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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 4. I Fall In Love - Chapter 51 |
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_ FOURTH PART. I FALL IN LOVE FIFTY-FIRST CHAPTER During our first day in London my husband had many visitors, including Mr. Eastcliff and Mr. Vivian, who had much to tell and arrange about. I dare say a great many events had happened during our six months' absence from England; but the only thing I heard of was that Mr. Eastcliff had married his dancing-girl, that she had retired from the stage, and that her public appearances were now confined to the box-seat of a four-in-hand coach, which he drove from London to Brighton. This expensive toy he proposed to bring round to the hotel the following day, which chanced to be Derby Day, when a party was to be made up for the races. In the preparations for the party, Alma, who, as usual, attracted universal admiration, was of course included, but I did not observe that any provision was made for me, though that circumstance did not distress me in the least, because I was waiting for Martin's message. It came early next morning in the person of Martin himself, who, running into our sitting-room like a breath of wind from the sea, said his fellow officers were separating that day, each going to his own home, and their commander had invited me to lunch with them on their ship, which was lying off Tilbury. It did not escape me that my husband looked relieved at this news, and that Alma's face brightened as she said in her most succulent tones: "I should go if I were you, Mary. The breeze on the river will do you a world of good, dear." I was nothing loath to take them at their word, so I let them go off in their four-in-hand coach, a big and bustling party, while with a fast-beating heart I made ready to spend the day with Martin, having, as I thought, so much and such serious things to say to him. A steam launch from the ship was waiting for us at the Westminster Pier, and from the moment I stepped into it I felt like another woman. It was a radiant day in May, when the climate of our much-maligned London is the brightest and best, and the biggest city in the world is also the most beautiful. How I loved it that day! The sunlight, the moving river, the soft air of early summer, the passing panorama of buildings, old and new--what a joy it was to me I sat on a side seat, dipping my hand over the gunwale into the cool water, while Martin, with a rush of racy words, was pointing out and naming everything. St. Paul's was soon past, with the sun glistening off the golden cross on its dome; then London Bridge; then the Tower, with its Traitors' Gate; then the new Thames Bridge; and then we were in the region of the barges and wharfs and warehouses, with their colliers and coasting traders, and with the scum of coal and refuse floating on the surface of the stream. After that came uglier things still, which we did not mind, and then the great docks with the hammering of rivets and the cranking noise of the lightermen's donkey engines, loading and unloading the big steamers and sailing ships; and then the broad reaches of the river where the great liners, looking so high as we steamed under them, lay at anchor to their rusty cable-chains, with their port-holes gleaming in the sun like rows of eyes, as Martin said, in the bodies of gigantic fish. At last we came out in a fresh breadth of water, with marshes on either side and a far view of the sea, and there, heaving a little to the flowing tide, and with a sea-gull floating over her mizzen mast, lay Martin's ship. She was a wooden schooner, once a Dundee whaler called the _Mary_ but now re-christened the _Scotia_, and it would be silly to say how my eyes filled at sight of her, just because she had taken Martin down into the deep Antarctic and brought him safely back again. "She's a beauty, isn't she?" said Martin. "Isn't she?" I answered, and in spite of all my troubles I felt entirely happy. We had steamed down against a strong tide, so we were half an hour late for luncheon, and the officers had gone down to the saloon, but it was worth being a little after time to see the way they all leapt up and received me like a queen--making me feel, as I never felt before, the difference between the politeness of the fashionable idlers and the manners of the men who do things. "Holloa!" they cried. "Excuse us, won't you? We thought something had happened and perhaps you were not coming," said the commander, and then he put me to sit between himself and Martin. The strange thing was that I was at home in that company in a moment, and if anybody imagines that I must have been embarrassed because I was the only member of my sex among so many men he does not know the heart of a woman. They were such big, bronzed manly fellows with the note of health and the sense of space about them--large space--as if they had come out of the heroic youth of the world, that they set my blood a-tingling to look at them. They were very nice to me too, though I knew that I only stood for the womankind that each had got at home and was soon to go back to, but none the less it was delightful to feel as if I were taking the first fruits of their love for them. So it came to pass that within a few minutes I, who had been called insipid and was supposed to have no conversation, was chattering away softly and happily, making remarks about the things around me and asking all sorts of questions. Of course I asked many foolish ones, which made the men laugh very much; but their laughter did not hurt me the least bit in the world, because everybody laughed on that ship, even the sailors who served the dishes, and especially one grizzly old salt, a cockney from Wapping, who for some unexplained reason was called Treacle. It made me happy to see how they all deferred to Martin, saying: "Isn't that so, Doctor?" or "Don't you agree, Doctor?" and though it was strange and new to hear Martin (my "Mart of Spitzbergen") called "Doctor," it was also very charming. After luncheon was over, and while coffee was being served, the commander sent Treacle to his cabin for a photograph of all hands which had been taken when they were at the foot of Mount Erebus; and when it came I was called upon to identify one by one, the shaggy, tousled, unkempt, bearded, middle-aged men in the picture with the smart, clean-shaven young officers who sat round me at the table. Naturally I made shockingly bad shots, and the worst of them was when I associated Treacle with the commander, which made the latter rock in his seat and the former shake and shout so much that he spilled the coffee. "But what about the fourth man in the front row from the left?" asked the commander. "Oh, I should recognise him if I were blindfolded," I answered. "By what?" "By his eyes," I said, and after this truly Irish and feminine answer the men shrieked with laughter. "She's got you there, doc," cried somebody. "She has sure," said Martin, who had said very little down to that moment, but was looking supremely happy. At length the time came for the men to go, and I went up on deck to see them off by the launch, and then nobody was left on the ship except Martin and myself, with the cook, the cabin-boy and a few of the crew, including Treacle. I knew that that was the right time to speak, but I was too greedy of every moment of happiness to break in on it with the story of my troubles, so when Martin proposed to show me over the ship, away I went with him to look at the theodolites and chronometers and sextants, and sledges and skis, and the aeronautic outfit and the captive balloon, and the double-barrelled guns, and the place where they kept the petroleum and the gun cotton for blasting the ice, and the hold forward for the men's provisions in hermetically-sealed tins, and the hold aft for the dried fish and biscuit that were the food for the Siberian dogs, and the empty cage for the dogs themselves, which had just been sent up to the Zoo to be taken care of. Last of all he showed me his own cabin, which interested me more than anything else, being such a snug little place (though I thought I should like to tidy it up a bit), with his medical outfit, his books, his bed like a shelf, and one pretty photograph of his mother's cottage with the roses growing over it, that I almost felt as if I would not mind going to the Antarctic myself if I could live in such comfortable quarters. Two hours passed in this way, though they had flown like five minutes, when the cabin-boy came to say that tea was served in the saloon, and then I skipped down to it as if the ship belonged to me. And no sooner had I screwed myself into the commander's chair, which was fixed to the floor at the head of the narrow table, and found the tea-tray almost on my lap, than a wave of memory from our childhood came sweeping back on me, and I could not help giving way to the coquetry which lies hidden in every girl's heart so as to find out how much Martin had been thinking of me. "I'll bet you anything," I said, (I had caught Martin's style) "you can't remember where you and I first saw each other." He could--it was in the little dimity-white room in his mother's house with its sweet-smelling "scraas" under the sloping thatch. "Well, you don't remember what you were doing when we held our first conversation?" He did--he was standing on his hands with his feet against the wall and his inverted head close to the carpet. "But you've forgotten what happened next?" He hadn't--I had invited William Rufus and himself into bed, and they had sat up on either side of me. Poor William Rufus! I heard at last what had become of him. He had died of distemper soon after I was sent to school. His master had buried him in the back-garden, and, thinking I should be as sorry as he was for the loss of our comrade, he had set up a stone with an inscription in our joint names--all of his own inditing. It ran--he spelled it out to me--
How we laughed! We laughed at everything; we laughed at nothing; we laughed until we cried; but I have often thought since that this was partly because we knew in our secret hearts that we were always hovering on the edge of tragic things. Martin never once mentioned my husband or my marriage, or his letters to my father, the Bishop and Father Dan, which had turned out so terribly true; but we had our serious moments for all that, and one of them was when we were bending over a large chart which he had spread out on the table to show me the course of the ship through the Great Unknown, leaning shoulder to shoulder, so close that our heads almost touched, and I could see myself in his eyes as he turned to speak to me. "You were a little under the weather yesterday, shipmate--what was the cause of it?" he asked. "Oh, we . . . we can talk of that another time, can't we?" I answered, and then we both laughed again, goodness knows why, unless it was because we felt we were on the verge of unlocking the doors of each other's souls. Oh that joyful, wonderful, heart-swelling day! But no day ever passed so quickly. At half-past six Martin said we must be going back, or I should be late for dinner, and a few minutes afterwards we were in the launch, which had returned to fetch us. I had had such a happy time on the ship that as we were steaming off I kissed my hand to her, whereupon Treacle, who was standing at the top of the companion, taking the compliment to himself, returned the salute with affectionate interest, which sent Martin and me into our last wild shriek of laughter. The return trip was just as delightful as the coming out had been, everything looking different the other way round, for the sunset was like a great celestial fire which had been lighted in the western sky, and the big darkening city seemed to have turned its face to it. Martin talked all the way back about a scheme he had afoot for going down to the region of the Pole again in order to set up some machinery that was to save life and otherwise serve humanity, and while I sat close up to him, looking into his flashing eyes--they were still as blue as the bluest sea--I said, again and again: "How splendid! How glorious! What a great, great thing it will be for the world." "Won't it?" he said, and his eyes sparkled like a boy's. Thus the time passed without our being aware how it was going, and we were back at Westminster Pier before I bethought me that of the sad and serious subject I had intended to speak about I had said nothing at all. But all London seemed to have been taking holiday that day, for as we drove in a taxi up Parliament Street streams of vehicles full of happy people were returning from the Derby, including costers' donkey carts in which the girls were carrying huge boughs of May blossom, and the boys were wearing the girls' feathery hats, and at the top of their lusty lungs they were waking the echoes of the stately avenue with the "Honeysuckle and the Bee."
It was Alma, with my husband's and Mr. Eastcliff's party back from the races, and as soon as we met on the pavement she began to pay me high compliments on my improved appearance. "Didn't I say the river air would do you good, dearest?" she said, and then she added something else, which would have been very sweet if it had been meant sweetly, about there being no surer way to make a girl beautiful than to make her happy. There was some talk of our dining together that night, but I excused myself, and taking leave of Martin, who gave my hand a gentle pressure, I ran upstairs without waiting for the lift, being anxious to get to my own room that I might be alone and go over everything in my mind. I did so, ever so many times, recalling all that had been said and done by the commander and his comrades, and even by Treacle, but above all by Martin, and laughing softly to myself as I lived my day over again in a world of dream. My maid came in once or twice, with accounts of the gorgeous Derby dinner that was going on downstairs, but that did not matter to me in the least, and as soon as I had swallowed a little food I went to bed early--partly in order to get rid of Price that I might go over everything again and yet again. I must have done so far into the night, and even when the wings of my memory were weary of their fluttering and I was dropping off at last, I thought I heard Martin calling "shipmate," and I said "Yes," quite loud, as if he had been with me still in that vague and beautiful shadow-land which lies on the frontier of sleep. How mysterious, how magical, how wonderful! Looking back I cannot but think it strange that even down to that moment I did not really know what was happening to me, being only conscious of a great flood of joy. I cannot but think it strange that, though Nature had been whispering to me for months, I did not know what it had been saying. I cannot but think it strange that, though I had been looking for love so long without finding it, I did not recognise it immediately when it had come to me of itself. But when I awoke early in the morning, very early, while the sunrise was filling my bedroom with a rosy flush, and the thought of Martin was the first that was springing from the mists of sleep to my conscious mind, and I was asking myself how it happened that I was feeling so glad, while I had so many causes for grief, then suddenly--suddenly as the sun streams through the cloud-scud over the sea--I knew that what had long been predestined had happened, that the wondrous new birth, the great revelation, the joyous mystery which comes to every happy woman in the world had come at last to me. I was in love. I was in love with Martin Conrad. _ |
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