Mrs. Falchion Part 31

"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."

Mrs. Falchion was delighted, she said, and then they talked of trivial matters, Ruth smoothing out the folds of her riding-dress with her whip more earnestly, in preoccupation, than the act called for. At last she said, in the course of the formal talk: "You have travelled much?"

"Yes, that has been my lot," was the reply; and she leaned back in the gold-trimmed cane chair, her feet still in the belt of sunlight.

"I have often wished that I might travel over the ocean," said Ruth, "but here I remain--what shall I say?--a rustic in a bandbox, seeing the world through a pin-hole. That is the way my father puts it. Except, of course, that I think it very inspiring to live out here among wonderful mountains, which, as Mr. Roscoe says, are the most aristocratic of companions."

Some one in the next room was playing the piano idly yet expressively.

The notes of Il Trovatore kept up a continuous accompaniment to their talk, varying, as if by design, with its meaning and importance, and yet in singular contrast at times to their thoughts and words. It was almost sardonic in its monotonous persistence.

"Travel is not all, believe me, Miss Devlin," was the indolent reply.

"Perhaps the simpler life is the happier. The bandbox is not the worst that may come to one--when one is born to it. I am not sure but it is the best. I doubt that when one has had the fever of travel and the world, the bandbox is permanently habitable again."

Mrs. Falchion was keen; she had found her opportunity.

On the result of this duel, if Ruth Devlin but knew it, depends her own and another's happiness. It is not improbable, however, that something of this was in her mind. She s.h.i.+fted her chair so that her face was not so much in the light. But the belt of sunlight was broadening from Mrs.

Falchion's feet to her dress.

"You think not?" Ruth asked slowly.

The reply was not important in tone. Mrs. Falchion had picked up a paper knife and was bending it to and fro between her fingers.

"I think not. Particularly with a man, who is, we will say, by nature, adventurous and explorative. I think if, in some mad moment, I determined to write a novel, it should be of such a man. He flies wide and far; he sees all; he feeds on novelty; he pa.s.ses from experience to experience--liberal pleasures of mind and sense all the way. Well, he tires of Egypt and its flesh-pots. He has seen as he hurried on--I hope I am not growing too picturesque--too much of women, too many men. He has been unwise--most men are. Perhaps he has been more than unwise; he has made a great mistake, a social mistake--or crime--less or more.

If it is a small one, the remedy is not so difficult. Money, friends, adroitness, absence, long retirement, are enough. If a great one, and he is sensitive--and sated--he flies, he seeks seclusion. He is afflicted with remorse. He is open to the convincing pleasures of the simple and unadorned life; he is satisfied with simple people. The snuff of the burnt candle of enjoyment he calls regret, repentance. He gives himself the delights of introspection, and wishes he were a child again--yes, indeed it is so, dear Miss Devlin."

Ruth sat regarding her, her deep eyes glowing. Mrs. Falchion continued: "In short, he finds the bandbox, as you call it, suited to his renunciations. Its simplicities, which he thinks is regeneration, are only new sensations. But--you have often noticed the signification of a 'but,'" she added, smiling, tapping her cheek lightly with the ivory knife--"but the hour arrives when the bandbox becomes a prison, when the simple hours cloy. Then the ordinary incident is merely gauche, and expiation a bore.

"I see by your face that you understand quite what I mean.... Well, these things occasionally happen. The great mistake follows the man, and, by a greater misery, breaks the misery of the bandbox; or the man himself, hating his captivity, becomes reckless, does some mad thing, and has a miserable end. Or again, some one who holds the key to his mistake comes in from the world he has left, and considers--considers, you understand!--whether to leave him to work out his servitude, or, mercifully--if he is not altogether blind--permit him the means of escape to his old world, to the life to which he was born--away from the bandbox and all therein.... I hope I have not tired you--I am sure I have."

Ruth saw the full meaning of Mrs. Falchion's words. She realised that her happiness, his happiness--everything--was at stake. All Mrs.

Falchion's old self was battling with her new self. She had determined to abide by the result of this meeting. She had spoken in a half gay tone, but her words were not everything; the woman herself was there, speaking in every feature and glance. Ruth had listened with an occasional change of colour, but also with an outward pride to which she seemed suddenly to have grown. But her heart was sick and miserable. How could it be otherwise, reading, as she did, the tale just told her in a kind, of allegory, in all its warning, nakedness, and vengeance? But she detected, too, an occasional painful movement of Mrs. Falchion's lips, a kind of trouble in the face. She noticed it at first vaguely as she listened to the music in the other room; but at length she interpreted it aright, and she did not despair. She did not then follow her first impulse to show that she saw the real meaning of that speech, and rise and say, "You are insulting," and bid her good-day.

After all, where was the ground for the charge of insult? The words had been spoken impersonally. So, after a moment, she said, as she drew a glove from a hand slightly trembling: "And you honestly think it is the case: that one having lived such a life as you describe so unusually, would never be satisfied with a simple life?"

"My dear, never--not such a man as I describe. I know the world."

"But suppose not quite such an one; suppose one that had not been so--intense; so much the social gladiator; who had business of life as well,"--here the girl grew pale, for this was a kind of talk unfamiliar and painful to her, but to be endured for her cause,--"as well as 'the flesh-pots of Egypt;' who had made no wicked mistakes--would he necessarily end as you say?"

"I am speaking of the kind of man who had made such mistakes, and he would end as I say. Few men, if any, would leave the world for--the bandbox, shall I still say? without having a Nemesis."

"But the Nemesis need not, as you say yourself, be inevitable.

The person who holds the key of his life, the impersonation of his mistake--"

"His CRIMINAL mistake," Mrs. Falchion interrupted, her hand with the ivory knife now moveless in that belt of sunlight across her knees.

"His criminal mistake," Ruth repeated, wincing--"might not it become changed into mercy, and the man be safe?"

"Safe? Perhaps. But he would tire of the pin-hole just the same.... My dear, you do not know life."