Complete works of hall c.., p.509
Complete Works of Hall Caine, page 509
I could not plead that I did not know of this condition. I was young but I was not a child. I had been brought up in a convent, but a convent is not a nursery. Then why had I not thought of it?
While sitting before the fire, gathering together these dark thoughts, I was in such fear that I was always conscious of my husband’s movements in the adjoining room. At one moment there was the jingling of his glass against the decanter, at another moment the smell of his cigarette smoke. From time to time he came to the door and called to me in a sort of husky whisper, asking if I was in bed.
“Don’t keep me long, little girl.”
I shuddered but made no reply.
At last he knocked softly and said he was coming in. I was still crouching over the fire as he came up behind me.
“Not in bed yet?” he said. “Then I must put you to bed.”
Before I could prevent him he had lifted me in his arms, dragged me on to his knee and was pulling down my hair, laughing as he did so, calling me by coarse endearing names and telling me not to fight and struggle.
But the next thing I knew I was back in the sitting-room, where I had switched up the lights, and my husband, whose face was distorted by passion, was blazing out at me.
“What do you mean?” he said. “I’m your husband, am I not? You are my wife, aren’t you? What did you marry for? Good heavens, can it be possible that you don’t know what the conditions of matrimony are? Is that what comes of being brought up in a convent? But has your father allowed you to marry without. . . . And your Aunt — what in God’s name has the woman been doing?”
I crossed towards the smaller bedroom intending to enter it, but my husband intercepted me.
“Don’t be a fool,” he said, catching at my wrist. “Think of the servants. Think what they’d say. Think what the whole island would say. Do you want to make a laughing stock of both of us?”
I returned and sat by the table. My husband lit another cigarette. Nervously flicking the ends off with the index finger of his left hand, and speaking quickly, as if the words scorched his lips, he told me I was mistaken if I supposed that he wanted a scene like this. He thought he could spend his time better. I was equally mistaken if I imagined that he had desired our marriage at all. Something quite different might have happened if he could have afforded to please himself.
He had made sacrifices to marry me, too. Perhaps I had not thought of that, but did I suppose a man of his class wanted a person like my father for his father-in-law. And then my Aunt and my cousins — ugh!
The Bishop, too! Was it nothing that a man had been compelled to make all those ridiculous declarations? Children to be brought up Catholics! Wife not to be influenced! Even to keep an open mind himself to all the muss and mummery of the Church!
It wasn’t over either. That seedy old “saint” was probably my confessor. Did any rational man want another man to come between him and his wife — knowing all he did and said, and everything about him?
I was heart-sick as I listened to all this. Apparently the moral of it was that if I had been allowed to marry without being instructed in the first conditions of married life my husband had suffered a gross and shocking injustice.
The disgust I felt was choking me. It was horribly humiliating and degrading to see my marriage from my husband’s point of view, and when I remembered that I was bound fast to the man who talked to me like this, and that he could claim rights in me, to-night, to-morrow, as long as I lived, until death parted us, a wild impulse of impotent anger at everybody and everything made me drop my head on to the table and burst into tears.
My husband misunderstood this, as he misunderstood everything. Taking my crying for the last remnant of my resistance he put his arms round my shoulders again and renewed his fondling.
“Come, don’t let us have any more conjugal scenes,” he said. “The people of the hotel will hear us presently, and there will be all sorts of ridiculous rumours. If your family are rather common people you are a different pair of shoes altogether.”
He was laughing again, kissing my neck (in spite of my shuddering) and saying:
“You really please me very much, you do indeed, and if they’ve kept you in ignorance, what matter? Come now, my sweet little woman, we’ll soon repair that.”
I could bear no more. I must speak and I did. Leaping up and facing round on him I told him my side of the story — how I had been married against my will, and had not wanted him any more than he had wanted me; how all my objections had been overruled, all my compunctions borne down; how everybody had been in a conspiracy to compel me, and I had been bought and sold like a slave.
“But you can’t go any farther than that,” I said. “Between you, you have forced me to marry you, but nobody can force me to obey you, because I won’t.”
I saw his face grow paler and paler as I spoke, and when I had finished it was ashen-white.
“So that’s how it is, is it?” he said, and for some minutes more he tramped about the room, muttering inaudible words, as if trying to account to himself for my conduct. At length he approached me again and said, in the tone of one who thought he was making peace:
“Look here, Mary. I think I understand you at last. You have some other attachment — that’s it, I suppose. Oh, don’t think I’m blaming you. I may be in the same case myself for all you know to the contrary. But circumstances have been too strong for us and here we are. Well, we’re in it, and we’ve got to make the best of it and why shouldn’t we? Lots of people in my class are in the same position, and yet they get along all right. Why can’t we do the same? I’ll not be too particular. Neither will you. For the rest of our lives let each of us go his and her own way. But that’s no reason why we should be strangers exactly. Not on our wedding-day at all events. You’re a damned pretty woman and I’m. . . . Well, I’m not an ogre, I suppose. We are man and wife, too. So look here, we won’t expect too much affection from each other — but let’s stop this fooling and be good friends for a little while anyway. Come, now.”
Once more he took hold of me, as if to draw me back, kissing my hands as he did so, but his gross misinterpretation of my resistance and the immoral position he was putting me into were stifling me, and I cried:
“No, I will not. Don’t you see that I hate and loathe you?”
There could be no mistaking me this time. The truth had fallen on my husband with a shock. I think it was the last thing his pride had expected. His face became shockingly distorted. But after a moment, recovering himself with a cruel laugh that made my hot blood run cold, he said:
“Nevertheless, you shall do as I wish. You are my wife, and as such you belong to me. The law allows me to compel you and I will.”
The words went shrieking through and through me. He was coming towards me with outstretched arms, his teeth set, and his pupils fixed. In the drunkenness of his rage he was laughing brutally.
But all my fear had left me. I felt an almost murderous impulse. I wanted to strike him on the face.
“If you attempt to touch me I will throw myself out of the window,” I said.
“No fear of that,” he said, catching me quickly in his arms.
“If you do not take your hands off me I’ll shriek the house down,” I cried.
That was enough. He let me go and dropped back from me. At the next moment I was breathing with a sense of freedom. Without resistance on my husband’s part I entered the little bedroom to the left and locked the door behind me.
THIRTY-SEVENTH CHAPTER
Some further time passed. I sat by the fireless grate with my chin in my hand. If the storm outside was still raging I did not hear it. I was listening to the confused sounds that came from the sitting-room.
My husband was pacing to and fro, muttering oaths, knocking against the furniture, breaking things. At one moment there was a crash of glass, as if he had helped himself to brandy and then in his ungovernable passion flung the decanter into the fire grate.
Somebody knocked at the sitting-room. It must have been a waiter, for through the wall I heard the muffled sound of a voice asking if there had been an accident. My husband swore at the man and sent him off. Hadn’t he told him not to come until he was rung for?
At length, after half an hour perhaps, my husband knocked at the door of my little room.
“Are you there?” he asked.
I made no answer.
“Open the door.”
I sat motionless.
“You needn’t be afraid. I’m not going to do anything. I’ve something to say.”
Still I made no reply. My husband went away for a moment and then came back.
“If you are determined not to open the door I must say what I’ve got to say from here. Are you listening?”
Sitting painfully rigid I answered that I was.
Then he told me that what I was doing would entitle him to annul our marriage — in the eyes of the Church at all events.
If he thought that threat would intimidate me he was mistaken — a wave of secret joy coursed through me.
“It won’t matter much to me — I’ll take care it won’t — but it will be a degrading business for you — invalidity and all that. Are you prepared for it?”
I continued to sit silent and motionless.
“I daresay we shall both be laughed at, but I cannot help that. We can’t possibly live together on terms like these.”
Another wave of joy coursed through me.
“Anyhow I intend to know before I leave the island how things are to be. I’m not going to take you away until I get some satisfaction. You understand?”
I listened, almost without breathing, but I did not reply.
“I’m think of writing a letter to your father, and sending Hobson with it in the car immediately. Do you hear me?”
“Yes.”
“Well, you know what your father is. Unless I’m much mistaken he’s not a man to have much patience with your semi-romantic, semi-religious sentiments. Are you quite satisfied?”
“Quite.”
“Very well! That’s what I’ll do, then.”
After this there was a period of quiet in which I assumed that my husband was writing his letter. Then I heard a bell ring somewhere in the corridor, and shortly afterwards there was a second voice in the sitting-room, but I could not hear the words that were spoken. I suppose it was Hobson’s low voice, for after another short interval of silence there came the thrum and throb of a motor-car and the rumble of india-rubber wheels on the wet gravel of the courtyard in front of the hotel.
Then my husband knocked at my door again.
“I’ve written that letter and Hobson is waiting to take it. Your father will probably get it before he goes to bed. It will be a bad break on the festivities he was preparing for the village people. But you are still of the same mind, I suppose?”
I did not speak, but I rose and went over to the window. For some reason difficult to explain, that reference to the festivities had cut me to the quick.
My husband must have been fuming at my apparent indifference, and I felt as if I could see him looking at me, passionate and proud.
“Between the lot of you I think you’ve done me a great injustice. Have you nothing to say?”
Even then I did not answer.
“All right! As you please.”
A few minutes afterwards I heard the motor-car turning and driving away.
The wind had fallen, the waves were rolling into the harbour with that monotonous moan which is the sea’s memory of a storm, and a full moon, like a white-robed queen, was riding through a troubled sky.
THIRTY-EIGHTH CHAPTER
The moon had died out; a new day had dawned; the sea was lying as quiet as a sleeping child; far out on the level horizon the sky was crimsoning before the rising sun, and clouds of white sea-gulls were swirling and jabbering above the rocks in the harbour below the house before I lay down to sleep.
I was awakened by a hurried knocking at my door, and by an impatient voice crying:
“Mary! Mary! Get up! Let me in!”
It was Aunt Bridget who had arrived in my husband’s automobile. When I opened the door to her she came sailing into the room with her new half-moon bonnet a little awry, as if she had put it on hurriedly in the dim light of early morning, and, looking at me with her cold grey eyes behind their gold-rimmed spectacles, she began to bombard me with mingled ridicule and indignant protest.
“Goodness me, girl, what’s all this fuss about? You little simpleton, tell me what has happened!”
She was laughing. I had hardly ever heard Aunt Bridget laugh before. But her vexation soon got the better of her merriment.
“His lordship’s letter arrived in the middle of the night and nearly frightened us out of our senses. Your father was for coming away straight, and it would have been worse for you if he had. But I said: ‘No, this is work for a woman, I’ll go,’ and here I am. And now tell me, what in the name of goodness does this ridiculous trouble mean?”
It was hard to say anything on such a subject under such circumstances, especially when so challenged, but Aunt Bridget, without waiting for my reply, proceeded to indicate the substance of my husband’s letter.
From this I gathered that he had chosen (probably to save his pride) to set down my resistance to ignorance of the first conditions of matrimony, and had charged my father first and Aunt Bridget afterwards with doing him a shocking injustice in permitting me to be married to him without telling me what every girl who becomes a wife ought to know.
“But, good gracious,” said my Aunt Bridget, “who would have imagined you didn’t know. I thought every girl in the world knew before she put up her hair and came out of short frocks. My Betsy did, I’m sure of that. And to think that you — you whom we thought so cute, so cunning. . . . Mary O’Neill, I’m ashamed of you. I really, really am! Why, you goose” (Aunt Bridget was again trying to laugh), “how did you suppose the world went on?”
The coarse ridicule of what was supposed to be my maidenly modesty cut me like a knife, but I could not permit myself to explain, so my Aunt Bridget ran on talking.
“I see how it has been. It’s the fault of that Reverend Mother at the convent. What sort of a woman is she? Is she a woman at all, I wonder, or only a piece of stucco that ought to be put up in a church corner! To think she could have you nine years and never say one word about. . . . Well, well! What has she been doing with you? Talking about the mysteries, I suppose — prayers and retreats and novenas, and the spiritual bridegroom and the rest of it, while all the while. . . . But you must put the convent out of your head, my girl. You are a married woman now. You’ve got to think of your husband, and a husband isn’t a spiritual bridegroom I can tell you. He’s flesh and blood, that’s what a husband is, and you can’t expect him to spend his time talking about eternity and the rosary. Not on his wedding-day, anyway.”
I was hot in my absurd embarrassment, and I dare say my face was scarlet, but Aunt Bridget showed me no mercy.
“The way you have behaved is too silly for anything. . . . It really is. A husband’s a husband, and a wife’s a wife. The wife has to obey her husband. Of course she has. Every wife has to. Some don’t like it. I can’t say that I liked it very much myself. But to think of anybody objecting. Why, it’s shocking! Nobody ever heard of such a thing.”
I must have flushed up to my forehead, for I became conscious that in my Aunt Bridget’s eyes there had been a kind of indecency in my conduct.
“But, come,” she said, “we must be sensible. It’s timidity, that’s what it is. I was a little timid myself when I was first married, but I soon got over it. Once get over your timidity and you will be all right. Sakes alive, yes, you’ll be as happy as the day is long, and before this time to-morrow you’ll wonder what on earth you made all this fuss about.”
I tried to say that what she predicted could never be, because I did not love my husband, and therefore . . . but my Aunt Bridget broke in on me, saying:
“Mary O’Neill, don’t be a fool. Your maiden days are over now, and you ought to know what your husband will do if you persist.”
I jumped at the thought that she meant he would annul our marriage, but that was not what she was thinking of.
“He’ll find somebody else — that’s what he’ll do. Serve you right, too. You’ll only have yourself to blame for it. Perhaps you think you’ll be able to do the same, but you won’t. Women can’t. He’ll be happy enough, and you’ll be the only one to suffer, so don’t make a fool of yourself. Accept the situation. You may not like your husband too much. I can’t say I liked the Colonel particularly. He took snuff, and no woman in the world could keep him in clean pocket handkerchiefs. But when a sensible person has got something at stake, she puts up with things. And that’s what you must do. He who wants fresh eggs must raise his own chickens, you know.”
Aunt Bridget ran on for some time longer, telling me of my father’s anger, which was not a matter for much surprise, seeing how he had built himself upon my marriage, and how he had expected that I should have a child, a son, to carry on the family.
“Do you mean to disappoint him after all he has done for you? It would be too silly, too stupid. You’d be the laughing-stock of the whole island. So get up and get dressed and be ready and willing to go with his lordship when he sails by this afternoon’s steamer.”
“I can’t,” I said.
“You can’t? You mean you won’t?”
“Very well, Auntie, I won’t.”
At that Aunt Bridget stormed at me for several minutes, telling me that if my stubborn determination not to leave the island with my husband meant that I intended to return home she might inform me at once that I was not wanted there and I need not come.
“I’ve enough on my hands in that house already, what with Betsy unmarried, and your father doing nothing for her, and that nasty Nessy MacLeod making up to him. You ungrateful minx! You are ruining everything! After all I’ve done for you too! But no matter! If you will make your bed I shall take care that you lie on it.”
