Complete works of hall c.., p.231
Complete Works of Hall Caine, page 231
“And do you think I should be afraid of that?” she said. “Indeed, no. If you were with me, Philip, and loved me still, I should not care for all the spirits of heaven itself.”
Her face was as pale as death now, but her great eyes were shining.
“Our love would fail us, Kate,” said Philip. “The sense of our guilt would kill it. How could we go on loving each other with a thing like that about us all day and all night — sitting at our table — listening to our talk — standing by our bed? Oh, merciful God!”
The terror of his vision mastered him, and he covered his face with both hands. She drew them down again and held them in a tight lock in her fingers. But the stony light of his eyes was more fearful to look upon, and she said in a troubled voice, “Do you mean, Philip, that we — could — not marry — now?”
He did not answer, and she repeated the question, looking up into his face like a criminal waiting for his sentence — her head bent forward and her mouth open.
“We cannot,” he muttered. “God help us, we dare not,” he said; and then he tried to show her again how their marriage was impossible, now that Pete had come, without treason and shame and misery. But his words frayed off into silence. He caught the look of her eyes, and it was like the piteous look of the lamb under the hands of the butcher.
“Is that what you came to tell me?” she asked.
His reply died in his throat. She divined rather than heard it.
Her doom had fallen on her, but she did not cry out. She did not yet realise in all its fulness what had happened. It was like a bullet-wound in battle; first a sense of air, almost of relief, then a pang, and then overwhelming agony.
They had been walking again, but she slid in front of him as she had done before. Her arms crept up his breast with a caressing touch, and linked themselves behind his neck.
“This is only a jest, dearest,” she said, “some test of my love, perhaps. You wished to make sure of me — quite, quite sure — now that Pete is alive and coming home. But, you see, I want only one to love me, only one, dear. Come, now, confess. Don’t be afraid to say you have been playing with me. I shan’t be angry with you. Come, speak to me.”
He could not utter a word, and she let her arms fall from his neck; and they walked on side by side, both staring out to sea. The English mountains were black by this time. A tempest was raging on the other shore, though the air on this side was as soft as human breath. .
Presently she stopped, her feet scraped the gravel, and she exclaimed in a husky tone, “I know what it is. It is not Pete. I am in your way. That’s it. You can’t get on with me about you. I am not fit for you. The distance between us is too great.”
He struggled to deny it, but he could not. It was part of the truth. He knew too well how near to being the whole truth it was. Pete had come at the last moment to cover up his conscience, but Kate was stripping it naked and showing him the skeleton.
“It’s all very well for you,” she cried, “but where am I? Why didn’t you leave me alone? Why did you encourage me? Yes, indeed, encourage me! Didn’t you say, though a woman couldn’t raise herself in life, a man could lift her up if he only loved her? And didn’t you tell me there was neither below nor above where there was true liking, and that if a woman belonged to some one, and some one belonged to her, it was God’s sign that they were equal, and everything else was nothing — pride was nothing and position was nothing and the whole world was nothing? But now I know different. The world is between us. It always has been between us, and you can never belong to me. You will go on and rise up, and I will be left behind.”
Then she broke into frightful laughter. “Oh, I have been a fool! How I dreamt of being happy! I knew I was only a poor ignorant thing, but I saw myself lifted up by the one I loved. And now I am to be left alone. Oh, it is awful! Why did you deceive me? Yes, deceive me! Isn’t that deceiving me? You deceived me when you led me to think that you loved me more than all the world. You don’t I It is the world itself you love, and Pete is only your excuse.”
As she spoke she clutched at his arms, his hands, his breast, and at her own throat, as if something was strangling her. He did not answer her reproaches, for he knew well what they were. They were the bitter cry of her great love, her great misery, and her great jealousy of the world — the merciless and mysterious power that was luring him away. After awhile his silence touched her, and she came up to him, full of remorse, and said, “No, no, Philip, you have nothing to reproach yourself with. You did not deceive me at all. I deceived myself. It was my own fault. I led you on — I know that. And yet I’ve been saying these cruel things. You’ll forgive me, though, will you not? A girl can’t help it sometimes, Philip. Are you crying? You are not crying, are you? Kiss me, Philip, and forgive me. You can do that, can’t you?”
She asked like a child, with her face up and her lips apart. He was about to yield, and was reaching forward to touch her forehead, when suddenly the child became the woman, and she leapt upon his breast, and held him fervently, her blood surging, her bosom exulting, her eyes flaming, and her passionate voice crying, “Philip, you are mine. No, I will not release you. I don’t care about your plans — you shall give them up. I don’t care about your trust — you shall break it. I don’t care about Pete coming — let him come. The world can do without you — I cannot. You are mine, Philip, and I am yours, and nobody else’s, and never will be. You must come back to me, sooner or later, if you go away. I know it, I feel it, it’s in my heart. But I’ll never let you go. I can’t, I can’t. Haven’t I a right to you? Yes, I have a right. Don’t you remember?... Can you ever forget?... My husband!”
The last word came muffled from his breast, where she had buried her head in the convulsions of her trembling at the moment when her modesty went down in the fierce battle with a higher pain. But the plea which seemed to give her the right to cling the closer made the man to draw apart. It was the old deep tragedy of human love — the ancient inequality in the bond of man and woman. What she had thought her conquest had been her vanquishment. He could not help, it — her last word had killed everything.
“Oh, God,” he groaned, “that is the worst of all.”
“Philip,” she cried, “what do you mean?”
“I mean that neither can I marry you, nor can you marry Pete. You would carry to him your love of me, and bit by bit he would find it out, and it would kill him. It would kill you, too, for you have called me your husband, and you could never, never, never forget it.”
“I don’t want to marry Pete,” she said. “If I’m not to marry you, I don’t want to marry any one. But do you mean that I must not marry at all — that I never can now that — —”
The word failed her, and his answer came thick and indistinct— “Yes.”
“And you, Philip? What about yourself?”
“As there is no other man for you, Kate,” he said, “so there is no other woman for me. We must go through the world alone.”
“Is this my punishment?”
“It is the punishment of both, Kate, the punishment of both alike.”
Kate stopped her breathing. Her clenched hands slackened away from his neck, and she stepped back from him, shuddering with remorse, and despair, and shame. She saw herself now for the first time a fallen woman. Never before had her sin touched her soul. It was at that moment she fell.
They had come up to the cave by this time, and she sat on the stone at the mouth of it in a great outburst of weeping. It tore his heart to hear her. The voice of her weeping was like the distressful cry of the slaughtered lamb. He had to wrestle with himself not to take her in his arms and comfort her. The fit of tears spent itself at length, and after a time she drew a great breath and was quiet. Then she lifted her face, and the last gleam of the autumn sun smote her colourless lips and swollen eyes. When she spoke again, it was like one speaking in her sleep, or under the spell of somebody who had magnetised her.
“It is wrong of me to think so much of myself, as if that were everything. I ought to feel sorry for you too. You must be driven to it, or you could never be so cruel.”
With his face to the sea, he mumbled something about Pete, and she caught up the name and said, “Yes, and Pete too. As you think it would be wrong to Pete, I will not hold to you. Oh, it will be wrong to me as well! But I will not give you the pain of turning a deaf ear to my troubles any more.”
She was struggling with a pitiless hope that perhaps she might regain him after all. “If I give him up,” she thought, “he will love me for it;” and then, with a sad ring in her voice, she said, “You will go on and be a great man now, for you’ll not have me to hold you back.”
“For pity’s sake, say no more of that,” he said, but she paid no heed.
“I used to think it a wonderful thing to be loved by a great man. I don’t now. It is terrible. If I could only have you to myself! If you could only be nothing to anybody else! You would be everything to me, and what should I care then?”
Between torture and love he had almost broken down at that, but he gripped his breast and turned half aside, for his eyes were streaming. She came up to him and touched with the tips of her fingers the hand that hung by his side, and said in a voice like a child’s, “Fancy! this is the end of everything, and when we part now we are to meet no more. Not the same way at all — not as we have met. You will be like anybody else to me, and I will be like anybody else to you. Miss Cregeen, that will be my name and you will be Mr. Christian. When you see me you’ll say to yourself, ‘Yes, poor thing; long ago, when she was a girl, I made her love me. Nobody ever loved me like that.’ And fancy! when you pass me in the street, you will not even look my way. You won’t, will you? No — no, it will be better not. Goodbye!”
Her simple tenderness almost stifled him. He had to hold his under lip with his teeth to keep back the cry that was bursting from his tongue. At last he could bear it no longer, and he broke out, “Would to God we had never loved each other! Would to God we had never met!”
But she answered with the same childish sweetness, “Don’t say that, Philip. We have had some happy hours together. I would rather be parted from you like this, though it is so hard, so cruel, than never to have met you at all. Isn’t it something for me to think of, that the truest, cleverest, noblest man in all the world has loved me?... Good-bye!... Good-bye!”
His heart bled, his heart cried, but he uttered no sound. They were side by side. She let his hand slip from the tips of her fingers, and drew silently away. At three paces apart she paused, but he gave no sign. She climbed the low brow of the hill slowly, very slowly, trying to command her throat, which was fluttering, and looking back through her tears as she went. Philip heard the shingle slip under her feet while she toiled up the cliff, and when she reached the top the soft thud on the turf seemed to beat on his heart. She stood there a moment against the sky, waiting for a sound from the shore, a cry, a word, the lifting of a hand, a sob, a sigh, her own name, “Kate,” and she was ready to fly back even then, wounded and humiliated as she was, a poor torn bird that had been struggling in the lime. But no; he was silent and motionless, and she disappeared behind the hill. He saw her go, and all the light of heaven went with her.
VIII.
It was so far back home, so much farther than it had been to come. The course is short and easy going out to sea when the tide is with you, and the water is smooth, and the sun is shining, but long and hard coming back to harbour, when the waves have risen, and the sky is low, and the wind is on your bow.
So far, so very far. She thought everybody looked at her, and knew her for what she was — a broken, forsaken, fallen woman. And she was so tired too; she wondered if her limbs would carry her.
When Philip was left alone, the sky seemed to be lying on his shoulders. The English mountains were grey and ghostly now, and the storm, which had spent itself on the other coast, seemed to hang over the island. There were breakers where the long dead sea had been, and the petrel outside was scudding close to the white curves, and uttering its dismal note.
So heavy and confused had the storm and wreck of the last hour left him, that he did not at first observe by the backward tail of smoke that the steamer had passed round the Head, and that the cart he had met at the mouth of the port had come back empty to the cave for another load of sea-wrack. The lobster-fisher, too, had beached his boat near by, and was shouting through the hollow air, wherein every noise seemed to echo with a sepulchral quake, “The block was going whistling at the mast-head. We’ll have a squall I was thinking, so in I came.”
That night Philip dreamt a dream. He was sitting on a dais with a wooden canopy above him, the English coat of arms behind, and a great book in front; his hands shook as he turned the leaves; he felt his leg hang heavily; people bowed low to him, and dropped their voices in his presence; he was the Deemster, and he was old. A young woman stood in the dock, dripping water from her hair, and she had covered her face with her hands. In the witness-box a young man was standing, and his head was down. The man had delivered the woman to dishonour; she had attempted her life in her shame and her despair. And looking on the man, the Deemster thought he spoke in a stern voice, saying, “Witness, I am compelled to punish her, but oh to heaven that I could punish you in her place! What have you to say for yourself?” “I have nothing to say for myself,” the young man answered, and he lifted his head and the old Deemster saw his face. Then Philip awoke with a smothered scream, for the young man’s face had been his own.
IX.
When Cæsar got to the quay, he looked about with watchful eyes, as if fearing he might find somebody there before him. The coast was clear, and he gave a grunt of relief. After fixing the horse-cloth, and settling the mare in a nose-bag, he began to walk up and down the fore part of the harbour, still keeping an eager look-out. As time went on he grew comfortable, exchanged salutations with the harbour-master, and even whistled a little to while away the time.
“Quiet day, Mr. Quayle.”
“Quiet enough yet, Mr. Cregeen; but what’s it saying? ‘The greater the calm the nearer the south wind.’”
By the time that Cæsar, from the end of the pier, saw the smoke of the steamer coming round Kirk Maughold Head, he was in a spiritual, almost a mournful, mood. He was feeling how melancholy was the task of going to meet the few possessions, the clothes and such like, which were all that remained of a dear friend departed. It was the duty of somebody, though, and Cæsar drew a long breath of resignation.
The steamer came up to the quay, and there was much bustle and confusion. Cæsar waited, with one hand on the mare’s neck, until the worst of it was over. Then he went aboard, and said in a solemn voice to the sailor at the foot of the gangway, “Anything here the property of Mr. Peter Quilliam?”
“That’s his luggage,” said the sailor, pointing to a leather trunk of moderate size among similar trunks at the mouth of the hatchway.
“H’m!” said Cæsar, eyeing it sideways, and thinking how small it was. Then, reflecting that perhaps valuable papers were all it was thought worth while to send home, he added cheerfully, “I’ll take it with me.”
Somewhat to Cæsar’s surprise, the sailor raised no difficulties, but just as he was regarding the trunk with that faith which is the substance of things hoped for, a big, ugly hand laid hold of it, and began to rock it about like a pebble.
It was Black Tom, smoking with perspiration.
“Aisy, man, aisy,” said Cæsar, with lofty dignity. “I’ve the gig on the quay.”
“And I’ve a stiff cart on the market,” said Black Tom.
“I’m wanting no assistance,” said Cæsar; “you needn’t trouble yourself.”
“Don’t mention it, Cæsar,” said Black Tom, and he turned the trunk on end and bent his back to lift it.
But Cæsar put a heavy hand on top and said, “Gough bless me, man, but I am sorry for thee. Mammon hath entered into thy heart, Tom.”
“He have just popped out of thine, then,” said Black Tom, swirling the trunk on one of its corners.
But Cæsar held on, and said, “I don’t know in the world why you should let the devil of covetousness get the better of you.”
“I don’t mane to — let go the chiss,” said Black Tom, and in another minute he had it on his shoulder.
“Now, I believe in my heart,” said Cæsar, “I would be forgiven a little violence,” and he took the trunk by both hands to bring it down again.
“Let go the chiss, or I’ll strek thee into the harbour,” bawled Black Tom under his load.
“The Philistines be upon thee, Samson,” cried Cæsar, and with that there was a struggle.
In the midst of the uproar, while the men were shouting into each other’s faces, and the trunk was rocking between them shoulder high, a sunburnt man, with a thick beard and a formidable voice, a stalwart fellow in a pilot jacket and wide-brimmed hat, came hurrying up the cabin-stairs, and a dog came running behind him. A moment later he had parted the two men, and the trunk was lying at his feet.
Black Tom fell back a step, lifted his straw hat, scratched his bald crown, and muttered in a voice of awe. “Holy sailor!”
Cæsar’s face was livid, and his eyes went up toward his forehead. “Lord have mercy upon me,” he mumbled; “have mercy on my soul, O Lord.”
“Don’t be afraid,” said the stranger. “I’m a living man and not a ghost.”
“The man himself,” said Black Tom.
“Peter Quilliam alive and hearty,” said Cæsar.
“I am,” said Pete. “And now, what’s the bobbery between the pair of you? Shuperintending the beaching of my trunk, eh?”
But having recovered from his terror at the idea that Pete was a spirit, Cæsar began to take him to task for being a living man. “How’s this?” said he. “Answer me, young man, I’ve praiched your funeral.”
