The Sailor Part 71

She couldn't help smiling a little at this rather childlike confusion.

"... that you would marry me if I asked you. But I didn't, because I couldn't. Do you understand that? Do you still look at things in the way you did?"

The soul of a poor mariner might be tempest tossed on all the oceans of the world, but the soul of Mary Pridmore was the fixed star of his faith. The mere thought seemed to brace his courage for the task that honor laid upon him.

He took her hand. It was the only manifestation he would allow himself until he had told her.

"I could not ask you to marry me then," he said, "because I had a wife."

"You had a wife." She repeated the words numbly, incredulously.

"I had a wife," he said, doggedly. "She died two months ago."

"And ... and you never told me!"

"No."

There was an edge to her tone that had struck like a knife.

"Henry!"

"I tried," he said feebly. "G.o.d knows I tried."

"You don't mean you deceived me?" Her voice was hardening.

"No." A queer kind of faintness was coming over him. "I don't mean that. You never asked me and ... and I never told you."

"But you knew I took it for granted that you were not married."

The order and precision of her speech began to frighten him. He could give no answer.

"You knew that." Her voice was hurting him terribly.

"I don't say I didn't," he said. He had a sick feeling that he was already in the jaws of a trap. G.o.d in heaven, what madness had lured him to tell her when he had no need to do so!

"Then you deceived me." The voice was pitiless.

He looked at her with scared eyes.

"Don't say that," he said.

He saw there was a cold light blazing in her and he began to grow miserably afraid.

"I tried very hard not to deceive you," he said. "G.o.d knows I tried.

And it was because I couldn't go on with it that I went away and ...

and never meant to see you again."

"I don't quite think that is an excuse."

Somehow the words seemed to goad him on to unknown perils. But he was in a quicksand, the ground was moving under his feet.

"You don't know what my life has been," he said desperately. "You don't know what a wife I married, you don't know anything about me, else you wouldn't be so hard."

She realized while he was speaking, realized with a kind of nausea, which came suddenly upon her, that all he said was true. There was a peculiar note creeping into his voice that a.s.sailed her fastidious ears like a sudden descent to a subterranean region which she knew to exist, but of which she had never had first-hand knowledge. The subtle change of tone was telling her as nothing else could have done that it was perfectly true that she knew neither what his life had been nor anything about him.

"Mary." In spite of an intense feeling for him it was beginning to make her wince to hear her name on his lips. "If you don't mind I think I'll tell you one or two things about my life and ... and how I came ... to get married."

"I think perhaps I would rather not know." It was not she who said that. Long generations of Pridmores and Colthursts had suddenly taken charge and had answered for her.

It was a tone he had never heard her use, not even at the dinner party at which she had discussed the question of divorce. It was almost as if she had hit him a blow and yet without intending to deal one. By this time he had grown so dazed and frightened that he had begun to lose his head.

"The woman I married was not respectable, and that was why I didn't tell you."

She drew away from him a little. It was quite an involuntary action, but he felt it like a knife in the flesh. In sick desperation he floundered on, suddenly losing touch with all the small amenities of speech and manner he had so painfully imposed upon himself. Moreover, he realized the fact with pangs that were almost murderous. There were notes from the Blackhampton gutter beginning to strike through his voice.

"You don't know what my life has been," he said. "You don't know where I started from."

Again she made that involuntary movement, almost as if she felt that the mere tone was defiling her.

"You must let me tell you ... let me tell you all, if you don't mind.

It'll help you understand."

"I would rather you didn't." Again the Pridmores and the Colthursts were speaking.

He looked at her with a wildness that made her s.h.i.+ver. An intense pity for this man had suddenly begun to do battle with the Colthursts and the Pridmores. There was something in those eyes, as there always had been, that was almost beyond her power to meet.

"I never had a chance," he said, holding her in thrall with the voice she no longer recognized as his. "I've been handicapped out of the race. I'm going to tell you, Mary. It's not that I want your pity ...

I ask more than that. It's more than pity will bring a sailorman like me into port."

A kind of defiance of himself and of her had entered his tone. His words seemed to open a vein in her heart. She had a great compa.s.sion for this man, but with all her strength of soul, with all her independence, she knew and felt that voice had already told her that the facts of his life were going to prove more than she could bear.

In a dogged way, with many of the tricks of speech and manner of former phases of his life, which he had sloughed as a snake its skin, and had now rea.s.sumed in the stress of overmastering agony, he told her all.

He spared her nothing, not even his comparatively recent knowledge that his father had been driven to commit a murder, which in Henry Harper's view accounted for the price the son had had to pay. Nothing was spared her of Auntie, of the police, of the night on the railway, of Mr. Thompson and the Old Man, of the _Margaret Carey_ and the Island of San Pedro, of Ginger and Blackhampton, of the first meeting with Klond.y.k.e, of the first meeting with Edward Ambrose, and, finally, an account of his fall into the clutches of Cora Dobbs and how he made the horrible discovery concerning her on the night of their own first memorable meeting at the dinner party in Bury Street.

Some insane demon seemed to urge him on. In spite of the look of horror in her eyes, he told her everything. Somehow he felt it was the only reparation he could make to her for being as he was.

"Klond.y.k.e gave me my first start," he said finally. "He knows nearly as much as you--except about that woman--but he's stood to me all through. I don't ask your pity. I admit I deceived you, Mary, an' I done wrong, but it warn't because I didn't want to do right. I got to pay for it, I can see that. I dare say it's right, but I'll only say ... and this is final ... _Enry Arper, whatever 'is father done, don't deserve not a half, not a quarter of what's been done to him_."

She had to hold on by the table. Something was stifling her. There were things in this elemental soul which the Pridmores and the Colthursts might once have known, but for long generations had forgotten.

She dare not look at him. An abyss had opened. She simply couldn't face it.

Somehow he knew that. It needed no words to tell him. Everything was lost. The mariner could never hope to come into port. Again that horrible sense of rage came on him, which a few hours ago had overthrown him in his interview with Edward Ambrose. It maddened him to think that he had been allowed to get so far along the road and that a subtle trick had defeated him when the goal was actually in sight.

Yet even at the last there was just one thing, and only one, that stood to him: if it was still possible he must be a man, a gentleman. He knew this woman was suffering cruelly, and he owed it to her and to his friends not to profane the G.o.d she wors.h.i.+ped. There was no G.o.d in heaven after all, it seemed, for Henry Harper, but for her, who had not the stain of a father's crime upon her, it was a different matter.

As he stood not three paces from her, clenched and incoherent, fighting not to strike her with the sudden awful blasphemies that were surging to his lips, he knew nothing of what was pa.s.sing in her mind. Had he known she would have had his pity. All that her progenitors had stood for in the past had suddenly recoiled upon her. All those entries in Burke it had been her pleasure to deride, all the politicians and the landed proprietors, all the Lady Sophias and the Lady Carolines, all that flunkyfied reverence for concrete things of those generations of the Pridmores and the Colthursts, which had so long affronted her high good sense, were now having their word to say in the matter.

She had pledged her help to this man if ever he asked it, but now she found that help was not hers to give. Said the tart voice of her famous Aunt Caroline, it is not to be expected, my dear, of a sane Christian gentlewoman. Think of your father, my dear! By some strange irony, Mary Pridmore suddenly thought of him, that admired and bewhiskered servant of a generation which allowed his friend Bismarck to steal Schleswig and to murder France, but paid itself the tribute of building the Albert Memorial; the distinguished servant of a generation that had denied reading, writing, and arithmetic to its Henry Harpers and had turned them barefoot into its Blackhampton gutters.