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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 52 |
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_ FOURTH PART. I FALL IN LOVE FIFTY-SECOND CHAPTER My joy was short-lived. No sooner had I become aware that I loved Martin Conrad, than my conscience told me I had no right to do so. I was married, and to love another than my husband was sin. It would be impossible to say with what terror this thought possessed me. It took all the sunlight out of my sky, which a moment before had seemed so bright. It came on me like a storm of thunder and lightning, sweeping my happiness into the abyss. All my religion, everything I had been taught about the sanctity of the sacrament of marriage seemed to rise up and accuse me. It was not that I was conscious of any sin against my husband. I was thinking only of my sin against God. The first effect was to make me realise that it was no longer possible for me to speak to Martin about my husband and Alma. To do this now that I knew I loved him would be deceitful, mean, almost treacherous. The next effect was to make me see that all thought of a separation must now be given up. How could I accuse my husband when I was myself in the same position? If he loved another woman, I loved another man. In my distress and fright I saw only one means of escape either from the filthy burden to which I was bound or the consciousness of a sinful heart, and that was to cure myself of my passion. I determined to do so. I determined to fight against my love for Martin Conrad, to conquer it and to crush it. My first attempt to do this was feeble enough. It was an effort to keep myself out of the reach of temptation by refusing to see Martin alone. For three or four days I did my best to carry out this purpose, making one poor excuse after another, when (as happened several times a day) he came down to see me--that I was just going out or had just come in, or was tired or unwell. It was tearing my heart out to deny myself so, but I think I could have borne the pain if I had not realised that I was causing pain to him also. My maid, whose head was always running on Martin, would come hack to my room, after delivering one of my lying excuses, and say: "You should have seen his face, when I told him you were ill. It was just as if I'd driven a knife into him." Everybody seemed to be in a conspiracy to push me into Martin's arms--Alma above all others. Being a woman she read my secret, and I could see from the first that she wished to justify her own conduct in relation to my husband by putting me into the same position with Martin. "Seen Mr. Conrad to-day?" she would ask. "Not to-day," I would answer. "Really? And you such old friends! And staying in the same hotel, too!" When she saw that I was struggling hard she reminded my husband of his intention of asking Martin to dinner, and thereupon a night was fixed and a party invited. Martin came, and I was only too happy to meet him in company, though the pain and humiliation of the contrast between him and my husband and his friends, and the difference of the atmosphere in which he lived from that to which I thought I was doomed for ever, was almost more than I could bear. I think they must have felt it themselves, for though their usual conversation was of horses and dogs and race-meetings, I noticed they were silent while Martin in his rugged, racy poetic way (for all explorers are poets) talked of the beauty of the great Polar night, the cloudless Polar day, the midnight calm and the moonlight on the glaciers, which was the loveliest, weirdest, most desolate, yet most entrancing light the world could show. "I wonder you don't think of going back to the Antarctic, if it's so fascinating," said Alma. "I do. Bet your life I do," said Martin, and then he told them what he had told me on the launch, but more fully and even more rapturously--the story of his great scheme for saving life and otherwise benefiting humanity. For hundreds of years man, prompted merely by the love of adventure, the praise of achievement, and the desire to know the globe he lived on, had been shouldering his way to the hitherto inviolable regions of the Poles; but now the time had come to turn his knowledge to account. "How?" said my husband. "By putting himself into such a position," said Martin, "that he will be able to predict, six, eight, ten days ahead, the weather of a vast part of the navigable and habitable world--by establishing installations of wireless telegraphy as near as possible to the long ice-barrier about the Pole from which ice-floes and icebergs and blizzards come, so that we can say in ten minutes from the side of Mount Erebus to half the southern hemisphere, 'Look out. It's coming down,' and thus save millions of lives from shipwreck, and hundreds of millions of money." "Splendid, by Jove!" said Mr. Eastcliff. "Yes, ripping, by jingo!" said Mr. Vivian. "A ridiculous dream!" muttered my husband, but not until Martin had gone, and then Alma, seeing that I was all aglow, said: "What a lovely man! I wonder you don't see more of him, Mary, my love. He'll be going to the ends of the earth soon, and then you'll be sorry you missed the chance." Her words hurt me like the sting of a wasp, but I could not resist them, and when some days later Martin called to take me to the Geographical Society, where his commander, Lieutenant ---- was to give an account of their expedition, I could not find it in my heart to refuse to go. Oh, the difference of this world from that in which I had been living for the past six months! All that was best in England seemed to be there, the men who were doing the work of the world, and the women who were their wives and partners. The theatre was like the inside of a dish, and I sat by Martin's side on the bottom row of seats, just in front of the platform and face to face with the commander. His lecture, which was illustrated by many photographic lantern slides of the exploring party, (including the one that had been shown to me on the ship) was very interesting, but terribly pathetic; and when he described the hardships they had gone through in a prolonged blizzard on a high plateau, with food and fuel running low, and no certainty that they would ever see home again, I found myself feeling for Martin's hand to make sure that he was there. Towards the end the commander spoke very modestly of himself, saying he could never have reached the 87th parallel if he had not had a crew of the finest comrades that ever sailed on a ship. "And though they're all splendid fellows," he said, "there's one I can specially mention without doing any wrong to the rest, and that's the young doctor of our expedition--Martin Conrad. Martin has a scheme of his own for going down to the Antarctic again to make a great experiment in the interests of humanity, and if and when he goes I say, 'Good luck to him and God bless him!'" At these generous words there was much applause, during which Martin sat blushing like a big boy when he is introduced to the girl friends of his sister. As for me I did not think any speech could have been so beautiful, and I felt as if I could have cried for joy. When I got back to the hotel I _did_ cry, but it was for another reason. I was thinking of my father and wondering why he did not wait. "Why, why, why?" I asked myself. _ |
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