Works of grant allen, p.462
Works of Grant Allen, page 462
Mariana drew a deep breath. “And such a mother!”
“She was all the mother we had,” I answered.
There was a long pause. Then Mariana began again, her soft chin sulky, and no longer dimpled. “You have not money enough to take you there,” she said coldly; “and I am happy to say I feel sure Mr. Stodmarsh will not care to supply you with any, for such a purpose.”
“That is true,” I replied. I had almost completed my trousseau and spent my thirty pieces of silver. Then I waited and reflected. “Mariana,” I said at last, “you have plenty. If you will not go yourself, at least assist me in doing what is for both of us a duty. Lend me ten pounds — to go and see our mother.” Mariana’s voice might have frozen the Thames. It was clear as a bell, and frigid. “I will not lend you one penny — to ruin both of us. All the world must hear of it, if you insist on going; and they will learn that my mother was a — well, was what we know her to have been. If I can prevent it, you shall never go. You will compromise yourself; and what is worse, you will compromise Me. I have my Future to think about.”
I rose from my seat and moved towards the door. “Where are you going?” she asked, rising and trying to intercept me.
“To mother,” I answered, with my fingers on the handle. “I cannot keep -away. I must go to her, instantly.”
“How will you get the money?”
“That is my affair, Mariana. You refuse to find it for me. I must raise it elsewhere.”
I descended the stairs, stumbling, and mounted my bicycle, which was waiting obedient at the door. After Mariana, it seemed quite sympathetic. As fast as I could make my sinuous way through the streams of close-packed traffic — cabs and omnibuses darting upon me from all sides — I hurried round to the Local Government Board. “Mr. Stodmarsh is engaged, Miss.”
“No matter.” I took out a card and wrote on it “Urgent,” thrice underlined. “I must see him at once. Give him that. I will wait for him.”
In a minute, I was ushered up into a small side-room, very scantily furnished. It had an orderly confusion of blue-books and papers on the table — as one might expect from John — and there John soon came to me. “Excuse this barn,” he said hastily, glancing round him at the neat red-tape-tied bundles. “I am busy to-day — very important State Papers to talk over with a Cabinet Minister. But I explained the nature of the interruption to Sir Andrew” — he glanced at my card—” and he kindly excused me for just three minutes. We both feared we knew the object of your visit — for we have seen the paper. I sympathise, dear Rosalba; but we must act with caution.
Your sister Mariana will, of course—”
“John,” I said, “I am going to her.”
“To Mariana?”
“No, to my mother!”
He gazed at me, stupefied. “My dear child,” he said at last, “it would be a fatal blunder.”
“I cannot help that!” I said, and then I told him how I felt, as I had told Mariana. He listened respectfully, but with disapproval growing visibly on his clean-shaven face each moment. When I had finished, he said with forced calm, “You must not go, Rosalba.”
“I am going, John.”
“I forbid it. Categorically.”
“I can’t let that weigh with me. This is a question of duty. John, I never asked you for money before; but I ask you now. I want money to go to my dying mother.”
“Rosalba, I grieve to refuse you anything; but I must protect you from yourself. More than that. You are not yet of age. By your mother’s express consent in writing, extracted from her that day at Miss Westmacott’s, I am your guardian.” His lips grew thinner as he spoke. “I stand to you therefore in loco parentis, and I forbid you to go to her.”
“John, there is a higher sanction that compels me to go.”
“No, Rosalba; if you insist upon going, you must understand the penalty.” His lips faded out. “On every ground, I forbid y»u — as your guardian, and as your future husband. Do you understand that? You are not to go to her.”
I bowed my head. “Very well, John,” I answered.
He grasped my hand, misunderstanding my “Very well.”
“That is right, dear,” he answered. “Now I must return to Sir Andrew. Let me see — what engagements have I this morning?” He consulted his note-book — he was the slave of notes. “Ah, I lunch at the Duddleswells’. At three, I go with Lady Duddleswell and Gwendoline to the Old Masters. Very well, then; at half-past four I will come to Linda’s to discuss this more fully with you.”
He glanced at his watch and bade me goodbye. “Good-bye, John,” I answered. I meant it. Then I went downstairs again.
I hardly knew what to do. Auntie was in Cambridge. She had gone to attend some social science congress or other grand talkee-talkee — I forget the particular name of it; she loved such frivolities. I could not wait. I must go off that afternoon by the club train to Dijon — Saint-André is a village about five miles off. I knew not where to turn. One thought alone possessed me now. By whatever means, I must go to my mother.
One chance remained. I mounted my bicycle and rode round to Dudu’s.
I rushed into his studio, hot and flushed, in a turmoil of excitement. He saw at once that something serious had occurred; and he set me down in an armchair and leaned towards me deferentially. I told him the whole story much as I have told it here — my visit to Mariana, the fatal telegram, Auntie’s absence, my interview with John, and the rest. When I finished and paused, crimson but proud, he laid his hand on my arm—” And you will allow me?” he cried eagerly.
“O Dudu! — I would allow you — anything!”
“Have I enough, I wonder?” he cried, opening his purse. “Dru, darling, is fifteen pounds sufficient? If not” — he glanced about him—” I could raise it — somehow.”
“It would be ample,” I said, “for the moment. When I get there, I may need more — in case she dies — to bury her. But that would do for the journey and hotels at least. O Dudu! how good of you!”
“And how good of you to let me! I should not have dared to ask you if you had not half suggested it. Dru, you are too kind to me. And — you will let me go with you?”
“No, Dudu,” I cried. “Impossible! What would everybody say? We cannot keep this thing quiet. It has got into the papers already. It will all come out now. I must go — alone — to her.”
“But — I can’t bear to let you go alone. May I not follow — at a respectful distance?”
I shook my head. “I am a born Bohemian,” I said; “and for myself and you, I trust you. But we have others to think of — John’s pride — and Auntie.” —
“When do you mean to start?”
“At once. This afternoon. Going home to pack a few things in a bag, if there is time. If not, just so, in the gown I am wearing.”
“And you will go alone — to this dreadful little village — among anarchists and what-not — alone and unprotected?”
“Oh, I am not afraid,” I answered. “Anarchists are my brethren. I was born anarchic. Remember, to me continental countries are not strange as they are to you English. I am quite at home in French and Italian. I can. take the people as they are. And I have lived on the road. Rough folk do not alarm me.” He held my hands. “Still, Dru” — he spoke wistfully—” if I might follow and take care of you!”
“Arthur,” I cried, “I see what you are thinking! You half mean to sneak after me.” He looked sheepish. “I did mean it,” he answered, like a schoolboy detected in a scrape. “I thought I would let you go, and then steal quietly after you.”
“Promise me you will not!” I cried earnestly. “It would be a great mistake. O Dudu, I beg of you, promise me, and keep your promise!” He struggled for a while; but I made him do as I said. At last he answered, “Well, Dru, I promise it.”
“That’s right, dear!” I cried. And I pressed his hand gently.
He bent forward. “Then I may, Dru? You are no longer John Stodmarsh’s.”
I waved him aside tenderly. “Not yet, dear,” I answered. “Not just now — not today — when my mother is dying.”
I rose to go. But I was faint with excitement; the ground reeled under me. I caught at a chair. “How white you are!” he cried.
“You must have a glass of wine!” And he fetched a decanter.
I seized his hand to check him. “No, no!” I cried. “Not that poison! You know I never touch it.”
“But, dearest, you are ill. You don’t mean to say you refuse it even now?”
“More than ever now!” I cried. “I know where it led her.”
CHAPTER XXII
AT SAINT-ANDRÉ
THE long night-journey across France to Dijon gave me abundance of time to consider my position. I dozed occasionally, it is true, propped up in one corner of the jolting carriage; but as every seat was fully occupied, after the fashion of the Paris-Lyon-Méditerranée, much sleep was impossible. I gazed blankly out of the window now and again at bare stretches of dimly lit hedgeless fields, interspersed with spectral rows of tall poplars fringing the long straight roads, and interrupted at times by the flashing red lights and pallid yellow gas-lamps of some country station, through which our train dashed, screaming, with phantasmagoric haste. Ghostly plains, threaded by dark rivers, which only the reflections of the stars revealed; parallel rows of lights seen from above as we shot through some town; black falls of woodland clinging to the hillsides. It was a weird journey — away from my home, my friends, my position, my prospects, all utterly left behind or destroyed or ruined, and on, on, on across the misty levels of that interminable dull plain with its faintly twinkling lights towards the doubtful goal of my dead or dying mother.
Should I reach her alive? — that was the chief question which agitated me as we whirled through the solemn gloom. Should I be in time to see her fortified by the last rites of the Church, anointed with the holy oil, strengthened for her last journey by the consecrated wafer? I clasped my hands now and then and prayed to that Heaven in which John Stodmarsh had done his best to shake my wavering faith, that I might still be in time to soothe the last moments of the mother I had never loved, the mother whose injustice had driven me forth upon the world in untimely childhood.
For the most part, that terrible doubt — was she living? was she dead? — filled my mind to the exclusion of every other idea. But now and again, in the course of my vigil, too, I had time by snatches to reflect upon my relations with John Stodmarsh and my position in the future.
Amid the gloom and solitude of that night ride — for though I was surrounded by fellow-travellers, I spoke to no one — light fell upon many things; I saw them more clearly in that outer darkness than I had seen them before. Especially it came home to me that my bargain with John Stodmarsh had been from the beginning a false and a bad one. It was never binding. I was too young to know; for no one, boy or girl, can realise what these promises mean before the coming on of the Great Awakening. But more than that; even if I had made such a covenant with my eyes open, as I made it with my eyes closed, it would have been wrong of me to fulfil it — untrue to myself, untrue to John, untrue above all to those that might afterward be born of us. You may call it unmaidenly to face that point; Miss Westmacott would have held it so; but I faced it none the less: for if one is born a woman, surely one holds the great and holy privilege of child-bearing in trust for humanity; and surely one must approach that God-given duty reverently and devoutly indeed, but bravely and frankly too, with full consciousness of its meaning. I faced it so that night, and something within me or without me bore in upon me the truth that to unite oneself to a man whom one does not love is treason to oneself and to one’s unborn babes — to unite oneself to a man whom one loves and trusts is a duty to oneself and to those who hereafter may call one mother.
Like Constantine’s cross in the sky, the truth flashed fiery on me. I saw that I had been misled by false ideals. This Juggernaut of honour toppled in its car. I was bound to John Stodmarsh — yes; but what was that formal obligation compared to the deeper and more primitive obligation to be true to myself, true to my own inmost ideals of purity, true to the instinct which bids us cleave to this man and reject that one — the instinct which tells for the good and improvement of humanity? My fetish disappeared. I had bowed down to it too long. To-night I broke it.
All this flashed upon me, I say, from within — or from without. Perhaps it was the voice of nature and of reason; perhaps it was direct monition from the Powers that are above us. And perhaps it was both; for may not both be one? — may not the Voice that speaks from within be the echo implanted in us of the Word without? I prayed for light: was not light vouchsafed me?
John Stodmarsh’s sense of dignity! Thank Heaven! John Stodmarsh’s sense of dignity had taken care of itself. I had not rejected him; he had rejected me. He could go about and say; “I meant to marry the girl, but fortunately, before I took that fatal step, she gravely disobeyed and displeased me. I have broken off the match, which was, after all, a most quixotic one. This waif of the highroad attracted me at first by the very oppositeness of her qualities to my own; I see now it is better for a man to marry in his own rank of life and among his own people.”
John Stodmarsh’s money! Yes, I owed John Stodmarsh the expenses of my education. But, in a sense, that was all. Pounds sterling can always be repaid by pounds sterling. And I had none. But I could earn them. Mariana was earning large sums; Pactolus flowed in upon her: and though I had not Mariana’s glorious soprano voice, yet I might say without vanity I was cleverer than Mariana — more varied, more original. I made up my mind in the train as we whirled, snorting lurid steam in the glow of the engine, across the dimly star-lit uplands of Burgundy, that I would set to work at once when I got back to London to earn my own living, and repay John Stodmarsh.
Then again, after all, his anger might be short-lived. When he saw I had disobeyed him and gone to my mother, he might change his mind and wish to forgive me — wish still to marry me. In that case, what? Thank God for the light! I saw more clearly now; and I resolved, if that were so, to refuse him. As clearly as I had felt my debt to him before, just so clearly did I feel my debt to myself now — my debt to my own soul — and my debt to Dudu.
Self-sacrifice is not always one’s highest duty. There are cases when it is even one’s worst moral enemy.
We pulled up at Dijon in the grey dawn. Weary with a sleepless night, I hired a fiacre at once and drove out through white mists of morning to Saint-André. Frost was in the air. Yellow leaves fluttered down from the trees upon the roadway.
A gendarme directed me to the house where la nommée Lupari lay, She might be dead; or she might not. The administration had not yet heard news this morning. Nobody else stirred. Blue smoke just curled here and there from a cottage chimney.
I found the squalid house; I entered the wretched room, alone and trembling. I was chilled with my drive. My mother lay on an ill-kept bed; I looked at her, holding my breath: she was still breathing. By her head knelt a sombre French priest with the holy elements. I was in time, then! I was in time! She opened her eyes and saw me.
“Have ye come, Mariana?” she asked in a feeble voice, but very excitedly. She stretched her wasted hand towards me. I took it in my own.
“No, not Mariana, Mother,” I answered. “Mariana was detained by her engagements in London. But I have come in her place. You know me, — Rosalba!”
She lifted herself in her bed with a convulsive gasp. Excitement seemed to choke her. “An’ is it Rosalba?” she cried, her face twitching with a stormy tumult of feeling. She shrank from me as she looked. “Mariana has shtopped away; an’ ye have come, Rosalba?”
“Yes, Mother,” I answered. “I have come. I could not keep away from you. Lie down and calm yourself.”
The curé interposed. He was a tall, thin man with an ascetic face, made more gloomy by the long, straight fall of his robes. It gave me a shudder to look at him. “She is dying, ma fille” he said. “She needs the consolations of religion. Not a word to distract her!”
“Not a word, mon pire? I answered. “I will not interrupt. Proceed with your office.”
“No, no!” my mother cried, struggling hard to speak, though scarcely able to do so. “I have something to confess. Something that I have kept hid from ye. I can’t die wid it on me sowl. Rosalba, Rosalba! ‘t was for the sake of that that I telegraphed to Mariana. Me child, me child—” She struggled hard to speak, but her words choked her. She fell back half insensible on the squalid pillow.
The priest looked across at me with surprised inquiry. “You are her daughter, mademoiselle?”
I nodded a painful assent. “Her daughter.”
He raised his eyebrows almost imperceptibly, but rearranged his sacerdotal dress as if my answer did not astonish him. “She has something on her mind,” he whispered. “Something that troubles her greatly. She speaks little French, but I can gather so much. She has kept asking at intervals all day yesterday whether you had yet arrived. It seems to me she wanted to tell you something which she believed would be of great service to you or relieve your mind from a serious burden. For that, I have delayed administering le bon dieu to her.”
“I think,” I answered, “it is more likely she wished to express regret for some part of her conduct. But that is needless now. If ever I have sustained any wrong at her hands, I forgive her freely. If ever I have wronged her, here, before God’s presence and before you, mon pire, I implore her forgiveness.”
She started up again at the words, and endeavoured to speak, but could not. She could only clasp my hand convulsively with a dying pressure.
Her eyes were growing glassy. “There is no time to lose, Father,” I said. “If you mean to administer the last rites of the Church, you must at once administer them.”
“So I think, my daughter,” he answered. And, kneeling by her bed, he proceeded with the solemn office.
She did not speak again. But her face grew calmer. We watched her till noon. Then her throat quivered a little; she opened her eyes once; her head fell back on the pillow.
“She was all the mother we had,” I answered.
There was a long pause. Then Mariana began again, her soft chin sulky, and no longer dimpled. “You have not money enough to take you there,” she said coldly; “and I am happy to say I feel sure Mr. Stodmarsh will not care to supply you with any, for such a purpose.”
“That is true,” I replied. I had almost completed my trousseau and spent my thirty pieces of silver. Then I waited and reflected. “Mariana,” I said at last, “you have plenty. If you will not go yourself, at least assist me in doing what is for both of us a duty. Lend me ten pounds — to go and see our mother.” Mariana’s voice might have frozen the Thames. It was clear as a bell, and frigid. “I will not lend you one penny — to ruin both of us. All the world must hear of it, if you insist on going; and they will learn that my mother was a — well, was what we know her to have been. If I can prevent it, you shall never go. You will compromise yourself; and what is worse, you will compromise Me. I have my Future to think about.”
I rose from my seat and moved towards the door. “Where are you going?” she asked, rising and trying to intercept me.
“To mother,” I answered, with my fingers on the handle. “I cannot keep -away. I must go to her, instantly.”
“How will you get the money?”
“That is my affair, Mariana. You refuse to find it for me. I must raise it elsewhere.”
I descended the stairs, stumbling, and mounted my bicycle, which was waiting obedient at the door. After Mariana, it seemed quite sympathetic. As fast as I could make my sinuous way through the streams of close-packed traffic — cabs and omnibuses darting upon me from all sides — I hurried round to the Local Government Board. “Mr. Stodmarsh is engaged, Miss.”
“No matter.” I took out a card and wrote on it “Urgent,” thrice underlined. “I must see him at once. Give him that. I will wait for him.”
In a minute, I was ushered up into a small side-room, very scantily furnished. It had an orderly confusion of blue-books and papers on the table — as one might expect from John — and there John soon came to me. “Excuse this barn,” he said hastily, glancing round him at the neat red-tape-tied bundles. “I am busy to-day — very important State Papers to talk over with a Cabinet Minister. But I explained the nature of the interruption to Sir Andrew” — he glanced at my card—” and he kindly excused me for just three minutes. We both feared we knew the object of your visit — for we have seen the paper. I sympathise, dear Rosalba; but we must act with caution.
Your sister Mariana will, of course—”
“John,” I said, “I am going to her.”
“To Mariana?”
“No, to my mother!”
He gazed at me, stupefied. “My dear child,” he said at last, “it would be a fatal blunder.”
“I cannot help that!” I said, and then I told him how I felt, as I had told Mariana. He listened respectfully, but with disapproval growing visibly on his clean-shaven face each moment. When I had finished, he said with forced calm, “You must not go, Rosalba.”
“I am going, John.”
“I forbid it. Categorically.”
“I can’t let that weigh with me. This is a question of duty. John, I never asked you for money before; but I ask you now. I want money to go to my dying mother.”
“Rosalba, I grieve to refuse you anything; but I must protect you from yourself. More than that. You are not yet of age. By your mother’s express consent in writing, extracted from her that day at Miss Westmacott’s, I am your guardian.” His lips grew thinner as he spoke. “I stand to you therefore in loco parentis, and I forbid you to go to her.”
“John, there is a higher sanction that compels me to go.”
“No, Rosalba; if you insist upon going, you must understand the penalty.” His lips faded out. “On every ground, I forbid y»u — as your guardian, and as your future husband. Do you understand that? You are not to go to her.”
I bowed my head. “Very well, John,” I answered.
He grasped my hand, misunderstanding my “Very well.”
“That is right, dear,” he answered. “Now I must return to Sir Andrew. Let me see — what engagements have I this morning?” He consulted his note-book — he was the slave of notes. “Ah, I lunch at the Duddleswells’. At three, I go with Lady Duddleswell and Gwendoline to the Old Masters. Very well, then; at half-past four I will come to Linda’s to discuss this more fully with you.”
He glanced at his watch and bade me goodbye. “Good-bye, John,” I answered. I meant it. Then I went downstairs again.
I hardly knew what to do. Auntie was in Cambridge. She had gone to attend some social science congress or other grand talkee-talkee — I forget the particular name of it; she loved such frivolities. I could not wait. I must go off that afternoon by the club train to Dijon — Saint-André is a village about five miles off. I knew not where to turn. One thought alone possessed me now. By whatever means, I must go to my mother.
One chance remained. I mounted my bicycle and rode round to Dudu’s.
I rushed into his studio, hot and flushed, in a turmoil of excitement. He saw at once that something serious had occurred; and he set me down in an armchair and leaned towards me deferentially. I told him the whole story much as I have told it here — my visit to Mariana, the fatal telegram, Auntie’s absence, my interview with John, and the rest. When I finished and paused, crimson but proud, he laid his hand on my arm—” And you will allow me?” he cried eagerly.
“O Dudu! — I would allow you — anything!”
“Have I enough, I wonder?” he cried, opening his purse. “Dru, darling, is fifteen pounds sufficient? If not” — he glanced about him—” I could raise it — somehow.”
“It would be ample,” I said, “for the moment. When I get there, I may need more — in case she dies — to bury her. But that would do for the journey and hotels at least. O Dudu! how good of you!”
“And how good of you to let me! I should not have dared to ask you if you had not half suggested it. Dru, you are too kind to me. And — you will let me go with you?”
“No, Dudu,” I cried. “Impossible! What would everybody say? We cannot keep this thing quiet. It has got into the papers already. It will all come out now. I must go — alone — to her.”
“But — I can’t bear to let you go alone. May I not follow — at a respectful distance?”
I shook my head. “I am a born Bohemian,” I said; “and for myself and you, I trust you. But we have others to think of — John’s pride — and Auntie.” —
“When do you mean to start?”
“At once. This afternoon. Going home to pack a few things in a bag, if there is time. If not, just so, in the gown I am wearing.”
“And you will go alone — to this dreadful little village — among anarchists and what-not — alone and unprotected?”
“Oh, I am not afraid,” I answered. “Anarchists are my brethren. I was born anarchic. Remember, to me continental countries are not strange as they are to you English. I am quite at home in French and Italian. I can. take the people as they are. And I have lived on the road. Rough folk do not alarm me.” He held my hands. “Still, Dru” — he spoke wistfully—” if I might follow and take care of you!”
“Arthur,” I cried, “I see what you are thinking! You half mean to sneak after me.” He looked sheepish. “I did mean it,” he answered, like a schoolboy detected in a scrape. “I thought I would let you go, and then steal quietly after you.”
“Promise me you will not!” I cried earnestly. “It would be a great mistake. O Dudu, I beg of you, promise me, and keep your promise!” He struggled for a while; but I made him do as I said. At last he answered, “Well, Dru, I promise it.”
“That’s right, dear!” I cried. And I pressed his hand gently.
He bent forward. “Then I may, Dru? You are no longer John Stodmarsh’s.”
I waved him aside tenderly. “Not yet, dear,” I answered. “Not just now — not today — when my mother is dying.”
I rose to go. But I was faint with excitement; the ground reeled under me. I caught at a chair. “How white you are!” he cried.
“You must have a glass of wine!” And he fetched a decanter.
I seized his hand to check him. “No, no!” I cried. “Not that poison! You know I never touch it.”
“But, dearest, you are ill. You don’t mean to say you refuse it even now?”
“More than ever now!” I cried. “I know where it led her.”
CHAPTER XXII
AT SAINT-ANDRÉ
THE long night-journey across France to Dijon gave me abundance of time to consider my position. I dozed occasionally, it is true, propped up in one corner of the jolting carriage; but as every seat was fully occupied, after the fashion of the Paris-Lyon-Méditerranée, much sleep was impossible. I gazed blankly out of the window now and again at bare stretches of dimly lit hedgeless fields, interspersed with spectral rows of tall poplars fringing the long straight roads, and interrupted at times by the flashing red lights and pallid yellow gas-lamps of some country station, through which our train dashed, screaming, with phantasmagoric haste. Ghostly plains, threaded by dark rivers, which only the reflections of the stars revealed; parallel rows of lights seen from above as we shot through some town; black falls of woodland clinging to the hillsides. It was a weird journey — away from my home, my friends, my position, my prospects, all utterly left behind or destroyed or ruined, and on, on, on across the misty levels of that interminable dull plain with its faintly twinkling lights towards the doubtful goal of my dead or dying mother.
Should I reach her alive? — that was the chief question which agitated me as we whirled through the solemn gloom. Should I be in time to see her fortified by the last rites of the Church, anointed with the holy oil, strengthened for her last journey by the consecrated wafer? I clasped my hands now and then and prayed to that Heaven in which John Stodmarsh had done his best to shake my wavering faith, that I might still be in time to soothe the last moments of the mother I had never loved, the mother whose injustice had driven me forth upon the world in untimely childhood.
For the most part, that terrible doubt — was she living? was she dead? — filled my mind to the exclusion of every other idea. But now and again, in the course of my vigil, too, I had time by snatches to reflect upon my relations with John Stodmarsh and my position in the future.
Amid the gloom and solitude of that night ride — for though I was surrounded by fellow-travellers, I spoke to no one — light fell upon many things; I saw them more clearly in that outer darkness than I had seen them before. Especially it came home to me that my bargain with John Stodmarsh had been from the beginning a false and a bad one. It was never binding. I was too young to know; for no one, boy or girl, can realise what these promises mean before the coming on of the Great Awakening. But more than that; even if I had made such a covenant with my eyes open, as I made it with my eyes closed, it would have been wrong of me to fulfil it — untrue to myself, untrue to John, untrue above all to those that might afterward be born of us. You may call it unmaidenly to face that point; Miss Westmacott would have held it so; but I faced it none the less: for if one is born a woman, surely one holds the great and holy privilege of child-bearing in trust for humanity; and surely one must approach that God-given duty reverently and devoutly indeed, but bravely and frankly too, with full consciousness of its meaning. I faced it so that night, and something within me or without me bore in upon me the truth that to unite oneself to a man whom one does not love is treason to oneself and to one’s unborn babes — to unite oneself to a man whom one loves and trusts is a duty to oneself and to those who hereafter may call one mother.
Like Constantine’s cross in the sky, the truth flashed fiery on me. I saw that I had been misled by false ideals. This Juggernaut of honour toppled in its car. I was bound to John Stodmarsh — yes; but what was that formal obligation compared to the deeper and more primitive obligation to be true to myself, true to my own inmost ideals of purity, true to the instinct which bids us cleave to this man and reject that one — the instinct which tells for the good and improvement of humanity? My fetish disappeared. I had bowed down to it too long. To-night I broke it.
All this flashed upon me, I say, from within — or from without. Perhaps it was the voice of nature and of reason; perhaps it was direct monition from the Powers that are above us. And perhaps it was both; for may not both be one? — may not the Voice that speaks from within be the echo implanted in us of the Word without? I prayed for light: was not light vouchsafed me?
John Stodmarsh’s sense of dignity! Thank Heaven! John Stodmarsh’s sense of dignity had taken care of itself. I had not rejected him; he had rejected me. He could go about and say; “I meant to marry the girl, but fortunately, before I took that fatal step, she gravely disobeyed and displeased me. I have broken off the match, which was, after all, a most quixotic one. This waif of the highroad attracted me at first by the very oppositeness of her qualities to my own; I see now it is better for a man to marry in his own rank of life and among his own people.”
John Stodmarsh’s money! Yes, I owed John Stodmarsh the expenses of my education. But, in a sense, that was all. Pounds sterling can always be repaid by pounds sterling. And I had none. But I could earn them. Mariana was earning large sums; Pactolus flowed in upon her: and though I had not Mariana’s glorious soprano voice, yet I might say without vanity I was cleverer than Mariana — more varied, more original. I made up my mind in the train as we whirled, snorting lurid steam in the glow of the engine, across the dimly star-lit uplands of Burgundy, that I would set to work at once when I got back to London to earn my own living, and repay John Stodmarsh.
Then again, after all, his anger might be short-lived. When he saw I had disobeyed him and gone to my mother, he might change his mind and wish to forgive me — wish still to marry me. In that case, what? Thank God for the light! I saw more clearly now; and I resolved, if that were so, to refuse him. As clearly as I had felt my debt to him before, just so clearly did I feel my debt to myself now — my debt to my own soul — and my debt to Dudu.
Self-sacrifice is not always one’s highest duty. There are cases when it is even one’s worst moral enemy.
We pulled up at Dijon in the grey dawn. Weary with a sleepless night, I hired a fiacre at once and drove out through white mists of morning to Saint-André. Frost was in the air. Yellow leaves fluttered down from the trees upon the roadway.
A gendarme directed me to the house where la nommée Lupari lay, She might be dead; or she might not. The administration had not yet heard news this morning. Nobody else stirred. Blue smoke just curled here and there from a cottage chimney.
I found the squalid house; I entered the wretched room, alone and trembling. I was chilled with my drive. My mother lay on an ill-kept bed; I looked at her, holding my breath: she was still breathing. By her head knelt a sombre French priest with the holy elements. I was in time, then! I was in time! She opened her eyes and saw me.
“Have ye come, Mariana?” she asked in a feeble voice, but very excitedly. She stretched her wasted hand towards me. I took it in my own.
“No, not Mariana, Mother,” I answered. “Mariana was detained by her engagements in London. But I have come in her place. You know me, — Rosalba!”
She lifted herself in her bed with a convulsive gasp. Excitement seemed to choke her. “An’ is it Rosalba?” she cried, her face twitching with a stormy tumult of feeling. She shrank from me as she looked. “Mariana has shtopped away; an’ ye have come, Rosalba?”
“Yes, Mother,” I answered. “I have come. I could not keep away from you. Lie down and calm yourself.”
The curé interposed. He was a tall, thin man with an ascetic face, made more gloomy by the long, straight fall of his robes. It gave me a shudder to look at him. “She is dying, ma fille” he said. “She needs the consolations of religion. Not a word to distract her!”
“Not a word, mon pire? I answered. “I will not interrupt. Proceed with your office.”
“No, no!” my mother cried, struggling hard to speak, though scarcely able to do so. “I have something to confess. Something that I have kept hid from ye. I can’t die wid it on me sowl. Rosalba, Rosalba! ‘t was for the sake of that that I telegraphed to Mariana. Me child, me child—” She struggled hard to speak, but her words choked her. She fell back half insensible on the squalid pillow.
The priest looked across at me with surprised inquiry. “You are her daughter, mademoiselle?”
I nodded a painful assent. “Her daughter.”
He raised his eyebrows almost imperceptibly, but rearranged his sacerdotal dress as if my answer did not astonish him. “She has something on her mind,” he whispered. “Something that troubles her greatly. She speaks little French, but I can gather so much. She has kept asking at intervals all day yesterday whether you had yet arrived. It seems to me she wanted to tell you something which she believed would be of great service to you or relieve your mind from a serious burden. For that, I have delayed administering le bon dieu to her.”
“I think,” I answered, “it is more likely she wished to express regret for some part of her conduct. But that is needless now. If ever I have sustained any wrong at her hands, I forgive her freely. If ever I have wronged her, here, before God’s presence and before you, mon pire, I implore her forgiveness.”
She started up again at the words, and endeavoured to speak, but could not. She could only clasp my hand convulsively with a dying pressure.
Her eyes were growing glassy. “There is no time to lose, Father,” I said. “If you mean to administer the last rites of the Church, you must at once administer them.”
“So I think, my daughter,” he answered. And, kneeling by her bed, he proceeded with the solemn office.
She did not speak again. But her face grew calmer. We watched her till noon. Then her throat quivered a little; she opened her eyes once; her head fell back on the pillow.
