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The Woman Thou Gavest Me: Being the Story of Mary O'Neill, a novel by Hall Caine |
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Part 3. My Honeymoon - Chapter 36 |
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_ THIRD PART. MY HONEYMOON THIRTY-SIXTH CHAPTER There was a fire in the bedroom and I sat down in front of it. Many forces were warring within me. I was trying to fix my thoughts and found it difficult to do so. Some time passed. My husband's man came in with the noiseless step of all such persons, opened one of the portmanteaux and laid out his master's combs and brushes on the dressing table and his sleeping suit on the bed. A maid of the hotel followed him, and taking my own sleeping things out of the top tray of my trunk she laid them out beside my husband's. "Good-night, my lady," they said in their low voices as they went out on tiptoe. I hardly heard them. My mind, at first numb, was now going at lightning speed. Brought face to face for the first time with one of the greatest facts of a woman's life I was asking myself why I had not reckoned with it before. I had not even thought of it. My whole soul had been so much occupied with one great spiritual issue--that I did not love my husband (as I understood love), that my husband did not love me--that I had never once plainly confronted, even in my own mind, the physical fact that is the first condition of matrimony, and nobody had mentioned it to me or even hinted at it. I could not plead that I did not know of this condition. I was young but I was not a child. I had been brought up in a convent, but a convent is not a nursery. Then why had I not thought of it? While sitting before the fire, gathering together these dark thoughts, I was in such fear that I was always conscious of my husband's movements in the adjoining room. At one moment there was the jingling of his glass against the decanter, at another moment the smell of his cigarette smoke. From time to time he came to the door and called to me in a sort of husky whisper, asking if I was in bed. "Don't keep me long, little girl." I shuddered but made no reply. At last he knocked softly and said he was coming in. I was still crouching over the fire as he came up behind me. "Not in bed yet?" he said. "Then I must put you to bed." Before I could prevent him he had lifted me in his arms, dragged me on to his knee and was pulling down my hair, laughing as he did so, calling me by coarse endearing names and telling me not to fight and struggle. But the next thing I knew I was back in the sitting-room, where I had switched up the lights, and my husband, whose face was distorted by passion, was blazing out at me. "What do you mean?" he said. "I'm your husband, am I not? You are my wife, aren't you? What did you marry for? Good heavens, can it be possible that you don't know what the conditions of matrimony are? Is that what comes of being brought up in a convent? But has your father allowed you to marry without. . . . And your Aunt--what in God's name has the woman been doing?" I crossed towards the smaller bedroom intending to enter it, but my husband intercepted me. "Don't be a fool," he said, catching at my wrist. "Think of the servants. Think what they'd say. Think what the whole island would say. Do you want to make a laughing stock of both of us?" I returned and sat by the table. My husband lit another cigarette. Nervously flicking the ends off with the index finger of his left hand, and speaking quickly, as if the words scorched his lips, he told me I was mistaken if I supposed that he wanted a scene like this. He thought he could spend his time better. I was equally mistaken if I imagined that he had desired our marriage at all. Something quite different might have happened if he could have afforded to please himself. He had made sacrifices to marry me, too. Perhaps I had not thought of that, but did I suppose a man of his class wanted a person like my father for his father-in-law. And then my Aunt and my cousins--ugh! The Bishop, too! Was it nothing that a man had been compelled to make all those ridiculous declarations? Children to be brought up Catholics! Wife not to be influenced! Even to keep an open mind himself to all the muss and mummery of the Church! It wasn't over either. That seedy old "saint" was probably my confessor. Did any rational man want another man to come between him and his wife--knowing all he did and said, and everything about him? I was heart-sick as I listened to all this. Apparently the moral of it was that if I had been allowed to marry without being instructed in the first conditions of married life my husband had suffered a gross and shocking injustice. The disgust I felt was choking me. It was horribly humiliating and degrading to see my marriage from my husband's point of view, and when I remembered that I was bound fast to the man who talked to me like this, and that he could claim rights in me, to-night, to-morrow, as long as I lived, until death parted us, a wild impulse of impotent anger at everybody and everything made me drop my head on to the table and burst into tears. My husband misunderstood this, as he misunderstood everything. Taking my crying for the last remnant of my resistance he put his arms round my shoulders again and renewed his fondling. "Come, don't let us have any more conjugal scenes," he said. "The people of the hotel will hear us presently, and there will be all sorts of ridiculous rumours. If your family are rather common people you are a different pair of shoes altogether." He was laughing again, kissing my neck (in spite of my shuddering) and saying: "You really please me very much, you do indeed, and if they've kept you in ignorance, what matter? Come now, my sweet little woman, we'll soon repair that." I could bear no more. I _must_ speak and I did. Leaping up and facing round on him I told him my side of the story--how I had been married against my will, and had not wanted him any more than he had wanted me; how all my objections had been overruled, all my compunctions borne down; how everybody had been in a conspiracy to compel me, and I had been bought and sold like a slave. "But you can't go any farther than that," I said. "Between you, you have forced me to marry you, but nobody can force me to obey you, because I won't." I saw his face grow paler and paler as I spoke, and when I had finished it was ashen-white. "So that's how it is, is it?" he said, and for some minutes more he tramped about the room, muttering inaudible words, as if trying to account to himself for my conduct. At length he approached me again and said, in the tone of one who thought he was making peace: "Look here, Mary. I think I understand you at last. You have some other attachment--that's it, I suppose. Oh, don't think I'm blaming you. I may be in the same case myself for all you know to the contrary. But circumstances have been too strong for us and here we are. Well, we're in it, and we've got to make the best of it and why shouldn't we? Lots of people in my class are in the same position, and yet they get along all right. Why can't we do the same? I'll not be too particular. Neither will you. For the rest of our lives let each of us go his and her own way. But that's no reason why we should be strangers exactly. Not on our wedding-day at all events. You're a damned pretty woman and I'm. . . . Well, I'm not an ogre, I suppose. We are man and wife, too. So look here, we won't expect too much affection from each other--but let's stop this fooling and be good friends for a little while anyway. Come, now." Once more he took hold of me, as if to draw me back, kissing my hands as he did so, but his gross misinterpretation of my resistance and the immoral position he was putting me into were stifling me, and I cried: "No, I will not. Don't you see that I hate and loathe you?" There could be no mistaking me this time. The truth had fallen on my husband with a shock. I think it was the last thing his pride had expected. His face became shockingly distorted. But after a moment, recovering himself with a cruel laugh that made my hot blood run cold, he said: "Nevertheless, you shall do as I wish. You are my wife, and as such you belong to me. The law allows me to compel you and I will." The words went shrieking through and through me. He was coming towards me with outstretched arms, his teeth set, and his pupils fixed. In the drunkenness of his rage he was laughing brutally. But all my fear had left me. I felt an almost murderous impulse. I wanted to strike him on the face. "If you attempt to touch me I will throw myself out of the window," I said. "No fear of that," he said, catching me quickly in his arms. "If you do not take your hands off me I'll shriek the house down," I cried. That was enough. He let me go and dropped back from me. At the next moment I was breathing with a sense of freedom. Without resistance on my husband's part I entered the little bedroom to the left and locked the door behind me. _ |
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