The Captives Part 39

Aunt Anne pa.s.sed Maggie and left the room.

Well, then, there was the situation. As she remained in the empty room she felt relief because now she knew where she was.

If only she could keep in touch with Martin then nothing else at all mattered. But that must be, otherwise she felt that she would rush at them all and tread them down and break doors and windows to get at him.

Meanwhile, how they must all have been talking! She felt no especial anger against Caroline Smith. It had been her own fault for trusting that note to her honour. Caroline had no honour, of course. Maggie might have guessed that from the way that she talked about other people. And then probably she herself was in love with Martin ... She sat down, staring in front of her, thinking. They all knew, Amy Warlock, Mr. Thurston, Miss Avies--knew about that wonderful, marvellous thing, her love for Martin, his for her. They were turning it over in their hands, soiling it, laughing at it, sneering at it. And what were they doing to Martin? At that thought she sprang up and began hurriedly to walk about. Oh, they must leave him alone! What were they saying to him? They were telling him how ridiculous it was to have anything to do with a plain, ugly girl! And he? Was he defending her?

At the sudden suggestion of his disloyalty indignation fought in her with some strange, horrible suspicion. Yes, it would come back, that thought. He was weak. He had told her that he was. He was weak. She KNEW that he was. She would not lie to herself. And then at the thought of his weakness the maternal love in her that was the strongest instinct in her character flooded her body and soul, so that she did not mind if he were weak, but only wanted to defend him, to protect him ...

Strangely, she felt more sure of him at that moment when she was conscious of his weakness than she had been when she a.s.serted his strength. Beneath that weakness he would be true to her because he needed her. No one else could give him what she did; he had said so again and again. And it would always be so. He would have to come back to her however often he denied her.

She felt happier then. She could face them all. She had been bad to her aunts, too. She had done them harm, and they had been nothing but goodness to her. Apart from leaving Martin she would do all, these next weeks, to please them.

She went up to her bedroom, and when she reached it she realised, with a little pang of fright, that she was a prisoner. No more meetings outside Hatchards, no more teas, no more walks ... She looked out of the window down into the street. It was a long way down and the figures walking were puppets, not human at all. But the thing to be thought of now was the question of letters. How was she to get them to the Strand Office and receive from them Martin's letters in return? After long, anxious thought there seemed to be only one way. There was a kitchen-maid, Jane, who came every morning to the house, did odd jobs in the kitchen, and went home again in the evening. Maggie had seen the girl about the house a number of times, had noticed her for her rebellious, independent look, and had felt some sympathy with her because she was under the harsh dominion of Martha.

Maggie had spoken to her once or twice and the girl had seemed grateful, smiling in a kind of dark, tearful way under her untidy hair.

Maggie believed that she would help her; of course the girl would get into trouble were she discovered, and dismissal would certainly follow, but it was clear enough that she would not in any case be under Martha's government very long. Martha never kept kitchen-maids for more than a month at a time.

She sat down at once and wrote her first letter, sitting on her bed.

DARLING MARTIN--There has been an explosion here. The aunts have told me to give you up. I could not promise them that I would not see you and so I am a prisoner here until I leave them altogether. I won't leave them until after the New Year, partly because I gave a promise and partly because it would make more trouble for you if I were turned out just now. I can't leave the house at all unless I am with one of them, so I am going to try and send the letters by the kitchen-maid here who goes home every day, and she will fetch yours when she posts mine. I'll give her a note to tell the post people that she is to have them. Martin, dear, try and write every day, even if it's only the shortest line, because it is dreadful to be shut up all day, and I think of you all the time and wonder how you are. Don't be unhappy, Martin--that's the one thing I couldn't bear. If you're not, I'm not.

There's no reason to be unhappy about me. I'm very cheerful indeed if I know that you are all right. You are all right, aren't you? I do want to know what happened when you got home. I quite understand that the one thing you must do now is to keep your father well and not let anything trouble him. If the thought of me troubles him, then tell him that you are thinking of nothing but him now and how to make him happy.

But don't let them change your feeling for me. You know me better than any of them do and I am just as you know me, every bit. The aunts are very angry because they say I deceived them, but they haven't any right to tell me who I shall love, have they? No one has. I am myself and n.o.body's ever cared for me except you--and Uncle Mathew, so I don't see why I should think of anybody. The aunts never cared for me really--only to make me religious.

But, Martin, never forget I love you so much I can never change. I'm not one who changes, and although I'm young now I shall be just the same when I'm old. I have the ring and I look at it all the time. I like to think you have the locket. Please write, dear Martin, or I'll find it very difficult to stay quiet here, and I know I ought to stay quiet for your sake.

Your loving,

MAGGIE.

She put it in an envelope, wrote the address as he had told her, and then set out to find Jane. It was four o'clock in the afternoon now and the house, on this winter's day, was dark and dim.

The gas was always badly lit in the pa.s.sages, spitting and muttering like an imprisoned animal. The house was so quiet when Maggie came out on to the stairs that there seemed to be no one in it. She found her way down into the hall and saw Thomas the cat there, moving like a black ghost along the floor. He came up to her and rubbed himself in his sinister, mysterious way against her dress. When she turned towards the green baize door that led towards the kitchen regions he stood back from her, stole on to the lower steps of the staircase and watched her with steady, unblinking eyes. She pushed the door and went through into the cold pa.s.sage that smelt of cheese and bacon and damp earth. There seemed to be no one about, and then suddenly the pantry door opened and Jane came out. She stopped when she saw Maggie.

"Where's Martha?" asked Maggie in a low voice.

The whisper seemed to tell Jane at once that this was to be a confidential matter. She jerked with a dirty thumb in the direction of the kitchen.

"In there. Cooking the dinner," she whispered back. She was untidy, there were streaks of black on her face, but her eyes looked up at Maggie with a friendly, roguish glance, as though they had already something in common. Maggie saw that she had no time to lose. She came close to her.

"Jane," she said, "I'm in trouble. It's only you who can help me.

Here's a letter that I want posted--just in the ordinary way. Can you do that for me?"

Jane, suddenly smiling, nodded her head.

"And there's something else," Maggie went on. "To-morrow morning, before you come here, I want you to go to the Strand post-office--you know the one opposite the station--and ask for a letter addressed to me. I've written on a piece of paper here that you're to be given any letters of mine. Give it to me somehow when no one's looking. Do you understand?"

Jane nodded her head. Maggie gave her the note and also half-a-crown, but Jane pushed back the money.

"I don't want no money," she said in a hoa.r.s.e whisper. "You're the only one here decent to me."

At that moment the kitchen door opened and Martha appeared. When she saw Jane she came up to her and said: "Now then, idling again! What about the potatoes?"

She looked at Maggie with her usual surly suspicion.

"I came down for a candle," Maggie said, "for my room. Will you give me one, please?"

Jane had vanished.

Martin, meanwhile, after Maggie left him, had returned home in no happy state. There had leapt upon him again that mood of sullen impatient rebellion that he knew so well--a mood that really was like a possession, so that, struggle as he--might, he seemed always in the grip of some iron-fingered menacing figure.

It was possession in a sense that to many normal, happy people in this world is so utterly unknown that they can only scornfully name it weakness and so pa.s.s on their way. But those human beings who have suffered from it do in very truth feel as though they had been caught up into another world, a world of slavery, moral galley-driving with a master high above them, driving them with a lash that their chained limbs may not resist. Such men, if they try to explain that torment, can often point to the very day and even hour of their sudden slavery; at such a tick of the clock the clouds gather, the very houses and street are weighted with a cold malignity, thoughts, desires, impulses are all checked, perverted, driven and counter-driven by a mysterious force. Let no man who has not known such hours and the terror of such a dominion utter judgment upon his neighbour.

To Martin the threat of this conflict with his father over Maggie was the one crisis that he had wished to avoid. But his character, which was naturally easy and friendly and unsuspicious, had confused him.

Those three weeks with Maggie had been so happy, so free from all morbidity and complication, that he had forgotten the world outside.

For a moment when Maggie had told him that she had given her note to Caroline he had been afraid, but he had been lulled as the days pa.s.sed and nothing interfered with their security. Now he was suddenly plunged into the middle of a confusion that was all the more complicated because he could not tell what his mother and his, sister were thinking. He knew that Amy had disliked him ever since his return, and that that dislike had been changed into something fiercer since his declared opposition to Thurston. His mother he simply did not understand at all. She spoke to him still with the same affection and tenderness, but behind the words he felt a hard purpose and a mysterious aloofness.

She was not like his mother at all; it was as though some spy had been introduced into the house in his mother's clothing.

But for them he did not care; it was his father of whom he must think.

Here, too, there was a mystery from which he was deliberately kept. He knew, of course, that they were all expecting some crisis; as the days advanced he could feel that the excitement increased. He knew that his father had declared that he had visions and that there was to be a revelation very shortly; but of these visions and this revelation he heard only indirectly from others. His father said nothing to him of these things, and at the ordinary Chapel services on Sunday there was no allusion to them. He knew that the Inside Saints had a society and rules of their own inside the larger body, and from that inner society he was quite definitely excluded. Of that exclusion he would have been only too glad had it not been for his father, but now when he saw him growing from day to day more haggard and worn, more aloof from all human society, when lie saw him wrapped further and further into some strange and as it seemed to him insane absorption, he was determined to fight his way into the heart of it. His growing intimacy with Maggie had relieved him, for a moment, of the intensity of this other anxiety.

Now suddenly he was flung back into the very thick of it. His earlier plan of forcing his father out of all this network of chicanery and charlatanism now returned. He felt that if he could only seize his father and forcibly abduct him and take him away from Amy and Thurston and the rest, and all the a.s.sociations of the Chapel, he might cure him and lead him back to health and happiness again.

And yet he did not know. He had not himself escaped from it all by leaving it, and then that undermining bewildering suspicion that perhaps after all there was something in all of this, that it was not only charlatanism, confused and disconcerted him. He was like a man who hears sounds and faint cries behind a thick wall, and there are no doors and windows, and the bricks are too stout to be torn apart.

He had been behind that wall all his life ...

Amy's allusion to Maggie in the morning had been very slight, but had shown quite clearly that she had heard all, and probably more, than the truth. When he returned that morning he found his mother alone, knitting a pink woollen comforter, her gold spectacles on the end of her nose, her fresh lace cap crisp and dainty on her white hair--the very picture of the dearest old lady in the world.

"Mother," he began at once, "what did Amy mean this morning about myself and Maggie Cardinal?"

"Maggie who, dear?" his mother asked.

"Maggie Cardinal--the Cardinal niece, you know," he said impatiently.

"Did she say anything? I don't remember."

"Yes, mother. You remember perfectly well. She said that they were all talking about me and Maggie."

"Did she?" The old lady slowly counted her st.i.tches. "Well, dear, I shouldn't worry about what they all say--whoever 'they' may be."

"Oh, I don't care for that," he answered contemptuously, "although all the same I'm not going to have Amy running that girl down. She's been against her from the first. What I want to know is has Amy been to father with this? Because if she has I'm going to stop it. I'm not going to have her bothering father with bits of gossip that she's picked up by listening behind other peoples' key-holes."

Amy, meanwhile, had come in and heard this last sentence.

"Thank you, Martin," she said quietly.

He turned to her with fury. "What did you mean at breakfast," he asked, "by what you said about myself and Maggie Cardinal?"

She looked at him with contempt but no very active hostility.