He gave a gesture of pain and offense.
“Do not speak of her,” — he said, quickly, “I can bear much — but not that! not that from you!”
She sat very still, and did not lift her eyes.
“I am sorry!” she murmured, “But I want to tell you everything — —”
“And I want to hear everything,” — he answered— “Only spare me where you can!”
She looked at his pale, troubled face for a moment without speaking. Her vanity was vaguely hurt. She saw that his love for his murdered wife was still his paramount passion, — and she was curiously vexed to think that the living presence of her own matchless beauty could not drive from his mind the pale ghost of a dead woman.
“I was wretchedly brought up, as you know,” — she went on slowly. “The drunken old thing I called Auntie, — by the way, is she still alive?”
“Yes.”
“I expect she’ll be like Mortar Pike, — go doddering on till she’s a hundred,” — and Jacynth laughed a little; “She is no relative of mine, and she certainly doesn’t deserve that I should ever do anything for her. She used to tell me my own story every day with curses and blows. I was a love-child, she said; my father was a gentleman, my mother a kitchen-maid. Poor kitchen-maid! She was young and pretty, and the ‘gentleman,’ while on a visit to the house where she was in service, took advantage of her youth and stupidity in the approved ‘gentlemanlike ‘fashion. She died when I was born, and left me with the woman who had nursed her. This was ‘Auntie,’ who for some reason or other kept me till I was big enough to carry wood and coals and water about for her, when she made me a kind of general servant without wages. Of course I took every chance I could to get out of her way whenever it was possible, and to amuse myself as I liked. At the Church school I had been taught to read and write, and I almost spelt out every newspaper I could get hold of. A girl who was in service at Cheltenham used to send me penny ‘society’ papers — and I loved to read all about the peeresses who had been chorus girls, and the Paris women who make the fashions. I was always thinking and planning how I could start a career of the same kind myself. Once I saw a picture in one of the papers of a woman in a swing, with only a little white drapery about her, — her legs and neck and arms were all bare — and I read that she was the Honorable Mrs. Brazenly, formerly a ‘variety artiste.’ That set me on the track of the stage. To have a portrait of one’s self taken like that I thought, was splendid, — no ordinary country girl would dare to show so much of her body to a photographer, — yet this ‘variety artiste’ had done it, and had got well married too. I knew I was beautiful — I could see that for myself, though Bob Hadley was the first man who told me how beautiful I was. He was dreadfully in love with me and wanted to marry me — you know all about that! He was a carpenter — I could not have settled down in Shadbrook as the wife of a consumptive carpenter! Now, could I?”
He looked at her and was silent. She read his expression, and the corners of her mouth went up in a little smile.
“Then,” — she continued, “then came Dan.” Here she paused, and a sudden wave of rich color rushed to her cheeks and brow. “Dan,” — she said, in a lower tone, “was a bold lover, — a man whose passions swept everything before him, — but, the drink was bolder still! I remember, — I shall never forget — the first time I was really drunk. Drunk! Think of it! — a girl of barely sixteen! Yet I did not take much of the stuff they gave me, — but it made my head burn as though it were on fire, — my hair hurt me, and I undid it and let it fall over my shoulders, — and all the men in the public-house shouted at the sight of it, and Dan took it up and twisted it through his fingers — and everything seemed going round and round, and I myself whirled and waltzed with the giddy wheel, — and I danced and ran, — danced and ran as hard as ever I could till the ground suddenly slipped away from me, and I fell, — into Dan s arms. Dan caught me and took me up, and carried me away—”
“Then— “Everton’s voice was hoarse and unsteady; “It was not your fault—”
She shrugged her shoulders indifferently.
“Oh yes, it was! I knew Dan was a drunkard; and I knew he would make me drink with him. I went quite willingly. It amused me. There was nothing else to do in Shadbrook. It was so deadly dull! And the dullest thing of all was when the school teacher, or the district visitor, — such frights of women, both of them! — came round telling us to read the Bible and say our prayers and go to church and Communion regularly and ask God to make us good! As if God cared! Or as if we cared!”
His lips moved, — but no sound came from them. Of what avail to speak? What arguments could be used that this woman would not put to scorn? What were the conventional moralities of Church discipline to her?
“Look at the birds and flowers!” she said, and her voice became tuneful with sudden tenderness; “No one calls them wicked for living their own lives in their own way. There is no law condemning them to eternal punishment for mating when and where they will, and as often as their nature inclines them. They are happy, — and every one calls them innocent. Yet if I bend like a rose, or fly like a bird to the hand that would caress me, I am called wicked and corrupt! I may not mate where I choose, — yet it is merely man’s law that imposes this restraint on me, — God is silent about it all! Only He plainly shows us that the birds and flowers are happier and purer than we!”
Her eyes shone with a lovely limpid light, — the sunshine of a smile quivered on her lips.
Everton rose abruptly and paced the room to and fro.
“You cannot judge the spiritual by the material,” he began.
She interrupted him.
“Why not? It is all we have to go by! Wise men of science tell us that nature is in itself the reflex or outcome of the mind of God. If that be so, the mind of God seems to hold only one idea, which is to make each living thing happy for a little while, — a very little while! — and then — to kill it!”
He came and stood facing her. There was a great wistfulness and sorrow in his eyes.
“Jacynth,” he said, slowly; “Is it possible you have no faith? Is there nothing in your better self, — for I believe each man and woman has a better self, however much the worse may predominate, — which tells you that death is not all? — that there is a Life Beyond, an unknown, mysterious but certain life whose good or ill we must determine for ourselves here and now? Can it be that when you came to me with the other young girls of Shadbrook to the Sunday class, you did not believe one word of what I was endeavoring to teach? Is it my fault? Is it my inefficiency as a minister of Christ that made me too weak to draw you to Him? Tell me! If I seemed to you insincere or hypocritical, — a mere clerical humbug whom you could not trust to have any compassion, patience or sympathy with you, I would like to know it. I must have been lacking in some way that you should have been lost! I cannot bear— “and his voice shook, “I cannot bear to think that you were a partaker in Our Lord’s Communion without believing in Him!”
She gazed at him with an incredulous, half-pitying amazement. Then she laughed softly.
“Poor Mr. Everton! What a child you are, for a man!” she said— “You seem to live in a dream of ages far behind our time! No one believes in Christ nowadays; surely you know that? The Churches have to be kept up, because the clergy don’t want to resign their incomes and disband, — but even they don’t believe! If they did, they would act quite differently. Some people are trying to introduce Buddhism and Islamism as a change from Christianity, — but the best thing of all is to be rational and material, and leave transcendental nonsense alone. You talk as if the Crucifixion happened yesterday!” — —
“It happens now!” said Everton, with a strong vibration of emotion in his accents; “it happens every time one creature whom Christ’s love has redeemed speaks lightly of His name! If such blasphemers be of the clergy, all the worse for them! But, Jacynth, I have not asked you what others say or what others accept, — I ask you! Did you never believe
a word I taught you?”
She smiled up at him candidly.
“Never!” —
He shrank back as though he had received a blow. She watched him curiously.
“If I had believed, do you think I could have taken to the drink — or to Dan?” she said; “If I had really thought that there was an Almighty Power that, cared for me and watched over me, — if I had really felt that there was a Heaven to which I should be taken after death, do you think I would, or could, have gone to the bad? But no clergyman — not even you — has ever persuaded me that such stories are true. I see with my own eyes that God, — if there is a God, — does not care; that good, really good people are made to suffer terrible things for no fault of their own, and that there is really no law except such as one makes for one’s self and one’s own convenience. Claude Ferrers told me that.”
“Claude Ferrers!” cried Everton— “That brute I saw with you last night at the Savoy—”
“He’s not a brute,” she interrupted him, with some quickness; “He’s one of the cleverest men in London. He writes plays and beautiful poetry, — and all the best critics admire him. And — he’s a very great friend of mine just now!”
He turned from her abruptly. The utter shamelessness, the cool audacity with which she spoke were horrible to him, — and yet — her beauty was as a ravening flame! A sudden temptation suggested itself to his mind — hideous in its swiftness and subtlety, — why should not he, even he, snatch her away from the life she was leading and save her soul for Heaven! For one flashing moment it was as though the pit of Hell had opened, — the next, he had sprung back from the edge of the abyss and his spirit was in arms, boldly and ruthlessly telling itself that there was, and could be no saving of the soul of Jacynth through him, — but merely an adding of passion to passion and sin to sin. Like a whirlwind the storm of thought went over him and left his heart like a desert heaped with burning sand, but outwardly he showed no sign of emotion, save that his face was very pale and his manner very cold.
“You’ve not heard the rest of my story,” — Jacynth went on. “I want you to know it all. And though you’ve asked me not to speak of your wife, I really must say a word or two about her, for I owe her an immense debt of gratitude. Indeed if it had not been for her I might never have left Shadbrook.”
Standing where he was, some little distance apart from her near a grand piano, on which the principal object set forth for notice was the signed portrait of a king, his eyes fastened upon her piteously as though she were a strong magnet drawing all the buried grief of his soul out of the soothing darkness of tears into the fierce light of despair. But he was silent. —
“That night when you were so anxious about Dan, — when I met you and told you that I’d take care he didn’t get any more drink,” she continued; “I stayed with him in his cottage, and I promised him that if Jennie died I would be his wife. It was a foolish promise,” she hesitated, and the color sprang to her face in a warm glow, “but — there were reasons for making it. Perhaps, — if Jennie had died then, quickly, and, — if my little child had lived, — I should have been content to settle down in Shadbrook, not because I loved Dan, but because he loved me. It was fine to be loved so utterly and desperately, — it is not every day that one comes across a man who is willing to give up everything for the love of a girl, — and well!” — her eyes shot a malicious gleam from under their dark lashes— “I don’t think Jennie would have lived long anyway! But next morning your wife came, — and she knew what was being said in the village about me and Dan, and when she heard I had been in the cottage with Dan all night she told Jennie all the tale. That evening when Dan went home, Jennie cried out to him—’ Is it true?’ — and Dan couldn’t understand at first, but when he did he was like a madman. He shook Jennie in her bed till she fainted away, — then he ran out of the house and drank till he was blind and deaf, and black in the face with rage. Then he came to me, storming and cursing. He asked me to go away with him at once from Shadbrook. ‘If you don’t,’ he shouted — I There’ll be murder here! I’ll finish off the d — d parson and his meddle some wife, — and I’ll make short work of Jennie! But if you’ll come along with me I’ll leave them all alone.’ I knew what that meant, — Dan was always a man of his word, even in drink, — but I managed to quiet him for the moment, and I told him I’d go with him in a day or two. I knew the time had come for me to decide my own future, and I wasn’t long making up my mind. There was a man I had got acquainted with, a sort of actor-manager who coached amateur Shakespeare reading-societies, — he told me he did it for the purpose of getting into the houses of the aristocracy, and becoming acquainted with people of title and position who wanted to show themselves off on the stage and who were too stupid to know how to read or to act. He was always talking about duchesses and princesses who sent for him and asked his advice about their amateur theatricals, and he played at being quite the fine gentleman. He had fallen in love with me one day when he met me taking a glass at the ‘Ram’s Head,’ he was motoring to Cheltenham, — and he said that if I would go to London with him, he’d find me a place on the variety stage. So when your wife had brought everything to a finish for me in Shadbrook, I wrote to him to come and fetch me away. He came, and I went with him straight to London one night, — he had his motor waiting in a bye-lane about a mile outside the village, and we did the whole journey at top speed. It was a splendid run! I was not sorry to go, — I was only just a little sorry for Dan — and you!”
Everton started as from a heavy dream.
“Me? Sorry for me?” he echoed— “In what way?”
She rose and moved towards him with a lithe, slow grace, and resting one elbow on the piano stood regarding him fixedly.
“Because I knew you would be disappointed in me,” she answered, slowly, “because I felt that when you heard all you would think of me as a beautiful thing broken and spoilt; that you would be pained and angry, — for I knew, — I couldn’t help seeing that though as a parson you could not approve of me, yet as a man’ you admired me. I know and see that still!”
There was a pause. So long it seemed, — so weighted with deep silence that the rays of sunshine dancing on the wall seemed more expressive of sound than light. Her eyes flashed a challenge to his, but they met with no response. She gave a little petulant movement of her shoulders.
“I’m afraid I’m boring you,” she said; “But there isn’t much more to tell. I heard of Jennie Kiernan’s death through a girl I knew, — and I felt sure Dan had killed her—”
Everton made a slight sign of protest.
“Do not accuse him of a guilt that was not his,” he said, in low, strained accents, “she died of grief and shock. She should never have been told of her husband’s unfaithfulness.”
Jacynth gave him a glance of open wonderment.
“You say that? But it was your wife who told her—”
He checked her by an imperative gesture.
“I know it!” he said— “And my wife is — dead!”
A shadowy pallor made his face look gray and old as he spoke; instinctively he covered his eyes with one hand. Some faint touch of compunction moved her, and she drew closer to him.
“Mr. Everton,” she murmured; “I have always been so sorry — it was such a terrible blow to you — you loved her—”
He lifted his hand from his eyes and looked at her sadly and searchingly.
“Yes, I loved her!” he answered, “with a love you have never known. With a love you will never know!”
Her head drooped. Her slim white hands clasped and unclasped themselves restlessly.
“Poor Jacynth!” he said, in a strange half-sighing tone. “With all your plans for your own happiness you have missed the best of life — and I, with all my sorrows, still hold the chief prize! I would not change my griefs for your joys — no, not for the whole world! I would not lose the memory of the woman I loved — and love — for all your social triumphs! You do not know what it is
to a man to feel that a sweet and sinless woman’s life has been linked to his own in the sacrament of marriage; you do not know, — how should you! — that even death itself fails to destroy such love if it be true. And with all your wealth and influence and power I pity you!”
She smiled.
“Not half so much,” she said, “as I pity you!”
And she threw back her head with an air of sudden defiance.
“I pity you,” she went on, “because you are only half a man, — because your stupid religion has chilled your blood and taught you to measure out natural feelings by rule and line, — because you always turn to the deaf blind Fancy you call God, and ask It whether you may or may not be happy! It answers nothing! It does not care! Yet your own imagination, speakings for It, says: ‘No, you shall not do this or that; you must not love, — you may not hate! The lion may tear his prey, — but you must give food to your enemy!
The bird may choose many mates, but you must only have one in youth and in age.’ And so you live in restraint and make yourself miserable for a dream! — while all the world of nature smiles on in perfect happiness without any of man’s laws to control it. Its only law is to live, love and die; and after death it gives no proof of any further kind of life that any sensible person would wish for. Dead things rot away and breed germs of disease, — I would not care to live again as a microbe!”
Her tragedy-queen expression here broke up into charming dimples of mirth which made her lovely face still lovelier, and she laughed.
“No, Mr. Everton! It’s no use your looking so solemn! Neither you nor any man of your calling will ever persuade me that it is not good to live one’s life according to one’s own temperament, — it is the lesson of nature, — and if God made nature, then it is the teaching of God. The Bible and all the codes of morality are merely man’s work. You see I’ve read heaps of books since I left Shadbrook; and I’ve had lessons from the best teachers in languages, music, literature, card-playing and all the fine-lady accomplishments, — and I’ve learned as many ‘up-to-date’ things as I can, — but my creed is the same as it always was — live, love and die — and there an end! It is enough!”
Delphi Collected Works of Marie Corelli (Illustrated) (Delphi Series Eight Book 22) Page 743