Sanctuary — Context and Discussion

terrace, held in check by her usual inclination to linger on the threshold of her pleasures; but now something drew her toward him, and she went quickly down the steps and across the lawn.

“Denis, you look tired. I was afraid something had happened.”

She had slipped her hand through his arm, and as they moved forward she glanced up at him, struck not so much by any new look in his face as by the fact that her approach had made no change in it.

“I am rather tired.--Is your father in?”

“Papa?” She looked up in surprise. “He went to town yesterday. Don’t you remember?”

“Of course--I’d forgotten. You’re alone, then?” She dropped his arm and stood before him. He was very pale now, with the furrowed look of extreme physical weariness.

“Denis--are you ill? _Has_ anything happened?”

He forced a smile. “Yes--but you needn’t look so frightened.”

She drew a deep breath of reassurance. _He_ was safe, after all! And all else, for a moment, seemed to swing below the rim of her world.

“Your mother--?” she then said, with a fresh start of fear.

“It’s not my mother.” They had reached the terrace, and he moved toward the house. “Let us go indoors. There’s such a beastly glare out here.”

He seemed to find relief in the cool obscurity of the drawing-room, where, after the brightness of the afternoon light, their faces were almost indistinguishable to each other. She sat down, and he moved a few paces away. Before the writing-table he paused to look at the neatly sorted heaps of wedding-cards.

“They are to be sent out to-morrow?”

He turned back and stood before her.

“It’s about the woman,” he began abruptly--“the woman who pretended to be Arthur’s wife.”

Kate started as at the clutch of an unacknowledged fear.

“She _was_ his wife, then?”

Peyton made an impatient movement of negation. “If she was, why didn’t she prove it? She hadn’t a shred of evidence. The courts rejected her appeal.”

“Well, she’s dead.” He paused, and the next words came with difficulty. “She and the child.”

“The child? There was a child?”

Kate started up and then sank down. These were not things about which young girls were told. The confused sense of horror had been nothing to this first sharp edge of fact.

“How do you know? My father said she had gone away--gone back to the West--”

“So we thought. But this morning we found her.”

He motioned toward the window. “Out there--in the lake.”

She drooped before him shudderingly, her eyes hidden, as though to exclude the vision. “She had drowned herself?”

“Oh, poor thing--poor thing!”

They paused awhile, the minutes delving an abyss between them till he threw a few irrelevant words across the silence.

“One of the gardeners found them.”

“It was sufficiently horrible.”

“Horrible--oh!” She had swung round again to her pole. “Poor Denis! _You_ were not there--_you_ didn’t have to--?”

“I had to see her.” She felt the instant relief in his voice. He could talk now, could distend his nerves in the warm air of her sympathy. “I had to identify her.” He rose nervously and began to pace the room. “It’s knocked the wind out of me. I--my God! I couldn’t foresee it, could I?” He halted before her with outstretched hands of argument. “I did all I could--it’s not _my_ fault, is it?”

“She wouldn’t take the money--” He broke off, checked by her awakened glance.

“The money? What money?” Her face changed, hardening as his relaxed. “Had you offered her _money_ to give up the case?”

He stared a moment, and then dismissed the implication with a laugh.

“No--no; after the case was decided against her. She seemed hard up, and I sent Hinton to her with a cheque.”

“And she refused it?”

“Oh, I don’t know--the usual thing. That she’d only wanted to prove she was his wife--on the child’s account. That she’d never wanted his money. Hinton said she was very quiet--not in the least excited--but she sent back the cheque.”

Kate sat motionless, her head bent, her hands clasped about her knees. She no longer looked at Peyton.

“Could there have been a mistake?” she asked slowly.

She raised her head now, and fixed her eyes on his, with a strange insistence of observation. “Could they have been married?”

“The courts didn’t think so.”

“Could the courts have been mistaken?”

He started up again, and threw himself into another chair. “Good God, Kate! We gave her every chance to prove her case--why didn’t she do it? You don’t know what you’re talking about--such things are kept from girls. Why, whenever a man of Arthur’s kind dies, such--such women turn up. There are lawyers who live on such jobs--ask your father about it. Of course, this woman expected to be bought off--”

“But if she wouldn’t take your money?”

“She expected a big sum, I mean, to drop the case. When she found we meant to fight it, she saw the game was up. I suppose it was her last throw, and she was desperate; we don’t know how many times she may have been through the same thing before. That kind of woman is always trying to make money out of the heirs of any man who--who has been about with them.”

Kate received this in silence. She had a sense of walking along a narrow ledge of consciousness above a sheer hallucinating depth into which she dared not look. But the depth drew her, and she plunged one terrified glance into it.

“But the child--the child was Arthur’s?”

Peyton shrugged his shoulders. “There again--how can we tell? Why, I don’t suppose the woman herself--I wish to heaven your father were here to explain!”

She rose and crossed over to him, laying her hands on his shoulders with a gesture almost maternal.

“Don’t let us talk of it,” she said. “You did all you could. Think what a comfort you were to poor Arthur.”

He let her hands lie where she had placed them, without response or resistance.

“I tried--I tried hard to keep him straight!”

“We all know that--every one knows it. And we know how grateful he was--what a difference it made to him in the end. It would have been dreadful to think of his dying out there alone.”

She drew him down on a sofa and seated herself by his side. A deep lassitude was upon him, and the hand she had possessed herself of lay in her hold inert.

“It was splendid of you to travel day and night as you did. And then that dreadful week before he died! But for you he would have died alone among strangers.”

He sat silent, his head dropping forward, his eyes fixed. “Among strangers,” he repeated absently.

She looked up, as if struck by a sudden thought. “That poor woman--did you ever see her while you were out there?”

He drew his hand away and gathered his brows together as if in an effort of remembrance.

“I saw her--oh, yes, I saw her.” He pushed the tumbled hair from his forehead and stood up. “Let us go out,” he said. “My head is in a fog. I want to get away from it all.”

A wave of compunction drew her to her feet.

“It was my fault! I ought not to have asked so many questions.” She turned and rang the bell. “I’ll order the ponies--we shall have time for a drive before sunset.”

With the sunset in their faces they swept through the keen-scented autumn air at the swiftest pace of Kate’s ponies. She had given the reins to Peyton, and he had turned the horses’ heads away from the lake, rising by woody upland lanes to the high pastures which still held the sunlight. The horses were fresh enough to claim his undivided attention, and he drove in silence, his smooth fair profile turned to his companion, who sat silent also.

Kate Orme was engaged in one of those rapid mental excursions which were forever sweeping her from the straight path of the actual into uncharted regions of conjecture. Her survey of life had always been marked by the tendency to seek out ultimate relations, to extend her researches to the limit of her imaginative experience. But hitherto she had been like some young captive brought up in a windowless palace whose painted walls she takes for the actual world. Now the palace had been shaken to its base, and through a cleft in the walls she looked out upon life. For the first moment all was indistinguishable blackness; then she began to detect vague shapes and confused gestures in the depths. There were people below there, men like Denis, girls like herself--for under the unlikeness she felt the strange affinity--all struggling in that awful coil of moral darkness, with agonized hands reaching up for rescue. Her heart shrank from the horror of it, and then, in a passion of pity, drew back to the edge of the abyss. Suddenly her eyes turned toward Denis. His face was grave, but less disturbed. And men knew about these things! They carried this abyss in their bosoms, and went about smiling, and sat at the feet of innocence. Could it be that Denis--Denis even--Ah, no! She remembered what he had been to poor Arthur; she understood, now, the vague allusions to what he had tried to do for his brother. He had seen Arthur down there, in that coiling blackness, and had leaned over and tried to drag him out. But Arthur was too deep down, and his arms were interlocked with other arms--they had dragged each other deeper, poor souls, like drowning people who fight together in the waves! Kate’s visualizing habit gave a hateful precision and persistency to the image she had evoked--she could not rid herself of the vision of anguished shapes striving together in the darkness. The horror of it took her by the throat--she drew a choking breath, and felt the tears on her face.

Peyton turned to her. The horses were climbing a hill, and his attention had strayed from them.

“This has done me good,” he began; but as he looked his voice changed. “Kate! What is it? Why are you crying? Oh, for God’s sake, _don’t_!” he ended, his hand closing on her wrist.

She steadied herself and raised her eyes to his.

“I--I couldn’t help it,” she stammered, struggling in the sudden release of her pent compassion. “It seems so awful that we should stand so close to this horror--that it might have been you who--”

“I who--what on earth do you mean?” he broke in stridently.

“Oh, don’t you see? I found myself exulting that you and I were so far from it--above it--safe in ourselves and each other--and then the other feeling came--the sense of selfishness, of going by on the other side; and I tried to realize that it might have been you and I who--who were down there in the night and the flood--”

Peyton let the whip fall on the ponies’ flanks. “Upon my soul,” he said with a laugh, “you must have a nice opinion of both of us.”

The words fell chillingly on the blaze of her self-immolation. Would she never learn to remember that Denis was incapable of mounting such hypothetical pyres? He might be as alive as herself to the direct demands of duty, but of its imaginative claims he was robustly unconscious. The thought brought a wholesome reaction of thankfulness.

“Ah, well,” she said, the sunset dilating through her tears, “don’t you see that I can bear to think such things only because they’re impossibilities? It’s easy to look over into the depths if one has a rampart to lean on. What I most pity poor Arthur for is that, instead of that woman lying there, so dreadfully dead, there might have been a girl like me, so exquisitely alive because of him; but it seems cruel, doesn’t it, to let what he was not add ever so little to the value of what you are? To let him contribute ever so little to my happiness by the difference there is between you?”

She was conscious, as she spoke, of straying again beyond his reach, through intricacies of sensation new even to her exploring susceptibilities. A happy literalness usually enabled him to strike a short cut through such labyrinths, and rejoin her smiling on the other side; but now she became wonderingly aware that he had been caught in the thick of her hypothesis.

“It’s the difference that makes you care for me, then?” he broke out, with a kind of violence which seemed to renew his clutch on her wrist.

He lashed the ponies again, so sharply that a murmur escaped her, and he drew them up, quivering, with an inconsequent “Steady, boys,” at which their back-laid ears protested.

“It’s because I’m moral and respectable, and all that, that you’re fond of me,” he went on; “you’re--you’re simply in love with my virtues. You couldn’t imagine caring if I were down there in the ditch, as you say, with Arthur?”

The question fell on a silence which seemed to deepen suddenly within herself. Every thought hung bated on the sense that something was coming: her whole consciousness became a void to receive it.

He turned on her almost savagely. “I don’t want your pity, you know,” he burst out. “You can keep that for Arthur. I had an idea women loved men for themselves--through everything, I mean. But I wouldn’t steal your love--I don’t want it on false pretenses, you understand. Go and look into other men’s lives, that’s all I ask of you. I slipped into it--it was just a case of holding my tongue when I ought to have spoken--but I--I--for God’s sake, don’t sit there staring! I suppose you’ve seen all along that I knew he was married to the woman.”

The housekeeper’s reminding her that Mr. Orme would be at home the next day for dinner, and did she think he would like the venison with claret sauce or jelly, roused Kate to the first consciousness of her surroundings. Her father would return on the morrow: he would give to the dressing of the venison such minute consideration as, in his opinion, every detail affecting his comfort or convenience quite obviously merited. And if it were not the venison it would be something else; if it were not the housekeeper it would be Mr. Orme, charged with the results of a conference with his agent, a committee-meeting at his club, or any of the other incidents which, by happening to himself, became events. Kate found herself caught in the inexorable continuity of life, found herself gazing over a scene of ruin lit up by the punctual recurrence of habit as nature’s calm stare lights the morrow of a whirlwind.

Life was going on, then, and dragging her at its wheels. She could neither check its rush nor wrench loose from it and drop out--oh, how blessedly--into darkness and cessation. She must go bounding on, racked, broken, but alive in every fibre. The most she could hope was a few hours’ respite, not from her own terrors, but from the pressure of outward claims: the midday halt, during which the victim is unbound while his torturers rest from their efforts. Till her father’s return she would have the house to herself, and, the question of the venison despatched, could give herself to long lonely pacings of the empty rooms, and shuddering subsidences upon her pillow.

Her first impulse, as the mist cleared from her brain, was the habitual one of reaching out for ultimate relations. She wanted to know the worst; and for her, as she saw in a flash, the worst of it was the core of fatality in what had happened. She shrank from her own way of putting it--nor was it even figuratively true that she had ever felt, under faith in Denis, any such doubt as the perception implied. But that was merely because her imagination had never put him to the test. She was fond of exposing herself to hypothetical ordeals, but somehow she had never carried Denis with her on these adventures. What she saw now was that, in a world of strangeness, he remained the object least strange to her. She was not in the tragic case of the girl who suddenly sees her lover unmasked. No mask had dropped from Denis’s face: the pink shades had simply been lifted from the lamps, and she saw him for the first time in an unmitigated glare.

Such exposure does not alter the features, but it lays an ugly emphasis on the most charming lines, pushing the smile to a grin, the curve of good-nature to the droop of slackness. And it was precisely into the flagging lines of extreme weakness that Denis’s graceful contour flowed. In the terrible talk which had followed his avowal, and wherein every word flashed a light on his moral processes, she had been less startled by what he had done than by the way in which his conscience had already become a passive surface for the channelling of consequences. He was like a child who had put a match to the curtains, and stands agape at the blaze. It was horribly naughty to put the match--but beyond that the child’s responsibility did not extend. In this business of Arthur’s, where all had been wrong from the beginning--where self-defence might well find a plea for its casuistries in the absence of a definite right to be measured by--it had been easy, after the first slip, to drop a little lower with each struggle. The woman--oh, the woman was--well, of the kind who prey on such men. Arthur, out there, at his lowest ebb, had drifted into living with her as a man drifts into drink or opium. He knew what she was--he knew where she had come from. But he had fallen ill, and she had nursed him--nursed him devotedly, of course. That was her chance, and she knew it. Before he was out of the fever she had the noose around him--he came to and found himself married. Such cases were common enough--if the man recovered he bought off the woman and got a divorce. It was all a part of the business--the marriage, the bribe, the divorce. Some of those women made a big income out of it--they were married and divorced once a year. If Arthur had only got well--but, instead, he had a relapse and died. And there was the woman, made his widow by mischance as it were, with her child on her arm--whose child?--and a scoundrelly black-mailing lawyer to work up her case for her. Her claim was clear enough--the right of dower, a third of his estate. But if he had never meant to marry her? If he had been trapped as patently as a rustic fleeced in a gambling-hell? Arthur, in his last hours, had confessed to the marriage, but had also acknowledged its folly. And after his death, when Denis came to look about him and make inquiries, he found that the witnesses, if there had been any, were dispersed and undiscoverable. The whole question hinged on Arthur’s statement to his brother. Suppress that statement, and the claim vanished, and with it the scandal, the humiliation, the life-long burden of the woman and child dragging the name of Peyton through heaven knew what depths. He had thought of that first, Denis swore, rather than of the money. The money, of course, had made a difference,--he was too honest not to own it--but not till afterward, he declared--would have declared on his honour, but that the word tripped him up, and sent a flush to his forehead.