immutable; a power which man did not make, which, if he clash with it, grinds him to powder. Its manifestations in Daphne's case were slight, but enough. She was not happy, that certainly was clear. She did not suppose she ever would be happy again. Whatever it was--just, heroic, or the reverse--the action by which she had violently changed her life had not been a success, estimated by results. No other man had attracted her since she had cast Roger off; her youth seemed to be deserting her; she saw herself in the gla.s.s every morning with discontent, even a kind of terror; she had lost her child. And in these suspended hours of the voyage, when life floats between sky and sea, amid the infinity of weaves, all that she had been doing since the divorce, her public "causes" and triumphs, the adulations with which she had been surrounded, began to seem to her barren and futile. No, she was not happy; what she had done had not answered; and she knew it.

One night, a night of calm air and silvery sea, she hung over the ship's side, dreaming rather miserably. The ship, aglow with lights, alive with movement, with talk, laughter and music, glided on between the stars and the unfathomable depths of the mid-Atlantic. Nothing, to north and south, between her and the Poles; nothing but a few feet of iron and timber between her and the hungry gulfs in which the highest Alp would sink from sight. The floating palace, hung by Knowledge above Death, just out of Death's reach, suggested to her a number of melancholy thoughts and images. A touch of more than Arctic cold stole upon her, even through this loveliness of a summer night; she felt desperately unhappy and alone.

From the saloon came a sound of singing:

_"An die Lippen wollt' ich pressen Deine kleine weisse Hand, Und mit Thranen sie benetzen Deine kleine weisse Hand."_

The tears came to her eyes. She remembered that she, too, had once felt the surrender and the tenderness of love.

Then she brushed the tears away, angry with herself and determined to brood no more. But she looked round her in vain for a companion who might distract her. She had made no friends on board, and though she had brought with her a secretary and a maid, she kept them both at arm's length, and they never offered their society without an invitation.

What was she going to do? And why was she making this journey?

Because the injustice and absurdity of English law had distorted and besmirched her own perfectly legitimate action. They had given a handle to such harsh critics as Alfred Boyson. But she meant somehow to put herself right; and not only herself, but the great cause of woman's freedom and independence. No woman, in the better future that is coming, shall be forced either by law or opinion to continue the relations of marriage with a man she has come to despise. Marriage is merely proclaimed love; and if love fails, marriage has no further meaning or _raison d'etre_; it comes, or should come, automatically to an end. This is the first article in the woman's charter, and without it marriage itself has neither value nor sanct.i.ty. She seemed to hear sentences of this sort, in her own voice, echoing about windy halls, producing waves of emotion on a sea of strained faces--women's faces, set and pale, like that of Madeleine Verrier. She had never actually made such a speech, but she felt she would like to have made it.

What was she going to do? No doubt Roger would resent her coming--would probably refuse to see her, as she had once refused to see him. Well, she must try and act with dignity and common sense; she must try and persuade him to recognize her good faith, and to get him to listen to what she proposed. She had her plan for Roger's reclamation, and was already in love with it. Naturally, she had never meant permanently to hurt or injure Roger! She had done it for his good as well as her own.

Yet even as she put this plea forward in the inner tribunal of consciousness, she knew that it was false.

_"You have murdered a life!"_ Well, that was what prejudiced and hide-bound persons like Alfred Boyson said, and no doubt always would say. She could not help it; but for her own dignity's sake, that moral dignity in which she liked to feel herself enwrapped, she would give as little excuse for it as possible.

Then, as she stood looking eastward, a strange thought struck her. Once on that farther sh.o.r.e and she would be Roger's wife again--an English subject, and Roger's wife. How ridiculous, and how intolerable! When shall we see some real comity of nations in these matters of international marriage and divorce?

She had consulted her lawyers in New York before starting; on Roger's situation first of all, but also on her own. Roger, it seemed, might take certain legal steps, once he was aware of her being again on English ground. But, of course, he would not take them. "It was never me he cared for--only Beatty!" she said to herself with a bitter perversity. Still the thought of returning within the range of the old obligations, the old life, affected her curiously. There were hours, especially at night, when she felt shut up with thoughts of Roger and Beatty--her husband and her child--just as of old.

How, in the name of justice, was she to blame for Roger's illness? Her irritable thoughts made a kind of grievance against him of the attack of pneumonia which she was told had injured his health. He must have neglected himself in some foolish way. The strongest men are the most reckless of themselves. In any case, how was it her fault?

One night she woke up suddenly, in the dawn, her heart beating tumultuously. She had been dreaming of her meeting--her possible meeting--with Roger. Her face was flushed, her memory confused. She could not recall the exact words or incidents of the dream, only that Roger had been in some way terrible and terrifying.