The Way We Live Now (64 page)

‘Never,' said Roger to himself, hitting at the stones on the beach with his stick. ‘Never.' Then he got his horse and rode back to Carbury Manor.

When Paul got down into the dining-room Mrs Hurtle was already there, and the waiter was standing by the side of the table ready to take the cover off the soup. She was radiant with smiles and made herself especially pleasant during dinner, but Paul felt sure that everything was not well with her. Though she smiled, and talked and laughed, there was something forced in her manner. He almost knew that she was only waiting till the man should have left the room to speak in a different strain. And so it was. As soon as the last lingering dish had been removed, and when the door was finally shut behind the retreating waiter, she asked the question which no doubt had been on her mind since she had walked across the strand to the hotel. ‘Your friend was hardly civil; was he, Paul?'

‘Do you mean that he should have come in? I have no doubt it was true that he had dined.'

‘I am quite indifferent about his dinner – but there are two ways of
declining as there are of accepting. I suppose he is on very intimate terms with you?'

‘Oh, yes.'

‘Then his want of courtesy was the more evidently intended for me. In point of fact, he disapproves of me. Is not that it?' To this question Montague did not feel himself called upon to make any immediate answer. ‘I can well understand that it should be so. An intimate friend may like or dislike the friend of his friend, without offence. But unless there be strong reason he is bound to be civil to his friend's friend, when accident brings them together. You have told me that Mr Carbury was your beau ideal of an English gentleman.'

‘So he is.'

‘Then why didn't he behave as such?' and Mrs Hurtle again smiled. ‘Did not you yourself feel that you were rebuked for coming here with me, when he expressed surprise at your journey? Has he authority over you?'

‘Of course he has not. What authority could he have?'

‘Nay, I do not know. He may be your guardian. In this safe-going country young men perhaps are not their own masters till they are past thirty. I should have said that he was your guardian, and that he intended to rebuke you for being in bad company. I dare say he did after I had gone.'

This was so true that Montague did not know how to deny it. Nor was he sure that it would be well that he should deny it. The time must come, and why not now as well as at any future moment He had to make her understand that he could not join his lot with her – chiefly indeed because his heart was elsewhere, a reason on which he could hardly insist because she could allege that she had a prior right to his heart; but also because her antecedents had been such as to cause all his friends to warn him against such a marriage. So he plucked up courage for the battle. ‘It was nearly that,' he said.

There are many – and probably the greater portion of my readers will be among the number – who will declare to themselves that Paul Montague was a poor creature, in that he felt so great a repugnance to face this woman with the truth. His folly in falling at first under the battery of her charms will be forgiven him. His engagement, unwise as it was, and his subsequent determination to break his engagement, will be pardoned. Women, and perhaps some men also, will feel that it was natural that he should have been charmed, natural that he should have expressed his admiration in the form which unmarried ladies expect
from unmarried men when any such expression is to be made at all – natural also that he should endeavour to escape from the dilemma when he found the manifold dangers of the step which he had proposed to take. No woman, I think, will be hard upon him because of his breach of faith to Mrs Hurtle. But they will be very hard on him on the score of his cowardice – as, I think, unjustly. In social life we hardly stop to consider how much of that daring spirit which gives mastery comes from hardness of heart rather than from high purpose, or true courage. The man who succumbs to his wife, the mother who succumbs to her daughter, the master who succumbs to his servant, is as often brought to servility by a continual aversion to the giving of pain, by a softness which causes the fretfulness of others to be an agony to himself – as by any actual fear which the firmness of the imperious one may have produced. There is an inner softness, a thinness of the mind's skin, an incapability of seeing or even thinking of the troubles of others with equanimity, which produces a feeling akin to fear; but which is compatible not only with courage, but with absolute firmness of purpose, when the demand for firmness arises so strongly as to assert itself. With this man it was not really that. He feared the woman – or at least, such fears did not prevail upon him to be silent; but he shrank from subjecting her to the blank misery of utter desertion. After what had passed between them he could hardly bring himself to tell her that he wanted her no further and to bid her go. But that was what he had to do. And for that his answer to her last question prepared the way. ‘It was nearly that,' he said.

‘Mr Carbury did take it upon himself to rebuke you for showing yourself on the sands at Lowestoffe with such a one as I am?'

‘He knew of the letter which I wrote to you.'

‘You have canvassed me between you?'

‘Of course we have. Is that unnatural? Would you have had me be silent about you to the oldest and the best friend I have in the world?'

‘No, I would not have had you be silent to your oldest and best friend. I presume you would declare your purpose. But I should not have supposed you would have asked his leave. When I was travelling with you, I thought you were a man capable of managing your own actions. I had heard that in your country girls sometimes hold themselves at the disposal of their friends – but I did not dream that such could be the case with a man who had gone out into the world to make his fortune.'

Paul Montague did not like it. The punishment to be endured was being commenced. ‘Of course you can say bitter things,' he replied.

‘Is it my nature to say bitter things? Have I usually said bitter things to you? When I have hung round your neck and have sworn that you should bè my God upon earth, was that bitter? I am alone, and I have to fight my own battles. A woman's weapon is her tongue. Say but one word to me, Paul, as you know how to say it, and there will be soon an end to that bitterness. What shall I care for Mr Carbury, except to make him the cause of some innocent joke, if you will speak but that one word. And think what it is I am asking. Do you remember how urgent were once your own prayers to me – how you swore that your happiness could only be secured by one word of mine? Though I loved you, I doubted. There were considerations of money, which have now vanished. But I spoke it – because I loved you, and because I believed you. Give me that which you swore you had given before I made my gift to you.'

‘I cannot say that word.'

‘Do you mean that, after all, I am to be thrown off like an old glove? I have had many dealings with men and have found them to be false, cruel, unworthy, and selfish. But I have met nothing like that. No man has ever dared to treat me like that. No man shall dare.'

‘I wrote to you.'

‘Wrote to me – yes! And I was to take that as sufficient! No. I think but little of my life, and have but little for which to live. But while I do live I will travel over the world's surface to face injustice and to expose it, before I will put up with it. You wrote to me! Heaven and earth – I can hardly control myself when I hear such impudence!' She clenched her fist upon the knife that lay on the table as she looked at him, and raising it, dropped it again at a further distance. ‘Wrote to me! Could any mere letter of your writing break the bond by which we were bound together? Had not the distance between us seemed to have made you safe, would you have dared to write that letter? The letter must be unwritten. It has already been contradicted by your conduct to me since I have been in this country.'

‘I am sorry to hear you say that.'

‘Am I not justified in saying it?'

‘I hope not When I first saw you I told you everything. If I have been wrong in attending to your wishes since, I regret it.'

‘This comes from your seeing your master for two minutes on the beach. You are acting now under his orders. No doubt he came with the purpose. Had you told him you were to be here?'

‘His coming was an accident.'

‘It was very opportune, at any rate. Well – what have you to say to me? Or am I to understand that you suppose yourself to have said all that is required of you? Perhaps you would prefer that I should argue the matter out with your – friend, Mr Carbury.'

‘What has to be said, I believe I can say myself.

‘Say it then. Or are you so ashamed of it, that the words stick in your throat?'

‘There is some truth in that. I am ashamed of it. I must say that which will be painful, and which would not have been to be said, had I been fairly careful.'

Then he paused. ‘Don't spare me,' she said. ‘I know what it all is as well as though it were already told. I know the lies with which they have crammed you at San Francisco. You have heard that up in Oregon – I shot a man. That is no lie. I did. I brought him down dead at my feet.' Then she paused, and rose from her chair and looked at him. ‘Do you wonder that that is a story that a woman should hesitate to tell? But not from shame. Do you suppose that the sight of that dying wretch does not haunt me? that I do not daily hear his drunken screech, and see him bound from the earth, and then fall in a heap just below my hand? But did they tell you also that it was thus alone that I could save myself – and that had I spared him, I must afterwards have destroyed myself? If I were wrong, why did they not try me for his murder? Why did the women flock around me and kiss the very hems of my garments? In this soft civilization of yours you know nothing of such necessity. A woman here is protected – unless it be from lies.'

‘It was not that only,' he whispered.

‘No; they told you other things,' she continued, still standing over him. ‘They told you of quarrels with my husband. I know the lies, and who made them, and why. Did I conceal from you the character of my former husband? Did I not tell you that he was a drunkard and a scoundrel? How should I not quarrel with such a one? Ah, Paul; you can hardly know what my life has been.'

‘They told me that – you fought him.'

‘Psha – fought him! Yes – I was always fighting him. What are you to do but to fight cruelty, and fight falsehood, and fight fraud and treachery – when they come upon you and would overwhelm you but for fighting. You have not been fool enough to believe that fable about a duel? I did stand once, armed, and guarded my bedroom door from him, and told him that he should only enter it over my body. He went away to the tavern and I did not see him for a week afterwards. That was the duel. And they have told you that he is not dead.'

‘Yes; – they have told me that.'

‘Who has seen him alive? I never said to you that I had seen him dead. How should I?'

‘There would be a certificate.'

‘Certificate – in the back of Texas – five hundred miles from Galveston! And what would it matter to you? I was divorced from him according to the law of the State of Kansas. Does not the law make a woman free here to marry again – and why not with us? I sued for a divorce on the score of cruelty and drunkenness. He made no appearance, and the court granted it me. Am I disgraced by that?'

‘I heard nothing of the divorce.'

‘I do not remember. When we were talking of these old days before, you did not care how short I was in telling my story. You wanted to hear little or nothing then of Caradoc Hurtle. Now you have become more particular. I told you that he was dead – as I believed myself, and do believe. Whether the other story was told or not I do not know.'

‘It was not told.'

‘Then it was your own fault – because you would not listen. And they have made you believe I suppose that I have failed in getting back my property?'

‘I have heard nothing about your property but what you yourself have said unasked. I have asked no question about your property.'

‘You are welcome. At last I have made it again my own. And now, sir, what else is there? I think I have been open with you. Is it because I protected myself from drunken violence that I am to be rejected? Am I to be cast aside because I saved my life while in the hands of a reprobate husband, and escaped from him by means provided by law – or because by my own energy I have secured my own property? If I am not to be condemned for these things, then say why am I condemned?'

She had at any rate saved him the trouble of telling the story, but in doing so had left him without a word to say. She had owned to shooting the man. Well, it certainly may be necessary that a woman should shoot a man – especially in Oregon. As to the duel with her husband – she had half denied and half confessed it. He presumed that she had been armed with a pistol when she refused Mr Hurtle admittance into the nuptial chamber. As to the question of Hurtle's death – she had confessed that perhaps he was not dead. But then – as she had asked – why should not a divorce for the purpose in hand be considered as good as a death? He could not say that she had not washed herself clean – and yet, from the story as told by herself, what man would wish to marry her? She had
seen so much of drunkenness, had become so handy with pistols, and had done so much of a man's work, that any ordinary man might well hesitate before he assumed to be her master. ‘I do not condemn you,' he replied.

‘At any rate, Paul, do not lie,' she answered. ‘If you tell me that you will not be my husband, you do condemn me. Is it not so?'

‘I will not lie if I can help it. I did ask you to be my wife – '