Prisoners Part 37

"Not for me," she said. "That is what I have long wished to tell you. It has been my great good fortune. Not at first--but after a time. I should never have known love--of that I am sure--unless it had been for you.

You were the only person who could waken it in me. The power to love is the great gift; to be permitted to know that marvel, to be allowed once in one's life to touch the infinite. Love opens all the doors. Some opened in pain, but they did open. I never knew, I never guessed until long after you had come into my life, and gone away again, how much I owed to you. Then I began to see, first in gleams, and then plainly.

Your momentary attraction towards me was a tiny spark of the Divine love, a sort of little lantern leading me home through the dark."

He stared at her amazed. Her transparency transfixed him. What is superficial is also often deep in clear natures such as Magdalen's, like a water lily whose stem goes down a long way.

"Love releases us from ourselves, our hard proud selves, and makes everything possible to flow in to us, happiness, peace, joy, grat.i.tude.

I thank G.o.d for having let me know you, for having made me love you. I might have missed it. I see others miss it. I might have gone through life not knowing. I might have had to bear the burden of life, without the one thing that makes it easy. I see other people toiling and moiling, and getting hopeless and miserable and exhausted till my heart aches for them. After the first I have never toiled, never grieved, never despaired. I have been sustained always. For there are not two kinds of love, Everard, but only one. The love of you is the cup of water, and the love of G.o.d is the well it is taken from.... You had better go now before anyone else comes in, but I want you to remember when you think of me that I bless and thank you, and am grateful to you.

I have been grateful for years."

She took his leaden hand in both of hers, and held it for a moment to her lips.

Lord Lossiemouth's face was pinched and aged. His hand fell out of hers.

Then his face became suddenly convulsed, frightful to behold, like that of a man being squeezed to death.

"I never loved you," he said in a fierce, suffocated voice. "I was a little in love with you, that was all, and that was not much. I soon got over it."

"I know," she said.

"I felt pain for a time. You were very beautiful, and you were the first. I was the same as you then. But I found other beautiful women. I took what I could get out of life, and out of women. I rubbed out my pain that way. It was not your father who parted us, it was myself. I would not own it, I was always bitter against him, but it was my fault.

I did not mean to work, and tie myself to an office stool: I had the chance, but I wanted to travel and see the world. It was not lack of means that parted us. I said a few minutes ago that it had been the only obstacle to our marriage, and your eyes dropped. You have known better all the time, but you wouldn't say. All these years I have put it down to that. But it was _not_. We were parted by lack of love."

"I know," she said again.

"On my side."

"It was not your fault. We can't love to order, or by our own will. It is a gift."

"Some of us can't love at all," he said fiercely. "That is about it. We have not got any room for it if--if it _is_ given us. It could not get a foothold. It was crowded out. I was often glad afterwards that I did not tie myself to you. _Glad!_ Do you hear, Magdalen? It left me free to--it did give me pain when I thought of you. I knew what I had done to you.

I used to tell myself that you gave me up very easily, that you did not really want me. But I knew in my heart that you did. But it only made me bitter, and I put the thought away. That time, it is ten years ago; good G.o.d! it is all so long ago, when you nearly died of scarlet fever in London, I heard of it by chance when you were at your worst, I was shocked, but I did not really care, for I had long ceased to want you. I used to visit a certain woman every day in that street, and I once asked her who the straw was down for, and she said it was for a 'Miss Magdalen Bellairs.' I was in love with her at the moment, if you can call it love. I have dragged myself through all kinds of sordid pa.s.sions since--we parted."

Tears of rage stood in his eyes. He looked at her through them. It seemed as if no wounding word under heaven would be left to say by the time he had finished.

"And I did not come back in order to make amends," he went on. "You know me very little if you think that. I came back solely out of pique. It was not those absurd letters which brought me, or held me back. It was another woman. I wanted to pay her out."

"I thought perhaps it was something like that," said Magdalen.

"It was a virtuous attachment this time. I am nearly forty. I am getting grey and stout. Young women have a difficulty in perceiving my existence. It was high time to settle, and to live on some attractive woman's money. There are thousands of women who must marry someone. So why not me? I found the attractive woman. I walked into love with her,"

he stammered with anger. "I regarded it as a const.i.tutional. But the attractive woman, though she liked me a little, weighed the pros and cons exactly as I had done, and decided not to take her const.i.tutional in my impecunious company. She refused me when I was poor, and _now_--now that I am rich--she is willing."

The harsh voice ceased suddenly. Magdalen looked for a moment at the savage, self-tortured face, and her heart bled.

"That is how I have treated you," he said, choking with pa.s.sion. "Now you know the truth of me--for the first time. That is the kind of man I am, hard and vindictive and selfish to the core: the man whom you have idealised, whom you have put on a pedestal all these years."

"I have known always the kind of man you were," she said steadily. "I never idealised you, as you call it. I loved you knowing the worst of you. Otherwise my love could not have endured through. A foolish idealism would have perished long ago."

"And then I come down here, on a sudden despicable impulse, intending to use you as a weapon to strike her with, not that she is worth striking, poor feeble pretty toy. And I encouraged myself in a thin streak of patronising sentiment for you. I wrote a little cursed sonnet in the train how old affection outlasts youthful pa.s.sion, like violets blooming in autumn. How loathsome! How incredibly base! And then, when my temper is aroused by your opposition, I am dastardly enough, heartless enough to try to humiliate you by shewing you those letters, to try to revenge myself on you. On you, Magdalen! On you! On you!"

She did not speak nor move. Her face was awed, as the face of one who watches beside the pangs of death or--birth.

Outside in the amber sunset a thrush piped.

"Magdalen," he said almost inarticulately, "you have never repulsed me.

Don't repulse me now, for I am very miserable. Don't pour your love into the sand any more. Give it me instead. I am dying of thirst. Give me to drink. You can live without me, but I can't live without you. I have tried--I have tried everything. I am not thinking of you, only of myself. I am only asking for myself, only impelled towards you by my own needs. Does not that prove to you that I am at last speaking the truth?

Does not that force you to believe me when I tell you that I want you more than anything in the world. I have wanted you all my life without knowing it. I don't want to make amends to you for the past. I want you yourself, for myself, as my wife. I swear to G.o.d if you won't marry me I will marry no one. You are the only woman I can speak to, the only one who does not fail, who holds on through thick and thin, the only one who has ever really wanted me. I daresay I shan't make you happy. I daresay I shall break your heart. G.o.d help me, I daresay I shall put my convenience before your happiness, my selfish whims before your health.

I have always put myself first. But risk it. Risk it, Magdalen. Take me back. Love me. For G.o.d's sake marry me."

Each looked into the other's bared soul.

Something in his desperate face which she had always sought for, which had always been missing from it--she found.

"I will," she said.

They made no movement towards each other. They had reached a spiritual nearness, a pa.s.sion of surrender each to each, which touch of hand or lip could only at that moment have served to lessen.

"You are not taking me out of pity? You are sure you can still love me a little?"

"More than in the early days," she said. "For you have not only come to me, Everard. You have come to yourself."

CHAPTER XXIX

Me, too, with mastering charm From husks of dead days freeing, The sun draws up to be warm And to bloom in this sweet hour.

The stem of all my being Waited to bear this flower.

--LAURENCE BINYON.

It would be hardly possible to describe the unholy, the unmeasured rejoicing to which Magdalen's engagement gave rise in her family. It is, perhaps, enough to say that the twenty years of her cheerful, selfless devotion to the domestic hearth had never won from her father and her two aunts anything like the admiring approval which her engagement at once elicited. The neighbourhood was interested. Lord Lossiemouth was a brilliant match for anyone (if you left out the man himself). The announcement read impressively in the _Morning Post_. The neighbours remembered that there had been a youthful attachment, an early engagement broken off owing to lack of means. And now it seemed the moment he was rich he had come flying back to cast his faithful heart once more at her feet. It was a real romance. Magdalen was considered an extraordinarily fortunate woman by the whole countryside, but Lord Lossiemouth was placed on a pedestal. What touching constancy. What beautiful fidelity. What a contrast to "most men." "Not one man in a hundred would have acted in that chivalrous manner," was the feminine verdict of Hampshire.

A wave of cheap sentiment overflowed the Bellairs family, in which Colonel Bellairs floated complacently like a piece of loose seaweed, and in which even Aunt Mary underwent a dignified undulation.

Bessie alone was unmoved.

"You said, 'Yes' too soon," she remarked to Magdalen in private. "I should never have thought you would be so lacking in true dignity. He goes away for fifteen years and I should not wonder a bit if he had thought of someone else in the interim for all you know to the contrary--men are like that--and then he just lounges in and says 'Marry me,' and you agree in a second. You might at any rate have made him wait for his answer till after tea. In my opinion you have made yourself cheap by such precipitate action. He thinks he has only got to ask, and he can have."

Magdalen did not answer.

"I don't understand you," continued the pained monitor. "I have always had a certain respect for you, Magdalen, and when he came back I supposed you would give in to him in time if he pressed you without intermission, and was constant for a considerable period--say a couple of years; but I never thought it possible you would collapse like this.

I fear you have not taken his character sufficiently into consideration.

If I were in your place I should be afraid that Everard would not allow my nature free scope, or take an interest in my mental development, and that the sacrifices which make domestic life tolerable might have to be all on my side. He is absolutely unworthy of you, and his nose is quite thick. I daresay you have not remarked it, but I did at once. And in my opinion he ought for his own good to have been made to _realise_ it.

Even Aunt Mary, though she says she entirely approves of the marriage, admits that you have shown too much eagerness."

Fortunately for Magdalen the interest of the neighbours, and even of her own family, was speedily diverted to another channel by the return of Wentworth and Michael to Barford. The enthusiastic welcome which Michael received from all cla.s.ses, and from distant families who had never evinced much cordiality to his elder brother, astonished Wentworth, touched him to the quick.

"I had no idea we had so many friends," he said repeatedly.