Part 31 (1/2)
”Madame, there is no commandment against being a fool.”
”Oh, you make me angry with your meekness!” Here Mrs. Falchion caught a twig from a tree by her, snapped it in her fingers, and petulantly threw its pieces to the ground. ”Suppose that the man had once loved you, and afterwards loved another--then again another?”
”Madame, that would be my great misfortune, but it might be no wrong in him.”
”How not a wrong in him?”
”It may have been my fault. There must be love in both--great love, for it to last.”
”And if the woman loved him not at all?”
”Where, then, could be the wrong in him?”
”And if he went from you,”--here her voice grew dry and her words were sharp,--”and took a woman from the depths of--oh, no matter what! and made her commit--crime--and was himself a criminal?”
”It is horrible to think of; but I should ask myself how much I was to blame.... What would you ask yourself, madame?”
”You have a strain of the angel in you, Justine. You would forgive Judas if he said, 'Peccavi.' I have a strain of Satan--it was born in me--I would say, You have sinned, now suffer.”
”G.o.d give you a softer heart,” said Justine, with tender boldness and sincerity.
At this Mrs. Falchion started slightly, and trouble covered her face.
She a.s.sumed, however, a tone almost brusque, artificially airy and unimportant.
”There, that will do, thank you.... We have become serious and incomprehensible. Let us talk of other things. I want to be gay....
Amuse me.”
Arrived at the hotel, she told Justine that she must not be disturbed till near dinner-time, and withdrew to her sitting-room. There she sat and thought, as she had never done in her life before. She thought upon everything that had happened since the day when she met Galt Roscoe on the 'Fulvia'; of a certain evening in England, before he took orders, when he told her, in retort to some peculiarly cutting remark of hers, that she was the evil genius of his life: that evening when her heart grew hard, as she had once said it should always be to him, and she determined again, after faltering many times, that just such a genius she would be; of the strange meeting in the rapids at the Devil's Slide, and the irony of it; and the fact that he had saved her life--on that she paused a while; of Ruth Devlin--and here she was swayed by conflicting emotions; of the scene at the mill, and Phil Boldrick's death and funeral; of the service in the church where she meant to mock him, and, instead, mocked herself; of the meeting with Tonga Sam; of all that Justine had said to her: then again of the far past in Samoa, with which Galt Roscoe was a.s.sociated, and of that first vow of vengeance for a thing he had done; and how she had hesitated to fulfil it year after year till now.
Pa.s.sing herself slowly back and forth before her eyes, she saw that she had lived her life almost wholly alone; that no woman had ever cherished her as a friend, and that on no man's breast had she ever laid her head in trust and love. She had been loved, but it had never brought her satisfaction. From Justine there was devotion; but it had, as she thought, been purchased, paid for, like the labour of a ploughboy.
And if she saw now in Justine's eyes a look of friends.h.i.+p, a note of personal allegiance, she knew it was because she herself had grown more human.
Her nature had been stirred. Her natural heart was struggling against her old bitterness towards Galt Roscoe and her partial hate of Ruth Devlin. Once Roscoe had loved her, and she had not loved him. Then, on a bitter day for him, he did a mad thing. The thing became--though neither of them knew it at the time, and he not yet--a great injury to her, and this had called for the sharp retaliation which she had the power to use. But all had not happened as she expected; for something called Love had been conceived in her very slowly, and was now being born, and sent, trembling for its timid life, into the world.
She closed her eyes with weariness, and pressed her hands to her temples.
She wondered why she could not be all evil or all good. She spoke and acted against Ruth Devlin, and yet she pitied her. She had the nettle to sting Roscoe to death, and yet she hesitated to use it. She had said to herself that she would wait till the happiest moment of his life, and then do so. Well, his happiest moment had come. Ruth Devlin's heart was all out, all blossomed--beside Mrs. Falchion's like some wild flower to the aloe.... Only now she had come to know that she had a heart.
Something had chilled her at her birth, and when her mother died, a stranger's kiss closed up all the ways to love, and left her an icicle.
She was twenty-eight years old, and yet she had never kissed a face in joy or to give joy. And now, when she had come to know herself, and understand what others understand when they are little children in their mother's arms, she had to bow to the spirit that denies. She drew herself up with a quiver of the body.
”O G.o.d!” she said, ”do I hate him or love him!” Her head dropped in her hands. She sat regardless of time, now scarcely stirring, desperately quiet. The door opened softly and Justine entered. ”Madame,” she said, ”pardon me; I am so sorry, but Miss Devlin has come to see you, and I thought--”
”You thought, Justine, that I would see her.” There was unmistakable irony in her voice. ”Very well.... Show her in.”
She rose, stretched out her arms as if to free herself of a burden, smoothed her hair, composed herself, and waited, the afternoon sun just falling across her burnished shoes, giving her feet of gold. She chanced to look down at them. A strange memory came to her: words that she had heard Roscoe read in church. The thing was almost grotesque in its a.s.sociation. ”How beautiful upon the mountains are the feet of him who bringeth glad tidings, who publisheth peace!”
Ruth Devlin entered, saying, ”I have come, to ask you if you will dine with us next Monday evening?”
Then she explained the occasion of the dinner party, and said: ”You see, though it is formal, I am asking our guests informally;” and she added as neutrally and as lightly as she could--”Mr. Roscoe and Dr. Marmion have been good enough to say that they will come. Of course, a dinner party as it should be is quite impossible to us simple folk, but when a lieutenant-governor commands, we must do the best we can--with the help of our friends.”