A Spirit in Prison Part 144

The real, the beautiful Hermione--he must seize her, grip her, hold her fast before it was too late.

"Hermione," he said, "I think you saved me from death; I am sure you did. Did you save me only to hate me?"

She made no reply.

"Do you remember that evening when you came into my room at Kairouan all covered with dust from your journey across the plains? I do. I remember it as if it had happened an hour ago instead of nearly seventeen years.

I remember the strange feeling I had when I turned my head and saw you, a feeling that you and Africa would fight for me and that you would conquer. It had seemed to me that Africa meant to have me and would have me. Unless you came I felt certain of that. And I had thought about it all as I lay there in the stifling heat, till I almost felt the feverish earth enclosing me. I had loved Africa, but Africa seemed to me terrible then. I thought of only Arabs, always Arabs, walking above me on the surface of the ground when I was buried. And the thought made me shudder with horror. As if it could have mattered! I was absurd! But one is often absurd when one is very ill. The child in one comes out then, I suppose. And I had wondered--how I had wondered!--whether there was any chance of your coming. I hadn't actually asked you to come. I hadn't dared to do that. But it was the same thing almost. I had let you know--I had let you know. And I saw you come into my room all covered with dust. You had come so quickly--at once. Perhaps--perhaps sometimes you have thought I had forgotten that evening. I may be an egoist. I expect most men are egoists. And perhaps I am the egoist you say I am.

Often one doesn't know what one is. But I have never forgotten that day, and that you were covered with dust. It was that--the dust--which seemed to make me realize that you had not lost a moment as to whether you would come or not. You looked as if--almost as if you had run all the way to be in time to save my life--my wretched life. And you saved it.

Did you save me to hate me?"

He waited for her to speak. But still she was silent. He heard no sound of her at all, and for a moment he almost wondered whether she had discovered that the chamber had some second outlet, whether she had not escaped while he had been speaking. But he looked round and he saw only dense darkness. She must be there still, close to him, hearing everything he said, whether against her will or with it. He was being perfectly sincere, and he was feeling very deeply, with intensity. But out of his natural reserve now rose a fear--the fear that perhaps his voice, his speech, did not convey his sincerity to her. If she should mistake him! If she should fancy he was trying to play upon her emotions in order to win her away from some desperate resolve. He longed to make her see what he was feeling, feel what he was feeling, be him and herself for one moment. And now the darkness began to distract him. He wanted light. He wanted to see Hermione, to see which of the women in her faced him, which was listening to him.

"Hermione," he said, "I want you--I want--it's hateful speaking like this, always in the darkness. Don't make me feel all the time that I am holding you a prisoner. No, I can't--I won't bear that any more."

He moved suddenly from the doorway back into the room behind him, in which there was a very little, very faint light. There he waited.

Almost immediately the tall shadow which had disappeared into the darkness emerged from it, pa.s.sed before him, and went into the central chamber of the palace. He followed it, and found Hermione standing by the great doorway that overlooked the sea. Hermione she was, no longer a shadow, but the definite darkness of a human form relieved against the clear but now moonless night. She was waiting. Surely she was waiting for him. She might have escaped, but she stayed. She was willing, then, to hear what he had to say, all he had to say.

He stood still at a little distance from her. But in this hall the sound of the sea which came from the chamber on the left was much more distinct and disturbing than in the chamber where she had hidden. And he came nearer to her, till he was very near, almost close to her.

"If you hated me for--once, when we were standing on the terrace, you said, 'Take care--or I shall hate you for keeping me in the dark.' If you hated me because of what I have done, with Gaspare, Hermione, I could bear it. I could bear it, because I think it would pa.s.s away. We did keep you in the dark. Now you know it. But you know our reason, and that it was a reason of very deep affection. And I think you would forgive us, I know you would forgive us in the end. But I understand it isn't only that--"

Suddenly he thought of Vere, of that perhaps dawning folly, so utterly dead now, so utterly dead that he could no longer tell whether it had ever even sluggishly stirred with life. He thought of Vere, and of the poems, and of the secret of Peppina's revelation. And he wondered whether the record he seemed to read in the silence had been a true record, or whether his imagination and his intellect of a psychologist, alert even in this hour of intense emotion, had been deceiving him.

Hermione had seemed to be speaking to him. But had he really been only impersonating her? Had it been really himself that had spoken to himself? As this question arose in his mind he longed to make Hermione speak. Then he could be sure of all. He must clear away all misconception. Yet, even now, how could he speak of that episode with Vere?

"You say you have always wanted gold, and that you have never been given gold--"

"Yes."

He saw the dark figure near him lift its head. And he felt that Hermione had come out of the darkness with the intention of speaking the truth of what she felt. If she could not have spoken she would have stayed in the inner chamber, or she would have escaped altogether from the palace when he moved from the doorway. He was sure that only if she spoke would she change. In her silence there was d.a.m.nation for them both. But she meant to speak.

"I have been a fool. I see that now. But I think I have been suspecting it for some time--nearly all this summer."

He could hear by the sound of her voice that while she was speaking she was thinking deeply. Like him, she was in search of absolute truth.

"It is only this summer that I have begun to see why people--you--have often smiled at my enthusiasms. No wonder you smiled! No wonder you laughed at me secretly!"

Her voice was hard and bitter.

"I never laughed at you, never--either secretly or openly!" he said, with a heat almost of anger.

"Oh yes, you did, as a person who can see clearly might laugh at a short-sighted person tumbling over all the little obstacles on a road.

I was always tumbling over things--always--and you must always have been laughing. I have been a fool. Instead of growing up, my heart has remained a child--till now. That's what it is. Children who have been kindly treated think the world is all kindness. Because my friends were good to me, the world was good to me, I got into the habit of believing that I was lovable, and of loving in return. And I trusted people. I always thought they were giving me what I was giving them. That has been my great folly, the folly I'm punished for. I have been a credulous fool. I have thought that because I gave a thing with all my heart it was--it must be--given back to me. And yet I was surprised--I could scarcely believe it--when--when--"

He knew she was thinking of her beautiful wonder when Maurice had said he loved her.

"I could scarcely believe it! But, because I was a fool, I got to believe it, and I have believed it till to-day--you have stood by, and watched me believing it, and laughed at me for believing it till to-day."

"Hermione!"

"Yes, you mayn't have meant to laugh, but you must have laughed. Your mind, your intellect must have laughed. Don't say they haven't. I wouldn't believe you. And I know your mind--at any rate, I know that.

Not your heart! I shall never pretend--I shall never think again for a moment that I know anything--anything at all--about a man's heart. But I do know something about your mind. And I know the irony in it. What a subject I have presented to you all these years for the exercise of your ironic faculty! You ought to thank me! You ought to go on your knees and thank me and bless me for that!"

"Hermione!"

"Just now you talked of my coming into your room in Kairouan all covered with dust. You asked me if I remembered it. Yes, I do. And I remember something you don't--probably you don't--remember. There was no looking-gla.s.s in your room."

She stopped.

"No looking-gla.s.s!" he repeated, wondering.

"No, there was no looking-gla.s.s. And I remember when I came in I saw there wasn't, and I was glad. Because I couldn't look at myself and see how dreadful and dishevelled and hideous I was--how dirty even I was.

My impulse was to go to a gla.s.s. And then I was glad I couldn't. And I looked at your face. And I thought 'he doesn't care. He loves me, all dusty and hideous and horrid, as I am.' And then I didn't care either. I said to myself, 'I look an object, and I don't mind a bit, because I see in his face that he loves me for myself, because he sees my heart, and--'"

And suddenly in her voice there was a sharp, hissing catch, and she stopped short. For a full minute she was silent. And Artois did not speak. Nor did he move.

"I felt then, perhaps for the first time, 'the outside doesn't matter to real people.' I felt that. I felt, 'I'm real, and he is real, and--and Maurice is real. And though it is splendid to be beautiful, and beauty means so much, yet it doesn't mean so much as I used to think. Real people get beyond it. And when once they have got beyond it then life begins.' I remember thinking that, feeling that, and--just for a minute loving my own ugliness. And then, suddenly, I wished there was a looking-gla.s.s in the room that I might stand before it and see what an object I was, and then look into your face and see that it didn't matter. And I even triumphed in my ugliness. 'I have a husband who doesn't mind,' I thought. 'And I have a friend who doesn't mind.

They love me, both of them, whatever I look like. It's me--the woman inside--they love, because they know I care, and how I care for them.'

And that thought made me feel as if I could do anything for Maurice and anything for you; heroic things, or small, dreadful, necessary things; as if I could be the servant of, or sacrifice my life easily for, those who loved me so splendidly, who knew how to love so splendidly. And I was happy then even in sacrificing my happiness with Maurice. And I thanked G.o.d then for not having given me beauty.

"And I was a fool. But I didn't find it out. And so I revelled in self-sacrifice. You don't know, you could never understand, how I enjoyed doing the most menial things for you in your illness. Often you thanked me, and often you seemed ashamed that I should do such things.

And the doctor--that little Frenchman--apologized to me. And you both thought that doing so much in the frightful heat would make me ill. And I blessed the heat and the flies and everything that made what I did for you more difficult to do. Because the doing of what was more difficult, more trying, more fatiguing needed more love. And my grat.i.tude to you for your loving friends.h.i.+p, and for needing me more than any one else, wanted to be tried to the uttermost. And I thought, too, 'When I go back to Maurice I shall be worth a little more, I shall be a little bit finer, and he'll feel it. He'll understand exactly what it was to me to leave him so soon, to leave--to leave what I thought of then as my Garden of Paradise. And he'll love me more because I had the courage to leave it to try and save my friend. He'll realize--he'll realize--' But men don't. They don't want to. Or they can't. I'm sure--I'm positive now that men think less of women who are ready to sacrifice themselves than of women who wish to make slaves of them. I see that now. It's the selfish women they admire, the women who take their own way and insist on having all they want, not the women who love to serve them--not slavishly, but out of love. A selfish woman they can understand; but a woman who gives up something very precious to her they don't understand.

Maurice never understood my action in going to Africa. And you--I don't believe you ever understood it. You must have wondered at my coming as much as he did at my going. You were glad I came at the moment. Oh yes, you were glad. I know that. But afterwards you must have wondered, you did wonder. You thought it Quixotic, odd. You said to yourself, 'It was just like Hermione. How could she do it? How could she come to me if she really loved her husband?' And very likely my coming made you doubt my really loving Maurice. I am almost sure it did. I don't believe all these years you have ever understood what I felt about him, what his death meant to me, what life meant to me afterwards. I told--I tried to tell you in the cave--that day. But I don't think you really understood at all. And he--he didn't understand my love for him. But I suppose he didn't even want to. When I went away he simply forgot all about me.

That was it. I wasn't there, and he forgot. I wasn't there, and another woman was there--and that was enough for him. And I dare say--now--it is enough for most men, perhaps for every man. And then I'd made another mistake. I was always making mistakes when my heart led me. And I'd made a mistake in thinking that real people get beyond looks, the outside--and that then life begins. They don't--at least real men don't.

A woman may spend her heart's blood for a man through years, and for youthful charm and a face that is pretty, for the mere look in a pair of eyes or the curve of a mouth, he'll almost forget that she's alive, even when she's there before him. He'll take the other woman's part against her instinctively, whichever is in the right. If both women do exactly the same thing a man will find that the pretty woman has performed a miracle and the ugly woman made some preposterous mistake. That is how men are. That is how you are, I suppose, and that was Maurice, too. He forgot me for a peasant. But--she must have been pretty once. And I was always ugly!"

"Delarey loved you," Artois said, suddenly, interrupting her in a strong, deep voice, a voice that rang with true conviction.

"He never loved me. Perhaps he thought he did. He must have thought so.

And that first day--when we were coming up the mountain-side--"

She stopped. She was seized; she was held fast in the grip of a memory so intense, so poignant, that she made, she could make, no effort to release herself. She heard the drowsy wail of the Ceramella dropping down the mountain-side in the radiant heat of noon. She felt Maurice's warm hand. She remembered her words about the woman's need to love--"I wanted, I needed to love--do men ever feel that? Women do often, nearly always, I think." The Pastorale--it sounded in her ears. Or was it the sea that sounded, the sea in the abandoned chambers of the Palace of the Spirits? She listened. No, it was the Pastorale, that antique, simple, holy tune, that for her must always be connected with the thought of love, man's love for woman, and the Bambino's love for all the creatures of G.o.d. It flooded her heart, and beneath it sank down, like a drowning thing, for a moment the frightful bitterness that was alive in her heart to-night.

"Delarey loved you," Artois repeated. "He loved you on the first day in Sicily, and he loved you on the last."

"And--and the days between?"

Her voice spoke falteringly. In her voice there was a sound of pleading that struck into the very depths of his heart. The real Hermione was in that sound, the loving woman who needed love, who deserved a love as deep as that which she had given, as that which she surely still had to give.

"He loved you always, but he loved you in his way."

"In his way!" she repeated, with a sort of infinite, hopeless sadness.

"Yes, Hermione, in his way. Oh, we all have our ways, all our different ways of loving. But I don't believe a human being ever existed who had no way at all. Delarey's way was different from your way, so different that, now you know the truth of him, perhaps you can't believe he ever loved you. But he did. He was young, and he was hot-blooded--he was really of the South. And the sun got hold of him. And he betrayed you.

But he repented. That last day he was stricken, not by physical fear, but by a tremendous shame at what he had done to you, and perhaps, also, by fear lest you should ever know it. I sat with him by the wall, and I felt without at all fully understanding it the drama in his soul. But now I understand it. I'm sure I understand it. And I think the depth of a shame is very often the exact measure of the depth of a love. Perhaps, indeed, there is no more exact measure."

Again he thought of the episode with Vere, and of his determination always from henceforth to be absolutely sincere with himself and with those whom he really loved.