CHAPTER XXI.
IN THE GREY dawn of Friday morning Katharine woke from broken sleep to face the reality of what she had done twenty-four hours earlier. It had snowed very heavily during the night, and her first conscious perception was of that strange, cold glare which the snow reflects, and which makes even a bedroom feel like a chilly outer hall into which the daylight penetrates through thick panes of ground glass.
She had slept very little, and against her will, losing consciousness from time to time out of sheer exhaustion, and roused again by the cruel reuniting of the train of thought. Those who have received a wound by which a principal nerve has been divided, know how intense is the suffering when the severed cords begin to grow together, with agonizing slowness, day by day and week by week, convulsing the whole frame of the man in their meeting. Katharine felt something like that each time that the merciful curtains of sleep were suddenly torn asunder between herself and the truth of the present.
The pain was combined of many elements, too, and each hurt her in its own way. There was the shame of the thing, first, the burning, scarlet shame — the thought of it had a colour for her. John Ralston was disgraced in the eyes of all the world. Even the smooth-faced dandy, fresh from college, young Van De Water, might sneer at him and welcome, and feel superior to him, for never having gone so far in folly. Now if such men as Van De Water knew the story, it was but a question of hours, and all society must know it, too. Society would set down John Ralston as a hopeless case. Katharine wondered, with a sickening chill, whether the virtuous — like her father — would turn their backs on Ralston and refuse to know him. She did not know. But Ralston was her husband.
The thought almost drove her mad. There was that condition of the inevitable in her position which gives fate its hold over men’s minds. She could not escape. She could not go back to the point where she had been yesterday morning, and begin her life again. As she had begun it, so it must go on to the very end, ‘until death them should part’ — the life of a spotless girl married to a man who was the very incarnation of a disgusting vice. In those first moments it would have been a human satisfaction to have been free to blame some one besides herself for what she had done.
But even now, when every bitter thought seemed to rise up against John Ralston, she could not say that the fault had been his if she had bound herself to him. To the very last he had resisted. This was Friday morning, and on the Wednesday night at the Thirlwalls’ he had told her that he could not be sure of himself. By and by, perhaps, that brave act of his might begin to tell in his favour with her, but not yet. The faces, the expressions, the words, of those from whom she had learned the story of his doings were before her eyes and present in her hearing now, as she lay wide awake in the early morning, staring with hot eyes at the cold grey ceiling of her room.
It was only yesterday that her sister Charlotte had sat there, lamenting her imaginary woes. How Katharine had despised her! Had she not deliberately chosen, of her own free will, and was she not bound to stand by her choice, out of mere self-respect? And Katharine had felt then that, come what might, for good or ill, better or worse, honour or dishonour, she was glad that she had married John Ralston and that she would face all imaginable deaths to help him, even a little. But now — now, it was different. He had failed her at the very outset. It was not that others had turned upon him, despising him wholly for a partial fault. The public disgrace made it all worse than it might have been, but it was only secondary, after all. The keenest pain was from the thrust that had entered Katharine’s own heart. It had been with him as though she had not existed. He had not been strong enough, for her sake, on their wedding day — the day of days to her — to keep himself sober from three o’clock in the afternoon until ten o’clock at night. Only seven hours, Katharine repeated to herself in the cold snow-glare of the early morning — seven little hours; her lips were hot and dry with anger, and her hands were cold, as she thought of it. It was not only the weakness of him, contemptible as that was — if it had at least been weakness for something less brutal, less beastly, less degrading. Katharine chose the strongest words she could think of, and smote him with them in her heart. Was he not her husband, and had she not the right to hate and despise what he had done? It was bad enough, as she said it, and as it appeared to most people that morning. There was not a link missing in the evidence, from the moment when John had begun to lose his temper with Miner at the club, until he had been brought home insensible to his mother’s house by a couple of policemen. His relations and his best friends were all convinced that he had been very drunk, and there was no reason why society in general should be more merciful than his own people. Robert Lauderdale said nothing, but when he saw the paragraph in a morning paper describing ‘Mr. John R — — ‘s drunken encounter with a professional pugilist,’ he regarded the statement as an elucidatory comment on his interview with his great-nephew. No one spoke of the matter in Robert Lauderdale’s presence, but the old gentleman felt that it was a distinct shame to the whole family, and he inwardly expressed himself strongly. The only one who tried to make matters look a little better than every one believed they were, was Hamilton Bright. He could not deny the facts, but he put on a cheerful countenance and made the best of them, laughing good-humouredly at John’s misfortune, and asking every one who ventured an unfavourable comment whether John was the only man alive on that day in the city of New York who had once been a little lively, recommending the beardless critics of his friend’s conduct to go out and drive cattle in the Nacimiento Valley if they wished to understand the real properties of alcohol, and making the older ones feel uncomfortable by reminding them vividly of the errors of their youth. But no one else said anything in Ralston’s favour. He was down just then, and it was as well to hit him when everybody was doing the same thing.
Katharine tried to make up her mind as to what she should do, and she did not find it an easy matter. It would be useless to deny the fact that what she felt for Ralston on that morning bore little resemblance to love. She remembered vaguely, and with wonder, how she had promised to stand by him and help him to her utmost to overcome his weakness. How was she to help him now? How could she play a part and conceal the anger, the pain, the shame that boiled and burned in her? If he should come to her, what should she say? She had promised that she would never refer to the matter in any way, when it had seemed but the shadow of a possibility. But it had turned into the reality so soon, and into such a reality — far more repulsive than anything of which she had dreamed. Besides, she added in her heart, it was unpardonable on that day of all days. Married she was, but forgive she could not and would not. Wounded love is less merciful than any hatred, and Katharine could not help deepening the wound by recalling every circumstance of the previous evening, from the moment when she had looked in vain for John’s face in the crowded room, until she had broken down and asked Hester Crowdie to bring her home.
She rose at last to face the day, undecided, worn out with fatigue, and scared, had she been willing to admit the fact, by the possibilities of the next twelve hours. Half dressed, she paused and sat down to think it all over again — all she knew, for she had yet to learn the end of the story.
She had been married just four and twenty hours. Yesterday, at that very time, life had been before her, joyous, hopeful, merry. All that was to be had glistened with gold and gleamed with silver, with the silver of dreamland and the gold of hope, having love set as a jewel in the midst. To-day the precious things were but dross and tinsel and cheap glass. For it was all over, and there was no returning. Real life was beginning, began, had begun — the reality of an existence not defined except in the extent of its suffering, but desperately limited in the possibilities of its happiness.
Katharine tried to think it over in some other way. The snow-glare was more grey than ever, and her eyes ached with it, whichever way she turned. The room was cold, and her teeth chattered as she sat there, half dressed. Then, when she let in the hot air
from the furnace, it was dry and unbearable. And she tried hard to find some other way in which to save her breaking heart — if so be that she might look at it so as not to see the break, and so, perhaps — if there were mercy in heaven, beyond that aching snow-glare — that by not seeing she might feel a little less, only a little less. It was hard that she should have to feel so much and so very bitterly, and all at once. But there was no other way. Instead of facing life with John Ralston, she had now to face life and John Ralston. How could she guess what he might do next? A drunken man has little control of his faculties — John might suddenly publish in the club the fact that he was her husband.
He was not the same John Ralston whom she had married yesterday morning, and whom she had seen yesterday afternoon for one moment at her door. The hours had changed him. Instead of his face there was a horrible mask; instead of his straight, elastic figure there was the reeling, delapidated body of the drunken wretch her father had once shown her in the streets. How could she love that thing? It was not even a man. She loathed it and hated it, for it had broken her life. She remembered having once broken a thermometer when she had been a little girl. She remembered the jagged edge of glass, and how the bright mercury had all run out and lost itself in tiny drops in the carpet. She recalled it vividly, and she felt that she was like the broken thermometer, and the idea was not ridiculous to her, as it must be to any one else, because she was badly hurt.
Vague ideas of a long and painful sacrifice rose before her — of something which must inevitably be begun and ended, like an execution. She had never understood what the inevitable meant until to-day.
Then, all at once, the great question presented itself clearly, the great query, the enormous interrogation of which we are all aware, more or less dimly, more or less clearly — the question which is like the death-rattle in the throat of the dying nineteenth century,— ‘What is it all for?’
It came in a rush of passionate disappointment and anger and pain. It had come to Katharine before then, and she had faced it with the easy answer, that it was for love — that it was all for love of John Ralston — life, its thoughts, its deeds, its hopes, its many fears — all for him, so far as Katharine Lauderdale was concerned. Love made God true, and heaven a fact, the angels her guardians now and her companions hereafter. And her love had been so great that it had seemed to demand a wider wealth of heavenly things wherewith to frame it. God was hardly good enough nor heaven broad enough.
But if this were to be the end, what had it all meant? She stood before the window and looked at the grey sky till the reflection from the dead white snow beneath her window and on the opposite roof was painful. Yet the little physical pain was a relief. She turned, quite suddenly, and fell upon her knees beside the corner of the toilet table, and buried her face in her hands and became conscious of prayer.
That seems to be the only way of describing what she felt. The wave of pain beat upon her agonized heart, and though the wave could not speak words, yet the surging and the moaning, and the forward rushing, and the backward, whispering ebb, were as the sounds of many prayers.
Was God good? How could she tell? Was He kind? She did not know. Merciful? What would be mercy to her? God was there — somewhere beyond the snow-glare that hurt so, and the girl’s breaking heart cried to Him, quite incoherently, and expecting nothing, but consciously, though it knew more of its own bitterness than of God’s goodness, just then.
Momentarily the great question sank back into the outer darkness with which it was concerned, and little by little the religious idea of a sacrifice to be made was restored with greater stability than before. She had chosen her own burden, her own way of suffering, and she must bear all as well as she could. The waves of pain beat and crashed against her heart — she wondered, childishly, whether it were broken yet. She knew it was breaking, because it hurt her so.
There was no connected thread of thought in the torn tissue of her mind, any more than there was any coherence in the few words which from time to time tried to form themselves on her lips without her knowledge. So long as she had been lying still and staring at the grey ceiling, the storm had been brooding. It had burst now, and she was as helpless in it as though it had been a real storm on a real sea, and she alone on a driving wreck.
She lifted her face and wrung her hands together. It was as though some one from behind had taken a turn of rough rope round her breast — some one who was very strong — and as though the rope were tightening fast. Soon she should not be able to draw breath against it. As she felt it crushing her, she knew that the hideous picture her mind had made of John was coming before her eyes again. In a moment it must be there. This time she felt as though she must scream when she saw it. But when it came she made no sound. She only dropped her head again, and her forehead beat upon the back of her hands and her fingers scratched and drew the cover of the toilet table. Then the picture was drowned in the tide of pain — as though it had fallen flat upon the dark sands between her and the cruel surf of her immense suffering that roared up to crash against her heart again. It must break this time, she thought. It could not last forever — nor even all day long. God was there — somewhere.
A lull came, and she said something aloud. It seemed to her that she had forgotten words and had to make new ones — although those she spoke were old and good. With the sound of her own voice came a little courage, and enough determination to make her rise from her knees and face daylight again.
Mechanically, as she continued to dress, she looked at herself in the mirror. Her features did not seem to be her own. She remembered to have seen a plaster cast from a death mask, in a museum, and her face made her think of that. There were no lines in it, but there were shadows where the lines would be some day. The grey eyes had no light in them, and scarcely seemed alive. Her colour was that of wax, and there was something unnatural in the strong black brows and lashes.
The door opened at that moment, and Mrs. Lauderdale entered the room. She seemed none the worse for having danced till morning, and the freshness which had come back to her had not disappeared again. She stood still for a moment, looking at Katharine’s face as the latter turned towards her with an enquiring glance, in which there was something of fear and something of shyness. A nervous thoroughbred has the same look, if some one unexpectedly enters its box. Mrs. Lauderdale had a newspaper in her hand.
“How you look, child!” she exclaimed, as she came forward. “Haven’t you slept? Or what is the matter?”
She kissed Katharine affectionately, without waiting for an answer.
“Well, I don’t wonder,” she added, a moment later, as though speaking to herself. “I’ve been reading this—”
She paused and hesitated, as though not sure whether she should give Katharine the paper or not, and she glanced once more at the paragraph before deciding.
“What is it about?” Katharine asked, in a tired voice. “Read it.”
“Yes — but I ought to tell you first. You know, last night — you asked me about Jack Ralston, and I wouldn’t tell you what I had heard. Then I saw that somebody else had told you — you really ought to be more careful, dear! Everybody was noticing it.”
“What?”
“Why — your face! It’s of no use to advertise the fact that you are interested in Jack’s doings. They don’t seem to have been very creditable — it’s just as well that he didn’t try to come to the ball in his condition. Do you know what he was doing, late last night, just about supper-time? I’m so glad I spoke to you both the other day. Imagine the mere idea of marrying a man who gets into drunken brawls with prize fighters and is taken home by the police—”
“Stop — please! Don’t talk like that!” Katharine was trembling visibly.
“My dear child! It’s far better that I should tell you — it’s in the papers this morning. That sort of thing can’t be concealed, you know. The first person you meet will talk to you about it.”
Katharine had turned from her and was
facing the mirror, steadying herself with her hands upon the dressing table.
“And as for behaving as you did last night — he’s not worth it. One might forgive him for being idle and all that — but men who get tipsy in the streets and fight horse-car conductors and pugilists are not exactly the kind of people one wants to meet in society — to dance with, for instance. Just listen to this—”
“Mother!”
“No — I want you to hear it. You can judge for yourself. ‘Mr. John R —— , a well-known young gentleman about town and a near relation of—’”
“Mother — please don’t!” cried Katharine, bending over the table as though she could not hold up her head.
“ ‘ — one of our financial magnates,’ “ continued Mrs. Lauderdale, inexorably, “and the hero of more than one midnight adventure, has at last met his match in the person of Tam Shelton, the famous light-weight pugilist. An entirety unadvertised and scantily attended encounter took place between these two gentlemen last night between eleven and twelve o’clock, in consequence of a dispute which had arisen in a horse-car. It appears that the representative of the four hundred had mistaken the public conveyance for his own comfortable quarters, and suddenly feeling very tired had naturally proceeded to go to bed—’”
With a very quick motion Katharine turned, took the paper from her mother’s hands and tore the doubled fourfold sheet through twice, almost without any apparent effort, before Mrs. Lauderdale could interfere. She said nothing as she tossed the torn bits under the table, but her eyes had suddenly got life in them again.
“Katharine!” exclaimed Mrs. Lauderdale, in great annoyance. “How can you be so rude?”
“And how can you be so unkind, mother?” asked Katharine, facing her. “Don’t you know what I’m suffering?”
Complete Works of F Marion Crawford Page 686
