Part 65 (1/2)
CHAPTER XVII
Margaret kept her promise to Freddy. During the three days which she spent with the Iretons nothing transpired to make it possible for her to break it. No word, either by letter or by native word of mouth, had arrived from Michael.
Even to Hada.s.sah's generous mind, Michael Amory's conduct seemed strange and inexplicable. His silence, in a manner, condemned him as casual, even if he was not guilty. She began to wonder if he had been carried off his feet by Millicent, if he had been weak and forgetful of Margaret for a little time. Millicent would certainly have done her best to deprive him of his higher instincts and ideals. If he had been faithless to Margaret, he was the type of man who would exaggerate the sin.
When she reviewed the situation calmly, she found that there was much to be said from Freddy Lampton's standpoint, and Margaret herself was growing more and more wounded by her lover's conduct--not so much by the fact that Millicent had been in the desert with him, for she knew the woman's persistence, but by the lack of effort which he had made to explain the situation to her. Even if he had allowed himself to be carried away by Millicent's wiles, she would have forgiven him, for Margaret was very human, and she was no fool. Never had she imagined that her lover was a saint. What she felt it harder and harder every day to forgive was his silence, his want of courage, his lack of trust.
During those three days Margaret's beautiful world and life seemed to have crumbled into dust, just as she had seen the unearthed objects in Egyptian tombs crumble into atoms when the first breath of air from the desert reached them. Her contact with the world of to-day had melted her romance of the desert into thin air. It was a beautiful vision which her strange life had created; it had flourished during her short stay in the Valley. It was not suited for the practical everyday world.
While she was with the Iretons, she tried to interest herself in Hada.s.sah's work as much as possible. She contrived very bravely to put aside her wretchedness and at least appear interested and eager.
Her dignity and self-control added greatly to Michael Ireton's admiration for her. He, too, had been struck by her resemblance to Hada.s.sah, so her beauty appealed to him very strongly.
Hada.s.sah and her husband allowed her to go home to England without protest. Cairo was becoming very hot for an English girl, and they both agreed that it might do Michael Amory good to learn, when he did turn up, that his conduct had hurt Margaret's pride, that she was seriously wounded. As Millicent had spoken to Margaret of Michael as being in robust health, they had banished the idea that his silence was due to illness.
Outwardly Margaret behaved as though the whole episode of her love-affair with Michael Amory was at an end. A woman's life is dog-eared by her love-affairs; this was the first in Margaret's book of life. To the Iretons she was always very insistent that there had been no formal engagement between them, that Michael had not allowed her to think of herself as bound to him in any way--for only one reason he had not considered himself justified in asking her to become his wife or to wait for him. This to the Iretons meant nothing. He had made Margaret love him--that was the essential point--and his sensibilities must have told him that with such a girl love was no light thing. He must have realized that Margaret had given him the one perfect gift in her possession, an unselfish love.
Margaret was very loyal to her lover. It was easy to be that, for in her super-senses she was convinced of his great love for her, as a thing apart from anything else. She found it wise to discuss the mystery of his silence less and less; for she knew that no one but G.o.d knows what is in our hearts, or what He has put there for our consolation, and that to all outward appearances things looked very black for Michael.
And so it came to pa.s.s that she sailed for England in the same boat as Freddy. He had hurried through his business and had managed to secure a pa.s.sage, so as to look after her and be a companion to her on her disconsolate voyage.
On the journey to Ma.r.s.eilles, Margaret discovered qualities in Freddy's character which, even with all her love for him, she had never imagined. For her sake he contrived to hide his anger at Michael for his treatment of her, and thus express a sympathetic understanding of the temptations which had beset him. If Margaret had not suffered, he would have ignored the affair altogether, as a matter which did not concern him. Freddy was very far-seeing. Margaret had kept her promise; she had shown that in spite of her romantic love for Michael her womanly pride had not been wanting. Any opposition or harsh denouncement of her lover would have brought out the obstinacy in her Lampton character. Persecution inflames the ardour of both love and religion. Margaret had confided to Freddy the true state of her feelings--her love was perhaps even greater than ever for the tardy Michael; jealousy had invigorated and reinforced it: but her pride and her love were wounded, and until Michael wrote to her or came to her, with a full and absolute apology and a good reason for his silence, she was determined not to play the part of a woman whose love would submit to any sort of casual treatment.
Freddy was well content. Time would settle things; Margaret was very young; she was scarcely aware yet of the possibilities that were in her own nature, of the things which can make life worth living, as apart from love and its pa.s.sions. Love had buried her under an avalanche of its mystery and revelations.
Their journey home was as uneventful as it was surprising, for summer on the Mediterranean, where there is no spring, opened Margaret's eyes to a new phase of Nature's beauty. There was so much to see, and Freddy was such an excellent companion, that the time pa.s.sed far more quickly and happily than Margaret could have believed possible. Did she know that it was the guarded light, which dispersed her brooding thoughts, thoughts which tried to spoil the beauty of the fairest scenes she had ever seen?
It was a voyage of solace and healing. As they sat together, the brother and sister, idly watching the spell of light resting on an archipelago of dreaming islands, or sailed out of the Bay of Naples on a morning of tender unreality, they little dreamed that in her womb the world was breeding a h.e.l.lish ma.s.sacre of G.o.d's highest creatures, a wholesale slaughter of His children; that that same summer's sun was to fall on fields of crimson, dyed with the blood of civilized nations, precious blood drawn from the veins of patriots and heroes by the lies and l.u.s.t of a war-mad king.
Ischia, lost in its ancient sleep, cradled in the beauty of the world's fairest waters, was to be waked with the bugles of war. From her mountain heights and her seagirt fields she was to send forth her sons, to fight until they became drunk with the smell of blood.
How little did either Margaret or Freddy dream that they were gazing for the last time together upon a land of dreams, upon a world of peace! As they sat and marvelled at a world which under a summer sun seemed as fair as heaven and as pure as an angel's dream, they little realized that Europe nursed and flattered a people more steeped in iniquity and eager for licentious cruelty than any nation recorded in the world's darkest story. The primitive barbarities of uncivilized races, and the war-atrocities of ancient Egypt and a.s.syria, which were familiar to Margaret, and against which Akhnaton had come to preach his mission of peace, were as nothing compared to the acts which were to be committed by a nation which had preached the mission of Jesus for a thousand years, and had carried His doctrines into the farthest corners of the earth.
In the years to come that journey from Alexandria to Ma.r.s.eilles was to be one of the greatest consolations of Margaret's life.
In the days to come, when Margaret, knowing all things and enduring all things, looked back upon the journey, it comforted her to think of how much Freddy had enjoyed his well-earned rest and how eagerly he had looked forward to his holiday in Scotland.
The war, which has set a date in England from which every event of importance counts and will be counted by her people for generations to come, had not been whispered or dreamed of by ordinary people. Like Ischia, England was still dreaming and trusting. Her ideals of honour forbade that she should doubt the honour of a sister-nation, bound to her by the closest ties of blood and sympathy.
When Freddy and Margaret landed in England they went their separate ways.
Margaret, at the outbreak of the war, at once offered her services as a V.A.D. Three months later she was working as a pantry-maid in a private hospital. Her work was very hard and deadly dull, but she had been promised that after working for a time as pantry-maid, she should be allowed to help in the wards. When Freddy left for the Front she was able to say good-bye during her ”two hours off.”
Fresh air and suns.h.i.+ne, after the dark bas.e.m.e.nt-pantry in which she worked, seemed to her sufficient enjoyment and all the pleasure she wanted. She seldom did anything in these hours but sit on a bench in the garden-square near her hospital and rest her tired feet. For the first month they were so swollen that she could not get on her walking shoes. By four o'clock she was back in her pantry again, setting out cups and saucers on little trays and laying the tea for the staff. Her work was lonely and unrecognized.
After she had washed up and put away the cups which had been used for afternoon tea and also the cups which had been used for the last meal of the day, which was served at seven o'clock in the wards, she went home to her quiet room, in a house on the other side of the square. It was an old house, which had known better days. The locality always carried Margaret's mind back to the gay world into whose society Becky Sharp so persistently pushed her way.
If Margaret was not happy, she was far too busy to be unhappy. She had, except for those two afternoon hours of rest, no time to think; and as thoughts make our heaven or our h.e.l.l, Margaret lived in an intermediate state, for she had none. Her physical tiredness dominated all other sensations.