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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 47 |
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_ THIRD PART. MY HONEYMOON 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. _ |
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