When Louise at last paid her visit, she came to the conclusion, watching them together, that Mary was more in love with Hugh than he with her. She was Hugh’s first love, the first love of an inexperienced young man whose quick appreciative senses are more mature than his groping mind. Bur for his wife, Hugh was a revelation for which the years since her first marriage had been unconsciously preparing her. She was a grown woman in love with a boy. Or so it seemed to the sharp eyes of Hugh’s sister.
Mary was blissfully unconscious of the older woman’s scrutiny. She felt so wise, and looked, even to Louise, so crudely pitifully young. She had never learned to hoard herself or to think that in loving Hugh she was conferring a boon on him. Her emotions had a simplicity that made her dangerous. There was no duplicity in her love and she could imagine none. With a nature divided between a haughty independence and an innocent youthful softness outliving all her premature initiation into the mysteries of experience, aware, for the first time, that her beauty was a power to incline men’s hearts towards her, lost in love, it would have been in fact strange if she had not fumbled in dealing with these infinitely complex and sophisticated Herveys.
Hugh seemed content. He had made his own discoveries about his young wife. He would never have believed, until the first time he saw it happen, that Mary’s mouth could set in an ugly sullen line and her enchanting face assume so stupid and obstinate an air that it lost all charm, even all youthfulness, in a moment. But the moment past, she was so eager to be friends, and so passionately humble in her repentance, that he could not resist her. Kissing the lips that trembled and clung to his, aware by the tension of her small body in his arms how near she was to a storm of weeping, he forgot his profound resentment in the luxury of consoling her.
He was aware that she felt herself the wiser of the two, in the strange maddening way that women have, of arrogating to themselves some secret knowledge of life, a hidden wisdom, that gives them an intermittent sense of superiority over their men. Mary had this sense. She mothered him too much. Except in the moments when he asked for it, Hugh disliked being mothered. He did not want a mother. He wanted a friend and a mistress, interest and passion. Half consciously his untried youth rebelled against Mary’s indulgent tenderness.
6
Mary was dressing herself to go to a Watch-Night service. New Year’s Eve was the only night in the year on which a service was held in the church on the cliff top. It required too much lighting, and the way to it, up the dizzy steep of unlighted steps, was not considered safe after dark. On a stormy night it was not in fact safe, and the closing night of 1866 was a splendid example of those grim winter nights in Victorian England when the very climate drew a rigour from the stern downright virtues of the English character. The ceremonial nature of the occasion did not allow Mary to wear the unfashionable dress she wore every day in her office, but she had chosen the most modest of crinolines and over the close-fitting bodice wound a thick silk shawl brought from China by one of Garton’s captains. Over that she wore a short fur-coat, cut close to her waist, with a basque and high collar into which she tucked her veil. Thus secured, so far as possible, against the icy cold outside, she waited for Hugh. An enchanting picture she made, standing poised, like a ship taking a wave, between the massive bureau and the door open on to the hall, and so Hugh would no doubt have thought her, if he had been there to see. Mary tapped the floor impatiently with one small foot and glanced from time to time at the clock on the mantelpiece. It was an elaborate affair of mahogany and brass, representing the Court of Neptune, and a dear possession, but now she saw only the face with its hands moving ever further past the hour when she ought to have left the house, and still no Hugh.
He had gone alone to dine with the one man in Danesacre for whom he had a liking, a shipowner of the name of Benham, whose unnatural passion for Italian pictures of a type shocking to the prevalent taste of his day was considered to account for his ill-success with ships. Mary disliked everything about him, from his arched eyebrows to his slow smile when talking to her, a smile that made nothing of her position and her experience, and left her feeling positively naked. She considered that her distrust was now amply justified.
At last she set off alone. A wind from the north-east was blowing directly down Harbour Street from the sea, and at the end, when she turned to climb the church steps, flying spray from waves five hundred yards distant stung her cheeks and pricked her eyelids. Half way up the steps the gale caught her and flung her against the iron railing. Luckily she did not fall, or she would have found if almost impossible to rise again, hampered by her dress. A hasty glance at the sky revealed it awash with blown clouds, and when her long climb brought her within sight of the church she was already exhausted. She reached it at last, and entering it by an outside flight of steps leading up to a side door, sank thankfully down in the Garton pew, in the gallery above the altar.
From this place she could look down into the shadowy pool of the church. Immense chandeliers, suspended from the whitewashed beams of the roof, bore a panoply of candles. The three-decker pulpit had its share, and a smaller company winked and glimmered round the musicians in the opposite gallery. The rest of the church was dark, full of shadows that strangled the few shrinking lamps placed at intervals along the walls. Peering down, Mary saw the bowed figures of Danesacre people kneeling in the square high-walled pews. Impossible to distinguish a face, but she knew where each family sat. At the far side of the church was the old Roxby pew, into which she never went. It was empty. To the left of it, below one of the low windows, like the windows of fishermen’s cottages, that pierced the thick walls, was the banker’s pew. The thin crouching figures of the banker’s wife and daughters seemed stricken and bowed down with fear. It was said that they never raised their voices above a whisper when the husband and father was in the house. Probably they thought of God as a Being at least as ruthless.
The majority of the worshippers was in the body of the church, and all round Mary the big pews, like rooms without roofs, were empty, save for one man in the narrow white-painted pew inserted between Garton’s and the next. She sat stiffly upright. Her cheeks had been stung by the wind to a vivid richness of colour that glowed even in the dusk of the gallery. Her eyes, when John Mempes caught a gleam from them under her lowered lashes, were unusually dark and bright. He wondered why she had come alone, and whether she had noticed his attendance, a phenomenon startling enough in his life to have attracted attention even at this solemn moment. To be quite truthful, Mary had noticed him, but her mind was in such a tumult of anger, disappointment and perplexity that she gave him no second thought. She had looked forward all the week to appearing with Hugh at this service and pictured herself standing for a few moments afterwards, in the wide stone-floored vestibule with the flickering candles set round its panelled walls, receiving the handshakes of her friends and exchanging New Year’s wishes with the wives of inferior men. And now she was here alone, and nothing, nothing, would ever efface the memory of that humiliation. She knew that she could be observed from almost every corner of the church, sitting alone. The Garton pew was too prominent, even in this gloom. She bit her lip, and the blood, rushing to her cheeks, stayed there and made her look what she was, a beautiful angry girl, placed in a situation that called up all her dignity, and mocked it at the same time.
The service went on. As the hour of midnight approached, the voice of God’s minister on the topmost deck—the bridge as it were—of his high place fell silent, and the congregation waited on its knees for a year to die and another to be born. In the silence the wind beat down on the old walls, without rattling a single window. Few of them were made to open, and those on the sea side were shuttered. One would have thought that in eight centuries the wind would have learned the folly of trying to impress the squat grey building, but it continued to bluster without the least effect, even on the hearts of the kneeling worshippers, though most of them had had reason at some time or another to listen with anguish to t
he terror abroad between sea and sky. Perhaps the tranquil place, in which not a breath disturbed the slender flames of the candles, persuaded them that ultimately they were safe. Perhaps a certain grim arrogance, born of their incontestable superiority over all other people in all other towns of a county that was as supreme among the rest of English counties as England among the countries of the world, held them rigid and unmoved, in their attitudes of assumed humility, every time a blast like the rending of a world broke over the church. No doubt they were not altogether unmoved. Some had ships, or husbands, sons and lovers abroad at sea. And no doubt their humility was not entirely a matter of posture. But much more than any humble yielding it was an immemorial gesture made by sound upright men to Another like themselves. They depended on God, and He depended on them. Between them, they and He sustained the splendid fabric of Victorian civilisation, in all its harshness, its grandeur, its superb complacence, its monstrous self-discipline, and its touching belief in human permanence. If they had not believed in God they would not so magnificently have believed in themselves, and the world would not have seen a social spectacle the like of which had never before existed and will not exist again. To the men and women kneeling in the shadows of their church on that wild night it seemed as invulnerable as the walls between which they knelt. The wind beat on it, the sea thundered, and it stood unmoved, a rock in a high place. The forces at work to destroy it made no sound.
The minutes passed. Mary Hervey’s face was pressed convulsively into her hands. The mysterious influences of the church, that had seen so many generations of Danesacre people come to it to be christened, married and buried, and of the Garton pew—which when she was a child had so impressed her by its size, high walls, and rich carpet, that she had wondered whether the towering pulpit itself could be more sacredly important—were beginning to assume their accustomed sway over her mind. The tumult in her heart died down, and she forgot Hugh’s defection in the overwhelming thought that she should be kneeling here, not as she had knelt on past Eves, but as Mary Hervey. She was a different creature from that earlier Mary, with a body that had been made new between her lover’s hands, and a mind so altered, so full of new vistas of experience and unimaginable dreams and tendernesses and hopes that when, as now, she was left alone with it, she hardly knew it for her own.
She knew that she should be thinking of spiritual things and not of Hugh, but she found herself repeating words that came into her head from the quiet solemn air. “Let me make him happy, dear God. Let me keep him always and make me worthy.” She repeated her prayer over and over again, until the clock fixed in the outer wall of the Garton pew gave one deep stroke, and the benediction, dropping from the pulpit into the deep shadows at its foot, was followed by peals of bells with the deep tolling of the Town Hall bell sounding below all the rest.
As she paused to arrange her crinoline for passage down the narrow corridor between the wall and the back of the pews Mary found John Mempes beside her.
“Let me take you home, Mary.”
She smiled at him, a dazzling smile. It was the palest reflection of the ecstasy she had experienced in her brief prostration before the Throne. Outside she took his arm and they descended the steps, with a darkness tenanted by the North Sea on one hand and the dark roofs of houses clinging to the cliff side on the other. Mary held to the railing with her free hand, and almost in Mempes’ arms, managed to reach the comparative quiet of Harbour Street. There she released her hold of him, and breathless, her dress swaying about her legs, picked her way down the cobbled street. Mempes did not ask her why she was alone, and though she would not have known what to reply she was annoyed with him for not saying: “Where is Hervey?” It was the natural thing to have said.
They reached Mark Henry’s house, and Mempes, in the character of First Foot, preceded her into the hall. Mary suffered a fresh pang. It should have been Hugh who did that. He was already in, and greeted John Mempes with civil indifference. Glasses of Mark Henry’s 1820 port were poured out, and they drank to the New Year, Hugh with pleasure, the older man with barely concealed disdain. Mary sipped hers and put it down, thinking that nothing would make her really enjoy wine. Something of the anger that her emotion in church had swept away, returned, as she caught Hugh’s air of delicate irony at a mention of the Watch-Night service. Why had he not come home to take her to it as he promised? She was thankful that he offered no incriminating apology in front of John Mempes, but when the manager had gone she turned swiftly on her husband.
“Why didn’t you come? I waited for you.”
“It was later than I knew,” he murmured. “And I had to take Mrs, Welham home. I knew you’d be all right. Mempes told me this morning he should be there.”
Mary blushed crimson, ashamed to have discovered that Hugh was willing to leave her to the chance escort of John Mempes. On Watch-Night, too. Her simple mind could not conceive the unimportance to a Kensington bred Hugh, of Watch-Night service in the “Old Church,” and she was struck to the heart by his mention of Mrs. Welham. Hugh had thrown his wife over for that woman. It was the end of the world.
Mrs. Welham, known to the profane as the Town Widow, was the wife of an explorer whose absences left his wife with nothing to do but employ the talents Heaven had given her, a magnificent pair of eyes, a roguish smile, and a fine opulent figure. Long practice had brought her in the use of them a dazzling assurance, and few sons and husbands in Danesacre society had not at one time or another pierced the heart of a mother or a wife by playing the second (and minor) rôle in her drama of the Deserted Wife.
Pride sustained Hugh Hervey’s wife now, stifling on her lips the comment that rose to them. But even her monstrous pride could not prevent those lips from curling nor keep the disdain out of her face. Hugh wore the air of a mischievous boy bent on seeing how far in mischief he can go. Indeed at this moment he was a boy, and Mary a woman, hurt to the roots of her being. She was the very image of outraged womanhood as she stood in front of Hugh, her veil thrown back and her head up. He could see the rapid breath come and go under the silk of her bodice. He knew that he had made a frightful blunder, and if Mary had shown any softness he would have been down on his knees apologising for it. There was nothing in her face but the most malignant dislike, and he steeled his heart against the mute appeal of her slender trembling body. Where now was Mary’s adoring passion? Where the girl who had prayed to be made worthy of this careless creature with raised brows and mocking smile, this philanderer? Gone. Dead and buried in a forgotten past. Mary’s lips quivered and the thought crossed her mind: “What a way to begin the New Year.”
“I never meant to stay with her,” Hugh said carelessly. “I don’t like her,” which was true, “but you know how it is. She just wanted someone to condole with her on her lonely life. Her mother was there of course—asleep. I thought I’d stayed five minutes and I stayed fifty.”
To tell the truth, Mary did know how it was, being unique among women in that respect, but nothing would have persuaded her to admit it. She saw Mrs. Welham in the likeness of an angel with a flaming sword standing at the door of every drawing-room in Danesacre telling the occupants where Hugh Hervey was when his wife was at Watch-Night service alone. She said cruelly:
“I suppose if she had wanted someone to condole with her all night, you’d have stayed on to do it?”
Absurd Mary! Every word cut into her own shrinking flesh, and all the effect it had on Hugh was to produce on his face a meditative smile.
“I don’t suppose I should. But it would be very natural. It might happen to any man who was rash enough to put himself into the position I did, sitting practically alone at night with an attractive woman while she tells you her husband neglects her.”
Then indeed Mary was beaten. The vision she herself had conjured up of Hugh in another woman’s arms was too much for her. Tears rushed into her eyes, and she turned and fled from the room, with a sudden relapse into girlishness that at another time would have amused her husban
d. Now it merely made him angry. He hated scenes. A strain of cruelty, hiding in an obscure corner of a subtly fastidious nature, made him in anger more than a match for Mary’s quick temper. He was angry and cold.
He was not vindictive and he was in love with his wife. A few minutes’ thought sufficed to fill him with remorse. He thought of her lying in that great bed upstairs, probably crying, and the wish to comfort her, to feel a sob stifled against his body and a quivering mouth pressed to his, drove him upstairs. Hurrying over his undressing, he went softly into her room. The light was out, but in the glow of the dying fire he could see Mary lying on the edge of the bed.
A queer excitement seized him.
“Mary,” he said gently.
There was no answer. Could she be already asleep? He came nearer, and saw Mary’s eyes fixed on him in cold scrutiny. Instantly his excitement fled, and left him standing foolish and unwanted in the middle of the room. What should he do? He could not bring himself to an inglorious return to his own room. Wistfully, he glanced again at his young wife but she made no sign. He did not want to get into bed beside this enemy, and he found himself doing it. Estranged and miserable, with the width of the bed between them, the two ridiculous young creatures, their minds filled with one and the same desire, lay silent and awake. Neither would make the first move, and after a while, such is the power of youth, they fell almost in the same instant into an untroubled sleep. For the first time they had gone to sleep in un-kindness. It was the most momentous thing that had ever happened to either of them.
7
One evening—it was less than a month after an inauspicious Watch-Night—Mary and Hugh were discussing the bankruptcy of Hugh’s friend, Benham, the shipowner. They discussed it cautiously, aware of unplumbed depths in each other’s mind on this subject of Benham’s failure to survive in his world. That world was sitting in judgment on him with justified severity. It knew precisely why he had failed, and how culpable he was. Freights were high, and shipping booming. There was no reason, except his criminal neglect of it, why his firm should have chosen this moment of prosperity to fail and throw some hundreds of men out of employment, not to mention unpaid creditors and a mysterious scene with the Town Widow on the evening before his public downfall. Mary was only voicing Danesacre’s considered opinion when she observed that if Benham had thought more of his ships and less of paintings and dissipation he would never have made such a mess of things.
The Lovely Ship Page 17