Captives - Бесплатная аудиокнига

CHAPTER III

THE TRIUMPH OF LIFE

Maggie, before she left London, had written both to Paul and Mr. Magnus giving them her new address. She had intended to see Magnus, but Martin's illness had absorbed her so deeply that she could not proceed outside it. She told him quite frankly that she was going down to Glebeshire with Martin and that she would remain with him there until he was well. She did not try to defend herself; she did not argue the case at all; she simply stated the facts.

Mr. Magnus wrote to her at once. He was deeply concerned, he did not chide her for what she had done, but he begged her to realise her position. She felt through every line of his letter that he disapproved of and distrusted Martin. His love for Maggie (and she felt that he had indeed love for her) made him look on Martin as the instigator in this affair. He saw Maggie, ignorant of the world, led away by a seducer from her married life, persuaded to embark upon what his own experience had taught him to be a dangerous, lonely, and often disastrous voyage. He had never heard of any good of Martin; he had been always in his view, idle, dissolute, and selfish. What could he think but that Martin had, most wickedly, persuaded her to abandon her safety?

She answered his letter, telling him in the greatest detail the truth. She told him that Martin had done all he could to refuse, that, had he not been so ill, he would have left her, that he had threatened her, again and again, with what he would do if she did not the him.

She showed him that it had been her own determination and absolute resolve that had created the situation—and she told him that she was happy for the first time in her life.

But his letter did force her to realise the difficulties of her position. In writing to Mrs. Bolitho she had spoken of herself as Martin's wife, and now when she was called "Mrs. Warlock" she tacitly accepted that, hating the deceit, but wishing for anything that might keep the situation tranquil and undisturbed. She asked Mrs. Bolitho to let her have a small room near the big one, telling her that Martin was so ill that he must be undisturbed at night. Then Mr. Magnus's letter arrived addressed to "Miss Cardinal," and she thought that Mrs. Bolitho looked at her oddly when she gave it to her. Martin's illness, too, seemed to disturb the household. He cried out in his dreams, his shouts waking the whole establishment. Bolitho, once, thinking that murder was being committed, went to his room, found him sitting up in bed, sweating with terror. He caught hold of Bolitho, flung his arms around him, would not let him go, urging him "not to help them, to protect him. They would catch him ... they would catch him. They would catch him."

The stout and phlegmatic farmer was himself frightened, sitting there on the bed, in his night-shirt, and "seeing ghosts" in the flickering light of the candle. Martin's conduct during the day was not reassuring. He had lost all his ferocity and bitterness; he was very quiet, speaking to no one, lying on a sofa that over-looked the moor, watching.

Mrs. Bolitho's really soft heart was touched by his pallor and weakness, but she could not deny that there was something queer here. Maggie almost wished that his old mood of truculence would return. She was terrified, too, of these night scenes, because they were so bad for his heart. The local doctor, a clever young fellow called Stephens, told her that he was recovering from the pneumonia, but that his heart was "dickey."

"Mustn't let anything excite him, Mrs. Warlock," he said.

There came then gradually over the old house and the village the belief that Martin was "fey." Mrs. Bolitho was in most ways a sensible, level-headed, practical woman, but like many of the inhabitants of Glebeshire, she was deeply superstitious. It was not so very many years since old Jane Curtis had been ducked in the St. Dreot's pond for a witch, and even now, did a cow fall sick or the lambs die, the involuntary thought in the Glebeshire "pagan mind" was to look for the "evil eye." But Mrs. Bolitho herself had had a very recent example in her own family of "possession." There had been her old grandfather, living in the farm with them, as hale and hearty a human of sixty-five years as you'd be likely to find in a day's march through Glebeshire. "He lost touch with them," as Mrs. Bolitho put it. In a night his colour failed him, his cheerful conversation left him, he could "do nought but sit and stare out o' window." A month later he died.

Martin had not been long at Borhedden before she came to her conclusions about him, told them to her James, and found that his slow but sure brains had come to the same decision. In the sense of the tragedy overhanging the poor young man she forgot to consider the possible impropriety of his relations with Maggie. He was removed at once from human laws and human judgment. He became "a creature of God" and was surrounded with something of the care and reverence with which the principal "softie" in the village was regarded.

It was not that Martin's behaviour was in any way odd. After a few days in the utter peace and quiet of the moor and farm he screamed no more at night. He was gentle and polite to every one, ate his meals, took little walks out on to the moor and into the village, but liked best to sit in front of the parlour window and look out on to the heath and grass, watching the shadows and the sunlight and the driving sheets of rain.

Mrs. Bolitho had a tender heart and Maggie shared in her superstitious pity. Looking back to her youth she had always thought Maggie a "wisht little thing." "Poor worm," what chance had she ever had with that great scandalous chap of a father? She saw her still in her shabby clothes trying to keep that dilapidated house together. No, what chance had she ever had? She was still a "wisht little thing."

Nor did it need very shrewd eyes to see how desperately devoted Maggie was to Martin. The sight of that touched the hearts of every human being in the farm. Not that Maggie was foolish; she did not hang about Martin all the time, she never, so far as Mrs. Bolitho could see, kissed him or fondled him, or was with him when he did not want her. She was not sentimental to him, not sighing nor groaning, nor pestering him to answer romantic questions. On the contrary, she was always cheerful, practical, and full of common sense, although she was sometimes forgetful, and was not so neat and tidy as Mrs. Bolitho would have wished. She always spoke as though Martin's recovery were quite certain, and Dr. Stephens told Mrs. Bolitho that he did not dare to speak the truth to her. "The chances against his recovery," Stephens said, "are about one in a hundred. He's been racketing about too long. Too much drink. But he's got something on his mind. That's really what's the matter with him."

Mrs. Bolitho was as naturally inquisitive as are most of her sex, and this knowledge that Martin was a doomed creature with a guilty conscience vastly excited her curiosity. What had the man done? What had been his relations with Maggie? Above all, did he really care for Maggie, or no? That was finally the question that was most eagerly discussed in the depths of the Bolitho bedchamber. James Bolitho maintained that he didn't care "that" for her; you could see plain enough, he asserted, when a man cared for a maid—there were signs, sure and certain, just as there were with cows and horses.

"You may know about cows and horses," said Mrs. Bolitho; "you're wrong about humans." The way that she put it was that Martin cared for Maggie but "couldn't get it out." "He doesn't want her to know it," she said.

"Why shouldn't he?" asked James.

"Now you're asking," said Mrs. Bolitho.

"Nice kind of courtin' that be," said James; "good thing you was a bit different, missus. Lovin' a lass and not speaking—shouldn't like!"

Mrs. Bolitho's heart grew very tender towards Maggie. Married or not, the child was in a "fiery passion of love." Nor was it a selfish passion, neither—wanted very little for herself, but only for him to get well. There was true romance here. Maggie, however, gave away no secrets. She had many talks with Mr. Bolitho: about the village, about the new parson, about Mrs. Bolitho's son, Jacob, now in London engineering, and the apple of her eye,—about many things but never about herself, the past history nor her feeling for Martin.

The girl never "let on" that she was suffering, and yet "suffering she must be." You could see that she was just holding herself "tight" like a wire. The strange intensity of her determination was beautiful but also dangerous. "If anything was to happen—" said Mrs. Bolitho. She saw Martin, too, many times, looking at Maggie in the strangest way, as though he were travelling towards some decision. He certainly was a good young man in his behaviour, doing now exactly what he was told, never angry, never complaining, and that, Mrs. Bolitho thought, was strange, because you could see in his eye that he had a will and a temper of his own, did he like to exercise them. After all, he himself was the merest boy, scarcely older than Jacob. She could, herself, see that he must have been a fine enough lad when he had his health—the breadth of his shoulders, the thick sturdiness of his shape, the strength of his thighs and arms. Her husband had seen the boy stripped, and had told her that he must have been a "lovely man." Drink and evil women—ay, they'd brought him down as they'd brought many another—and she thought of her Jacob in London with a catch at her heart. She stopped in her cooking and prayed there and then, upon her kitchen floor, that he might be kept safe from all harm.

Nearly every one in the village, of course, remembered Maggie, and they could not see that she was "any changed." "Cut 'er 'air short—London fashion" they supposed. They had liked her as a child and they liked her now. She was more cheerful and friendly, they thought, then she used to be.

Nevertheless all the village awaited, with deep interest, for what they felt would be a very moving climax. The young man was "fey." God had set His mark upon him, and nothing that any human being could do would save him. In old days they would have tried to come near him and touch him to snatch some virtue from the contact. They did not do that, but they felt when they had spoken to him that they had received some merit or advantage. The new parson came to call upon Martin and Maggie, but he got very little from his visit.

"Poor fellow," he said to his wife on his return. "His days are numbered, I fear."

To every one it was as though Martin and Maggie were enclosed in some world of their own. No one could come near them, no one could tell of what they were really thinking, of their hopes or fears, past or future.

"Only," as Mrs. Bolitho said to her husband, "one thing's certain, she do love 'im with all her heart and soul—poor lamb."

When Martin and Maggie had been at the farm about a fort-night, there came to St. Dreot's a travelling circus. This was a very small affair, but it came every year, and provided considerable excitement for the village population. There were also gipsies who came on the moor, and telling the fortunes of any who had a spare sixpence with which to cross their palms. The foreign and exotic colour that the circus and the gipsies brought into the village was exactly suited to the St. Dreot blood. Many centuries ago strange galleys had forced their way into bays and creeks of the southern coast, and soon dark strangers had penetrated across the moors and fields and had mingled with the natives of the plain. Scarcely an inhabitant of St. Dreot but had some dark colour in his blood, a gift from those Phoenician adventurers; scarcely an inhabitant but was conscious from time to time of other strains, more tumultuous passions, than the Saxon race could show.

This coming of the circus had in it, whether they knew it or no, something of the welcoming of their own people back to them again. They liked to see the elephant and the camel tread solemnly the uneven stones of the village street, they liked to hear the roar of the wild beasts at night when they were safe and warm in their own comfortable beds, they liked to have solemn consultations with the gipsy girls as to their mysterious destinies. The animals, indeed, were not many nor, poor things, were they, after many years' chains and discipline, very fierce—nevertheless they roared because they knew it was their duty so to do, and when the lion's turn came a notice was hung up outside his cage saying: "This is the Lion that last year, at Clinton, bit Miss Harper." There were also performing dogs, a bear, and two seals.

The circus was quite close to the farm.

"I do hope," said Mrs. Bolitho to Martin, "that the roaring of the animals won't disturb you."

It did not disturb him. He seemed to like it, and went out and stood there watching all the labours of the gipsies and the tent men, and even went into "The Green Boar" and drank a glass of beer with Mr. Marquis, the proprietor of the circus.

On the third day after their arrival there was a proper Glebeshire mist. It was a day, also, of freezing, biting cold, such a day as sometimes comes in of a Glebeshire May—cold that seems, in its damp penetration, more piercing than any frost.

The mist came rolling up over the moor in wreaths and spirals of shadowy grey, sometimes shot with a queer dull light as though the sun was fighting behind it to beat a way through, sometimes so dense and thick that standing at the door of the farm you could not see your hand in front of your face. It was cold with the chill of the sea foam, mysterious in its ever-changing intricacies of shape and form, lifting for a sudden instant and showing green grass and the pale spring flowers in the border by the windows, then charging down again with fold on fold of vapour thicker and thicker, swaying and throbbing with a purpose and meaning of its own. Early in the afternoon Mrs. Bolitho took a peep at her lodgers. She did not intend to spy—she was an honest woman—but she shared most vividly the curiosity of all the village about "these two queer ignorant children," as she called them. Standing in the bow-window of her own little parlour she could see the bow-window and part of the room on the opposite side of the house-door. Maggie and Martin stood there looking out into the mist. The woman could see Maggie's face, dim though the light was, and a certain haunting desire in it tugged at Mrs. Bolitho's tender heart. "Poor worm," she thought to herself, "she's longing for him to say something to her and he won't." They were talking. Then there was a pause and Martin turned away. Maggie's eyes passionately besought him. What did she want him to do—to say? Mrs. Bolitho could see that the girl's hands were clenched, as though she had reached, at last, the very limits of her endurance. He did not see. His back was half turned to her. He did not speak, but stood there drumming with his hands on the glass.

"Oh, I could shake him," thought Mrs. Bolitho's impatience. For a time Maggie waited, never stirring, her eyes fixed, her body taut.

Then she seemed suddenly to break, as though the moment of endurance was past. She turned sharply round, looking directly out of her window into Mrs. Bolitho's room—but she didn't see Mrs. Bolitho.

That good woman saw her smile, a strange little smile of defiance, pathos, loneliness, cheeriness defeated. She vanished from her window although he stood there. A moment later, in a coat and hat, she came out of the front door, stood for a moment on the outskirts of the mist looking about her, then vanished on to the moor.

"She oughtn't to be out in this," thought the farmer's wife. "It's dangerous."

She waited a little, then came and knocked on the door of the other sitting-room. She met Martin in the doorway.

"Oh, Mrs. Bolitho," he said, "I thought I'd go to the circus for half an hour."

"Very well, sir," she said.

He too disappeared. She sat in her kitchen all the afternoon busily mending the undergarments of her beloved James. But her thought were not with her husband. She could not get the picture of those two young things standing at the window facing the mist-drunk moor out of her head. The sense that had come to the farm with Martin's entry into it of something eerie and foreboding increased now with every tick of the heavy kitchen clock. She seemed to listen now for sounds and portents. The death-tick on the wall—was that foolish? Some men said so, but she knew better. Had she not heard it on the very night of her grandfather's death? She sat there and recounted to herself every ghost-story that, in the course of a long life, had come her way. The headless horseman, the coach with the dead travellers, the three pirates and their swaying gibbets, the ghost of St. Dreot's churchyard, the Wailing Woman of Clinton, and many, many others, all passed before her, making pale her cheek and sending her heart in violent beats up and down the scale.

The kitchen grew darker and darker. She let the underclothes lie upon her lap. Soon she must light the lamp, but meanwhile, before the oven she let her fancies overwhelm her, luxuriating in her terror.

Suddenly the kitchen-door was flung open. She started up with a cry. Martin stood there and in a voice, so new to her that she seemed never to have heard it before, he shouted, "Where's Maggie?"

She stood up in great agitation. He came towards her and she saw that his face was violent with agitation, with a kind of rage.

"Where's Maggie?" he repeated.

She saw that he was shaking all over and it was as though he did not know who she was.

"Maggie?" she repeated.

"My wife! My wife!" he cried, and he shouted it again as though he were proclaiming some fact to the whole world.

"She went out," said Mrs. Bolitho, "about three hours back I should think."

"Went out!" he stormed at her. "And in this?"

Then, before she could say another word, he was gone. It was in very truth like an apparition.

She sat there for some time staring in front of her, still shaken by the violence of his interruption. She went then to the kitchen-door and listened—not a sound in the house. She went farther, out through the passage to the hall-door. She opened it and looked out. A sea of driving mist, billowing and driving as though by some internal breeze, met her.

"Poor things," she said to herself. "They shouldn't be out in this." She shut the door and went back into the house. She called, "Jim! Jim! Where are you?" At last he came, stumping up from some mysterious labour in the lower part of the house.

"What is't?" he said, startled by her white face and troubled eyes.

"The two of them," she said, "have gone out on to the moor in this mist. It isn't safe."

"Whatever for?" he asked.

"How should I know? She went out first and now he's after her. 'Tisn't safe, Jim. You'd best follow them."

He didn't argue with her, being an obedient husband disciplined by many years of matrimony.

"Well, I'll go," he said slowly. "Best take William, though."

He went off in search of his man.

But Bolitho need not trouble. Half an hour later Maggie returned, stood in the sitting-room looking about her, took off her jacket and hat, then, pursuing her own thoughts, slowly put them on. She was then about to leave the room when the door burst open and Martin tumbled in. He stood at the doorway staring at her, his mouth open. "Why!" he stammered. "I thought ... I thought ... you were out—" She looked at him crossly.

"You shouldn't have gone out—an afternoon like this. If I'd been here—"

"Well, you weren't. You shouldn't have gone out either for the matter of that. And I was at the circus—a damned poor one too. Your things are soaking," he added, suddenly looking up at her. "You talk about me. You'd better go and change."

"I'm going out again," she said.

"Out again?"

"Yes ... There's a train at Clinton at seven. I'm catching that."

"A train?" He stared at her, completely bewildered.

"Yes. That's what I went out to get my head clear about. Martin, you've beaten me. After all these years you have. After all my fine speeches, too."

He began to drum on the window. He tried to speak casually.

"I haven't beaten you, Maggie."

"Yes, you have. I said you wouldn't be able to send me away. Well, you've managed to and in the only way you could—by your silence. You haven't opened your mouth for a fortnight. You're better now, too, and Mrs. Bolitho will look after you. I was determined to hang on to you, but I find I can't. I'm going back to London to get some work."

His hand dropped from the window. Then, with his head turned from her and his voice so low that she could scarcely hear the—

"No, Maggie, don't go."

She smiled across at him. "There's no need to be polite, Martin. We're both of us beyond that by this time. I'll come back if you really want me. You know that I always will, but at last, after all these years, I've found a scrap of self-respect. Here am I always bundling about—first the aunts, then you, then Paul, then you again, and nobody wanting me. I don't suppose," she said laughing, "that there can be anybody less wanted in the world. So I'm just going to look after myself now. It's quite time I did."

"But I want you," he said, his voice still very low. She looked up, her eyes lit as though with some sudden recognition.

"If you really mean that," she said, "say it again. If you don't mean it, don't humbug me. I won't be humbugged any more."

"I haven't humbugged you—ever," he answered. "You're the only person I've always been absolutely straight with. I've always, from the very beginning, told you to have nothing to do with me. It's more true than ever now. I've been trying ever since you came back to me in London to get you to leave me. But it's too late. I can't fight it any more ... I loved you all the time I was abroad. I oughtn't to have written to you, but I did. I came back to London with the one hope of seeing you, but determined not to."

"I loved you more than ever when you came into my lodging there, but I was sick and hadn't any money, besides all my other failings ... It's the only decent thing I've ever really tried to do, to keep you away from me, and now I've failed in that. When I came in and found you were gone this afternoon I thought I'd go crazy."

"I'm not going to struggle any more. If you go away I'll follow you wherever you go. I may as well try to give up keeping you out of it. It's like keeping myself out of it."

Slowly she took her hat and coat off again.

"Well, then," she said, "I'd better stay, I suppose."

He suddenly sat down, his face white. She came across to him.

She put her hand on his forehead.

"You'd better go to bed, Martin, dear. I'll bring your tea in."

He caught her hand. She knelt down, put her arms round him, and so they stayed, cheek to cheek, for a long time.

When he had gone to his room she sat in the arm-chair by the fire, her hands idly folded on her lap. She let happiness pour in upon her as water floods in upon a dried and sultry river-bed. She was passive, her tranquillity was rich and full, too full for any outward expression.

She was so happy that her heart was weighted down and seemed scarcely to beat. It was not, perhaps, the exultant happiness that she had expected this moment to bring her.

When, in after days, she looked back to that quiet half-hour by the fire she saw that it was then that she had passed from girlhood into womanhood. The first chapter of her life was, at that moment's laying of her hand on Martin's forehead, closed. The love for him that filled her so utterly was in great part maternal. It was to be her destiny to know the deep tranquil emotions of life rather than the passionate and transient. She was perhaps the more blessed in that.

Even now, at the very instant of her triumph, she deceived herself in nothing. There were many difficulties ahead for her. She had still to deal with Paul: Martin was not a perfect character, nor would he suddenly become one. Above all that strange sense of being a captive in a world that did not understand her, some one curious and odd and alien—that would not desert her. That also was true of Martin. It was true—strangely true—of so many of the people she had known—of the aunts, Uncle Mathew, Mr. Magnus, of Paul and of Grace, of Mr. Toms, and even perhaps of Thurston and Amy Warlock—all captives in a strange country, trying to find the escape, each in his or her own fashion, back to the land of their birth.

But the land was there. Just as the lion, whose roar very faintly she could hear through the thick walls, remembered in his cage the jungles and mountains of his happiness, so was she aware of hers. The land was there, the fight to get hack to it was real.

She smiled to herself, looking back on the years. Many people would have said that she had had no very happy time since that sudden moment of her father's death, but it did not seem to her, in retrospect, unhappy. There had been unhappy times, tragic times, but life was always bringing forward some magnificent moment, some sudden flash of splendour that made up for all the rest. How could you be bitter about people when you were all in the same box, all as ignorant, as blind, as eager to do well, as fallible, as brave, as mistaken?

The thoughts slipped dimly through her mind. She was too happy to trace them truly. She had never been one for conscious philosophy.

Nevertheless she did not doubt but that life was worth while, that there was something immortal in her, and that the battle was good to fight—but what it really came to was that she loved Martin, and that at last some one needed her, that she need never be lonely any more.

Mrs. Bolitho stepped in with the tea.

"I'll take it in to him," Maggie said, standing up and stretching out her arms for the tray.

The woman looked at her and gave a little "Ah!" of satisfaction, as though, at length, she saw in Maggie's eyes that for—which she had been searching.

"Why, I do believe," she said, "that walk's done 'ee good."

"I do believe," Maggie said, laughing, "it has."

Carrying the tray carefully she went through into Martin's room.