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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 66 |
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_ FOURTH PART. I FALL IN LOVE SIXTY-SIXTH CHAPTER Next morning, Monday morning, while I was breakfasting in my bedroom, Price came with a message from Martin to say that he was going into the glen and wished to know if I would go with him. I knew perfectly what that meant. He wished to tell me what steps he intended to take towards my divorce, and my heart trembled with the thought of the answer I had to give him--that divorce for me, under any circumstances, was quite impossible. Sorry as I was for myself I was still more sorry for Martin. I felt like a judge who had to pronounce sentence upon him--dooming his dearest hopes to painful and instant death. I could hear him on the lawn with Tommy the Mate, laughing like a boy let loose from school, and when I went down to him he greeted me with a cry of joy that was almost heart-breaking. Our way to the glen was through a field of grass, where the dew was thick, and, my boots being thin, Martin in his high spirits wished to carry me across, and it was only with an effort that I prevented him from doing so. The glen itself when we reached it (it was called Glen Raa) was almost cruelly beautiful that day, and remembering what I had to do in it I thought I should never be able to get it out of my sight--with its slumberous gloom like that of a vast cathedral, its thick arch of overhanging boughs through which the morning sunlight was streaming slantwards like the light through the windows of a clerestory, its running water below, its rustling leaves above, and the chirping of its birds on every side, making a sound that was like the chanting of a choir in some far-off apse and the rumbling of their voices in the roof. Two or three times, as we walked down the glen towards a port (Port Raa) which lay at the seaward end of it. Martin rallied me on the settled gravity of my face and then I had to smile, though how I did so I do not know, for every other minute my heart was in my mouth, and never more so than when, to make me laugh, he rattled away in the language of his boyhood, saying: "Isn't this stunning? Splendiferous, eh?" When we came out at the mouth of the port, where a line of little stunted oaks leaned landward as with the memory of many a winter's storm, Martin said: "Let us sit down here." We sat on the sloping bank, with the insects ticking in the grass, the bees humming in the air, the sea fowl screaming in the sky, the broad sea in front, and the little bay below, where the tide, which was going out, had left behind it a sharp reef of black rocks covered with sea-weed. A pleasure-steamer passed at that moment with its flags flying, its awnings spread, its decks crowded with excursionists, and a brass hand playing one of Sousa's marches, and as soon as it had gone, Martin said: "I've been thinking about our affair, Mary, how to go to work and all that, and of course the first thing we've got to do is to get a divorce." I made no answer, and I tried not to look at him by fixing my eyes upon the sea. "You have evidence enough, you know, and if you haven't there's Price--she has plenty. So, since you've given me the right to speak for you, dear, I'm going to speak to your father first" I must have made some half-articulate response, for not understanding me he said: "Oh, I know he'll be a hard nut to crack. He won't want to hear what I've got to say, but he has got to hear it. And after all you're his daughter, and if he has any bowels of compassion . . ." Again I must have made some effort to speak, for he said: "Yes, he's ill, but he has only to set Curphy to work and the lawyer will do the rest." I could not allow him to go any further, so I blurted out somehow that I had seen my father already. "On this subject?" "Yes." "And what did he say?" I told him as well as I could what my father had said, being ashamed to repeat it. "That was only bluff, though," said Martin. "The real truth is that you would cease to be Lady Raa and that would be a blow to his pride. Then there would no longer be any possibility of establishing a family and that would disturb his plans. No matter! We can set Curphy to work ourselves." "But I have seen Mr. Curphy also," I said. "And what did _he_ say?" I told him what the lawyer had said and he was aghast. "Good heavens! What an iniquity! In England too! But never mind! There are other countries where this relic of the barbaric ages doesn't exist. We'll go there. We must get you a divorce somehow." My time had come. I could keep back the truth no longer. "But Martin," I said, "divorce is impossible for me--quite impossible." And then I told him that I had been to see the Bishop also, and he had said what I had known before, though in the pain of my temptation I had forgotten it, that the Catholic Church did not countenance divorce under any circumstances, because God made marriages and therefore no man could dissolve them. Martin listened intently, and in his eagerness to catch every word he raised himself to a kneeling position by my side, so that he was looking into my face. "But Mary, my dear Mary," he said, "you don't mean to say you will allow such considerations to influence you?" "I am a Catholic--what else can I do?" I said. "But think--my dear, dear girl, think how unreasonable, how untrue, how preposterous it all is in a case like yours? God made your marriage? Yours? God married you to that notorious profligate? Can you believe it?" His eyes were flaming. I dared not look at them. "Then think again. They say there's no divorce in the Catholic Church, do they? But what are they talking about? Morally speaking you are a divorced woman already. Anybody with an ounce of brains can see that. When you were married to this man he made a contract with you, and he has broken the terms of it, hasn't he? Then where's the contract now? It doesn't any longer exist. Your husband has destroyed it." "But isn't marriage different?" I asked. And then I tried to tell him what the Bishop had said of the contract of marriage being unlike any other contract because God Himself had become a party to it. "What?" he cried. "God become a party to a marriage like yours? My dear girl, only think! Think of what your marriage has been--the pride and vanity and self-seeking that conceived it, the compulsion that was put upon you to carry it through, and then the shame and the suffering and the wickedness and the sin of it! Was God a party to the making of a marriage like that?" In his agitation he rose, walked two or three paces in front and came back to me. "Then think what it means if your marriage may not be dissolved. It means that you must go on living with this man whose life is so degrading. Year in, year out, as long as your life lasts you must let him humiliate and corrupt you with his company, his companions and his example, until you are dragged down, down, down to the filth he lives in himself, and your very soul is contaminated. Is that what the Church asks of you?" I answered no, and tried to tell him what the Bishop had told me about separation, but he interrupted me with a shout. "Separation? Did he say that? If the Church has no right to divorce you what right has it to separate you? Oh, I see what it will say--hope of reconciliation. But if you were separated from your husband would you ever go back to him? Never in this world. Then what would your separation be? Only divorce under another name." I was utterly shaken. Perhaps I wanted to believe what Martin was saying; perhaps I did not know enough to answer him, but I could not help it if I thought Martin's clear mind was making dust and ashes of everything that Father Dan and the Bishop had said to me. "Then what can I do?" I asked. I thought his face quivered at that question. He got up again, and stood before me for a moment without speaking. Then he said, with an obvious effort-- "If your Church will not allow you to divorce your husband, and if you and I cannot marry without that, then . . ." "Yes?" "I didn't mean to propose it . . . God knows I didn't, but when a woman . . . when a woman has been forced into a loveless marriage, and it is crushing the very soul out of her, and the iron law of her Church will not permit her to escape from it, what crime does she commit if she . . ." "Well?" I asked, though I saw what he was going to say. "Mary," he said, breathing, hard and fast, "you must come to me." I made a sudden cry, though I tried not to. "Oh, I know," he said. "It's not what we could wish. But we'll be open about it. We'll face it out. Why shouldn't we? I shall anyway. And if your father and the Bishop say anything to me I'll tell them what I think of the abominable marriage they forced you into. As for you, dear, I know you'll have to bear something. All the conventional canting hypocrisies! Every man who has bought his wife, and every woman who has sold herself into concubinage--there are thousands and thousands of them all the world over, and they'll try . . . perhaps they'll try . . . but let them try. If they want to trample the life out of you they'll have to walk over me first--yes, by God they will!" "But Martin . . ." "Well?" "Do you mean that I . . . I am . . . to . . . to live with you without marriage?" "It's the only thing possible, isn't it?" he said. And then he tried to show me that love was everything, and if people loved each other nothing else mattered--religious ceremonies were nothing, the morality of society was nothing, the world and its back-biting was nothing. The great moment had come for me at last, and though I felt torn between love and pity I had to face it. "Martin, I . . . I can't do it," I said. He looked steadfastly into my face for a moment, but I dare not look back, for I knew he was suffering. "You think it would be wrong?" "Yes." "A sin?" I tried to say "Yes" again, but my reply died in my throat. There was another moment of silence and then, in a faltering voice that nearly broke me down, he said: "In that case there is nothing more to say. . . . There isn't, is there?" I made an effort to speak, but my voice would not come. "I thought . . . as there was no other way of escape from this terrible marriage . . . but if you think . . ." He stopped, and then coming closer he said: "I suppose you know what this means for you, Mary--that after all the degradation you have gone through you are shutting the door to a worthier, purer life, and that . . ." I could bear no more. My heart was yearning for him, yet I was compelled to speak. "But would it be a purer life, Martin, if it began in sin? No, no, it wouldn't, it couldn't. Oh, you can't think how hard it is to deny myself the happiness you offer me. It's harder than all the miseries my husband has inflicted upon me. But it wouldn't be happiness, because our sin would stand between us. That would always be there, Martin--every day, every night, as long as ever we lived. . . . We should never know one really happy hour. I'm sure we should not. I should be unhappy myself and I should make you unhappy. Oh, I daren't! I daren't! Don't ask me, I beg--I beseech you." I burst into tears after this, and there was a long silence between us. Then Martin touched my arm and said with a gentleness that nearly broke my heart: "Don't cry, Mary. I give in. I find I have no will but yours, dear. If _you_ can bear the present condition of things, I ought to be able to. Let us go back to the house." He raised me to my feet and we turned our faces homeward. All the brightness of the day had gone for both of us by this time. The tide was now far out. Its moaning was only a distant murmur. The shore was a stretch of jagged black rocks covered with sea-weed. _ |
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