Running Sands Part 57

Stainton moved to the chair, but did not seat himself. He gripped its back and leaned across the back toward her.

So they stood, facing each other.

"This has been a 'good match' for me," she said. "It was a 'sensible alliance.' I 'did well for myself.' And to think that hundreds and hundreds of young girls are being carefully educated and brought up and trained in schools or in their own homes to be fitted for and to hope--actually to hope!--for this. 'A good match!' I was poor and young, and I married a rich man older than myself; but I was never for one minute your wife."

Stainton made a sally to recapture the situation.

"You were a good imitation," he said.

"Never," said she. "Not even that. What you wanted wasn't a wife, anyhow. You loved your crooked theories so well that you were blind and couldn't see that life was straight. You couldn't change what was real, so you tried to bend what was ideal to make it meet the real, and what was ideal snapped, and you didn't even know it snapped. Oh, I know what you wanted. Not a wife. You wanted someone that was all at once an admirer and a servant and a mistress. You didn't know it, but that was it: somebody who'd be the three things for the wages of the third. And me: I was something that my aunt's husband didn't want about the house, and so I was shuffled off on you. Is that being your wife?"

"For a time you were a good imitation."

"I tried to be what you wanted me to be, if that is what you mean. I tried. I took your word for what a wife was and what love was. But I soon found out, and then all the time I was saying to myself that things would change, that they were so bad they must change--and they wouldn't."

"So you bluffed?" he asked with the hint of a sneer on his long upper lip.

"I wanted to be honest." Her voice softened for the phrase. "Oh, don't you remember, at the very start, how I _said_ I wanted to be honest? But somehow all life, all the world, every littlest thing that happened, seemed to join against being honest. If G.o.d wants you to be honest, why does He make it so hard? The truth was that our being married was a lie, and so all we did was lies and lies."

"You told me that I gave you all you wanted, Muriel."

"All that you could give, but not the one thing you had promised to give--not what I gave you--not youth." Her tone hardened again. "What was the rest to that? If I told you that you gave me all I wanted, you always _knew_ that _you_ had all _you_ wanted. Well, you had. But did you ever think that a girl begins life with plans and dreams as much as a man does? You sinned against me and against Nature. Oh, yes, and I sinned too. I sinned ignorantly, but I sinned against Nature. I let myself be married to a man three times my age--and this is Nature's punishment. You taught me, you elaborately taught me, to be hungry, and then you were scared and angry because you couldn't satisfy my hunger, and because I _was_ hungry. We had only one thing in common, and that was the thing that couldn't last. Well, then, I'll tell you now"--she flashed it out at him--"what happened to me while you were selling the mine was not an accident!"

This, even in his most suspicious moments, he had not foreseen. Anger and horror struggled for him.

"Muriel," he cried, "you don't mean----"

"Yes, I do, I do! For some reason, I don't know why, I had got that girl's address, that girl in the box at the Bal Tabarin that night, and I went to her, and she sent me to someone. I knew once and for all that I didn't love you. I knew you were too old for it to be right for you to have a child. I knew it was wrong for me to have a child when I didn't want one and didn't know anything about taking care of one. Don't think I didn't suffer. It wasn't all physical, either. Do you remember the time you took me to buy baby-clothes? I thought I would go crazy--_crazy_! But I knew I had the right to refuse to be a mother against my will!"

He did not try to show her what all his training cried out against her deed. He could not try to indicate the injury that she had most likely done her health. He was too nearly stunned. He only asked:

"You loved him--then?"

"I didn't love you."

"Did you love him?"

"No. I thought I hated him. Later, when I knew I loved him, I even lied to him and told him I didn't love him. I can't forgive myself that. But then, when I did _that_ thing, I only knew what I've told you."

Stainton turned away. She saw him make an effort to straighten himself, but his shoulders bent and his head drooped. He was shuffling toward the door.

Nevertheless, Muriel was now ruthlessly honest.

"But I love him now," she said.

"Yes," said Stainton. His voice was dull.

"When you married me," said Muriel, "I knew nothing--nothing. I was no more fit to be your wife than you, because you knew so much and so little, were fit to be my husband."

Stainton half turned.

"And he?" Jim asked.

"He loves me: you only liked having me."

He turned slowly away again.

She thought that she heard him whisper:

"No child!"

"Oh, yes," she said. "I have lost everything else; but I have lost everything but a child. I only wish I could lose that, but I have a baby, a little dead baby. It will never leave me: it's the little ghost-baby of the woman I never had a chance to be."

He said nothing. He went down to the dining-room, merely for want of going somewhere away from her. He sat there in the darkness until, an hour later, he heard her shut and bolt the bedroom door. He took a candle in his shaking hand and studied in a mirror his gaunt grey face.

One of the twin fears that had dominated his earlier life was still with him. She was right; he was growing old.

XX

HUSBAND AND LOVER

At eight o'clock in the morning, when the warm sun beat upon the sea and flooded the rooms of the villa, Stainton, still clad in his travelling clothes, returned to the drawing-room and rang the bell for the maid.

"Go to Mrs. Stainton's room," he said to the maid, who spoke more or less English, "and tell her that, as soon as she is ready to see me, I----"

"But, monsieur----"

"You may add that I won't keep her fifteen minutes."

"But, monsieur, it is since an hour madame is gone out."

"Gone out?" Why had she gone so early and so silently? Had she not tried to conceal her exit, he would have heard her. The natural suspicion flashed through Stainton's mind. "Why didn't you tell me this before?"

"Madame say you are not to be disturbed."

"Hum. I see. Did she leave any message?"

"But, yes; she leave this note here. She say the note to be given to monsieur only when monsieur demanded her whereabout."

Stainton took the envelope that the girl handed to him and, as the maid left the room, opened it. He was reading it through for the twentieth time when the domestic reappeared.

"A gentleman to see monsieur," she said.

"What gentleman?" asked Stainton, though he guessed the answer to his question.