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_ The afternoon was already growing dark when the two other wayfarers,
Mary and Ralph Denham, came out on the high road beyond the outskirts
of Lincoln. The high road, as they both felt, was better suited to
this return journey than the open country, and for the first mile or
so of the way they spoke little. In his own mind Ralph was following
the passage of the Otway carriage over the heath; he then went back to
the five or ten minutes that he had spent with Katharine, and examined
each word with the care that a scholar displays upon the
irregularities of an ancient text. He was determined that the glow,
the romance, the atmosphere of this meeting should not paint what he
must in future regard as sober facts. On her side Mary was silent, not
because her thoughts took much handling, but because her mind seemed
empty of thought as her heart of feeling. Only Ralph's presence, as
she knew, preserved this numbness, for she could foresee a time of
loneliness when many varieties of pain would beset her. At the present
moment her effort was to preserve what she could of the wreck of her
self-respect, for such she deemed that momentary glimpse of her love
so involuntarily revealed to Ralph. In the light of reason it did not
much matter, perhaps, but it was her instinct to be careful of that
vision of herself which keeps pace so evenly beside every one of us,
and had been damaged by her confession. The gray night coming down
over the country was kind to her; and she thought that one of these
days she would find comfort in sitting upon the earth, alone, beneath
a tree. Looking through the darkness, she marked the swelling ground
and the tree. Ralph made her start by saying abruptly;
"What I was going to say when we were interrupted at lunch was that if
you go to America I shall come, too. It can't be harder to earn a
living there than it is here. However, that's not the point. The point
is, Mary, that I want to marry you. Well, what do you say?" He spoke
firmly, waited for no answer, and took her arm in his. "You know me by
this time, the good and the bad," he went on. "You know my tempers.
I've tried to let you know my faults. Well, what do you say, Mary?"
She said nothing, but this did not seem to strike him.
"In most ways, at least in the important ways, as you said, we know
each other and we think alike. I believe you are the only person in
the world I could live with happily. And if you feel the same about
me--as you do, don't you, Mary?--we should make each other happy."
Here he paused, and seemed to be in no hurry for an answer; he seemed,
indeed, to be continuing his own thoughts.
"Yes, but I'm afraid I couldn't do it," Mary said at last. The casual
and rather hurried way in which she spoke, together with the fact that
she was saying the exact opposite of what he expected her to say,
baffled him so much that he instinctively loosened his clasp upon her
arm and she withdrew it quietly.
"You couldn't do it?" he asked.
"No, I couldn't marry you," she replied.
"You don't care for me?"
She made no answer.
"Well, Mary," he said, with a curious laugh, "I must be an arrant
fool, for I thought you did." They walked for a minute or two in
silence, and suddenly he turned to her, looked at her, and exclaimed:
"I don't believe you, Mary. You're not telling me the truth."
"I'm too tired to argue, Ralph," she replied, turning her head away
from him. "I ask you to believe what I say. I can't marry you; I don't
want to marry you."
The voice in which she stated this was so evidently the voice of one
in some extremity of anguish that Ralph had no course but to obey her.
And as soon as the tone of her voice had died out, and the surprise
faded from his mind, he found himself believing that she had spoken
the truth, for he had but little vanity, and soon her refusal seemed a
natural thing to him. He slipped through all the grades of despondency
until he reached a bottom of absolute gloom. Failure seemed to mark
the whole of his life; he had failed with Katharine, and now he had
failed with Mary. Up at once sprang the thought of Katharine, and with
it a sense of exulting freedom, but this he checked instantly. No good
had ever come to him from Katharine; his whole relationship with her
had been made up of dreams; and as he thought of the little substance
there had been in his dreams he began to lay the blame of the present
catastrophe upon his dreams.
"Haven't I always been thinking of Katharine while I was with Mary? I
might have loved Mary if it hadn't been for that idiocy of mine. She
cared for me once, I'm certain of that, but I tormented her so with my
humors that I let my chances slip, and now she won't risk marrying me.
And this is what I've made of my life--nothing, nothing, nothing."
The tramp of their boots upon the dry road seemed to asseverate
nothing, nothing, nothing. Mary thought that this silence was the
silence of relief; his depression she ascribed to the fact that he had
seen Katharine and parted from her, leaving her in the company of
William Rodney. She could not blame him for loving Katharine, but
that, when he loved another, he should ask her to marry him--that
seemed to her the cruellest treachery. Their old friendship and its
firm base upon indestructible qualities of character crumbled, and her
whole past seemed foolish, herself weak and credulous, and Ralph
merely the shell of an honest man. Oh, the past--so much made up of
Ralph; and now, as she saw, made up of something strange and false and
other than she had thought it. She tried to recapture a saying she had
made to help herself that morning, as Ralph paid the bill for
luncheon; but she could see him paying the bill more vividly than she
could remember the phrase. Something about truth was in it; how to see
the truth is our great chance in this world.
"If you don't want to marry me," Ralph now began again, without
abruptness, with diffidence rather, "there is no need why we should
cease to see each other, is there? Or would you rather that we should
keep apart for the present?"
"Keep apart? I don't know--I must think about it."
"Tell me one thing, Mary," he resumed; "have I done anything to make
you change your mind about me?"
She was immensely tempted to give way to her natural trust in him,
revived by the deep and now melancholy tones of his voice, and to tell
him of her love, and of what had changed it. But although it seemed
likely that she would soon control her anger with him, the certainty
that he did not love her, confirmed by every word of his proposal,
forbade any freedom of speech. To hear him speak and to feel herself
unable to reply, or constrained in her replies, was so painful that
she longed for the time when she should be alone. A more pliant woman
would have taken this chance of an explanation, whatever risks
attached to it; but to one of Mary's firm and resolute temperament
there was degradation in the idea of self-abandonment; let the waves
of emotion rise ever so high, she could not shut her eyes to what she
conceived to be the truth. Her silence puzzled Ralph. He searched his
memory for words or deeds that might have made her think badly of him.
In his present mood instances came but too quickly, and on top of them
this culminating proof of his baseness--that he had asked her to marry
him when his reasons for such a proposal were selfish and
half-hearted.
"You needn't answer," he said grimly. "There are reasons enough, I
know. But must they kill our friendship, Mary? Let me keep that, at
least."
"Oh," she thought to herself, with a sudden rush of anguish which
threatened disaster to her self-respect, "it has come to this--to
this--when I could have given him everything!"
"Yes, we can still be friends," she said, with what firmness she could
muster.
"I shall want your friendship," he said. He added, "If you find it
possible, let me see you as often as you can. The oftener the better.
I shall want your help."
She promised this, and they went on to talk calmly of things that had
no reference to their feelings--a talk which, in its constraint, was
infinitely sad to both of them.
One more reference was made to the state of things between them late
that night, when Elizabeth had gone to her room, and the two young men
had stumbled off to bed in such a state of sleep that they hardly felt
the floor beneath their feet after a day's shooting.
Mary drew her chair a little nearer to the fire, for the logs were
burning low, and at this time of night it was hardly worth while to
replenish them. Ralph was reading, but she had noticed for some time
that his eyes instead of following the print were fixed rather above
the page with an intensity of gloom that came to weigh upon her mind.
She had not weakened in her resolve not to give way, for reflection
had only made her more bitterly certain that, if she gave way, it
would be to her own wish and not to his. But she had determined that
there was no reason why he should suffer if her reticence were the
cause of his suffering. Therefore, although she found it painful, she
spoke:
"You asked me if I had changed my mind about you, Ralph," she said. "I
think there's only one thing. When you asked me to marry you, I don't
think you meant it. That made me angry--for the moment. Before, you'd
always spoken the truth."
Ralph's book slid down upon his knee and fell upon the floor. He
rested his forehead on his hand and looked into the fire. He was
trying to recall the exact words in which he had made his proposal to
Mary.
"I never said I loved you," he said at last.
She winced; but she respected him for saying what he did, for this,
after all, was a fragment of the truth which she had vowed to live by.
"And to me marriage without love doesn't seem worth while," she said.
"Well, Mary, I'm not going to press you," he said. "I see you don't
want to marry me. But love--don't we all talk a great deal of nonsense
about it? What does one mean? I believe I care for you more genuinely
than nine men out of ten care for the women they're in love with. It's
only a story one makes up in one's mind about another person, and one
knows all the time it isn't true. Of course one knows; why, one's
always taking care not to destroy the illusion. One takes care not to
see them too often, or to be alone with them for too long together.
It's a pleasant illusion, but if you're thinking of the risks of
marriage, it seems to me that the risk of marrying a person you're in
love with is something colossal."
"I don't believe a word of that, and what's more you don't, either,"
she replied with anger. "However, we don't agree; I only wanted you to
understand." She shifted her position, as if she were about to go. An
instinctive desire to prevent her from leaving the room made Ralph
rise at this point and begin pacing up and down the nearly empty
kitchen, checking his desire, each time he reached the door, to open
it and step out into the garden. A moralist might have said that at
this point his mind should have been full of self-reproach for the
suffering he had caused. On the contrary, he was extremely angry, with
the confused impotent anger of one who finds himself unreasonably but
efficiently frustrated. He was trapped by the illogicality of human
life. The obstacles in the way of his desire seemed to him purely
artificial, and yet he could see no way of removing them. Mary's
words, the tone of her voice even, angered him, for she would not help
him. She was part of the insanely jumbled muddle of a world which
impedes the sensible life. He would have liked to slam the door or
break the hind legs of a chair, for the obstacles had taken some such
curiously substantial shape in his mind.
"I doubt that one human being ever understands another," he said,
stopping in his march and confronting Mary at a distance of a few
feet.
"Such damned liars as we all are, how can we? But we can try. If you
don't want to marry me, don't; but the position you take up about
love, and not seeing each other--isn't that mere sentimentality? You
think I've behaved very badly," he continued, as she did not speak.
"Of course I behave badly; but you can't judge people by what they do.
You can't go through life measuring right and wrong with a foot-rule.
That's what you're always doing, Mary; that's what you're doing now."
She saw herself in the Suffrage Office, delivering judgment, meting
out right and wrong, and there seemed to her to be some justice in the
charge, although it did not affect her main position.
"I'm not angry with you," she said slowly. "I will go on seeing you,
as I said I would."
It was true that she had promised that much already, and it was
difficult for him to say what more it was that he wanted--some
intimacy, some help against the ghost of Katharine, perhaps, something
that he knew he had no right to ask; and yet, as he sank into his
chair and looked once more at the dying fire it seemed to him that he
had been defeated, not so much by Mary as by life itself. He felt
himself thrown back to the beginning of life again, where everything
has yet to be won; but in extreme youth one has an ignorant hope. He
was no longer certain that he would triumph. _
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