CHAPTER XIX
The afternoon was already growing dark when the two other wayfarers,Mary and Ralph Denham, came out on the high road beyond the outskirtsof Lincoln. The high road, as they both felt, was better suited to thisreturn journey than the open country, and for the first mile or soof the way they spoke little. In his own mind Ralph was following thepassage of the Otway carriage over the heath; he then went back to thefive or ten minutes that he had spent with Katharine, and examined eachword with the care that a scholar displays upon the irregularities ofan ancient text. He was determined that the glow, the romance, theatmosphere of this meeting should not paint what he must in futureregard as sober facts. On her side Mary was silent, not because herthoughts took much handling, but because her mind seemed empty ofthought as her heart of feeling. Only Ralph's presence, as she knew,preserved this numbness, for she could foresee a time of loneliness whenmany varieties of pain would beset her. At the present moment her effortwas to preserve what she could of the wreck of her self-respect, forsuch she deemed that momentary glimpse of her love so involuntarilyrevealed 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 herselfwhich keeps pace so evenly beside every one of us, and had been damagedby her confession. The gray night coming down over the country was kindto her; and she thought that one of these days she would find comfortin sitting upon the earth, alone, beneath a tree. Looking through thedarkness, she marked the swelling ground and the tree. Ralph made herstart by saying abruptly;
"What I was going to say when we were interrupted at lunch was that ifyou go to America I shall come, too. It can't be harder to earn a livingthere 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 thistime, the good and the bad," he went on. "You know my tempers. I'vetried 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 eachother and we think alike. I believe you are the only person in the worldI 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 becontinuing his own thoughts.
"Yes, but I'm afraid I couldn't do it," Mary said at last. The casualand rather hurried way in which she spoke, together with the factthat she was saying the exact opposite of what he expected her to say,baffled him so much that he instinctively loosened his clasp upon herarm 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'tbelieve you, Mary. You're not telling me the truth."
"I'm too tired to argue, Ralph," she replied, turning her head away fromhim. "I ask you to believe what I say. I can't marry you; I don't wantto marry you."
The voice in which she stated this was so evidently the voice of one insome extremity of anguish that Ralph had no course but to obey her. Andas soon as the tone of her voice had died out, and the surprise fadedfrom his mind, he found himself believing that she had spoken the truth,for he had but little vanity, and soon her refusal seemed a naturalthing to him. He slipped through all the grades of despondency until hereached a bottom of absolute gloom. Failure seemed to mark the whole ofhis life; he had failed with Katharine, and now he had failed withMary. Up at once sprang the thought of Katharine, and with it a sense ofexulting freedom, but this he checked instantly. No good had ever cometo him from Katharine; his whole relationship with her had been made upof dreams; and as he thought of the little substance there had been inhis dreams he began to lay the blame of the present catastrophe upon hisdreams.
"Haven't I always been thinking of Katharine while I was with Mary? Imight have loved Mary if it hadn't been for that idiocy of mine. Shecared for me once, I'm certain of that, but I tormented her so with myhumors 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 silenceof relief; his depression she ascribed to the fact that he had seenKatharine and parted from her, leaving her in the company of WilliamRodney. She could not blame him for loving Katharine, but that, when heloved another, he should ask her to marry him--that seemed to herthe cruellest treachery. Their old friendship and its firm base uponindestructible qualities of character crumbled, and her whole pastseemed foolish, herself weak and credulous, and Ralph merely the shellof an honest man. Oh, the past--so much made up of Ralph; and now, asshe saw, made up of something strange and false and other than she hadthought it. She tried to recapture a saying she had made to help herselfthat morning, as Ralph paid the bill for luncheon but she could seehim paying the bill more vividly than she could remember the phrase.Something about truth was in it; how to see the truth is our greatchance in this world.
"If you don't want to marry me," Ralph now began again, withoutabruptness, with diffidence rather, "there is no need why we shouldcease to see each other, is there? Or would you rather that we shouldkeep 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 youchange 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 tellhim of her love, and of what had changed it. But although it seemedlikely that she would soon control her anger with him, the certaintythat he did not love her, confirmed by every word of his proposal,forbade any freedom of speech. To hear him speak and to feel herselfunable to reply, or constrained in her replies, was so painful that shelonged for the time when she should be alone. A more pliant woman wouldhave taken this chance of an explanation, whatever risks attached to it;but to one of Mary's firm and resolute temperament there was degradationin the idea of self-abandonment; let the waves of emotion rise ever sohigh, 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 deedsthat might have made her think badly of him. In his present moodinstances came but too quickly, and on top of them this culminatingproof of his baseness--that he had asked her to marry him when hisreasons 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 whichthreatened disaster to her self-respect, "it has come to this--tothis--when I could have given him everything!"
"Yes, we can still be friends," she said, with what firmness she couldmuster.
"I shall want your friendship," he said. He added, "If you find itpossible, let me see you as often as you can. The oftener the better. Ishall want your help."
She promised this, and they went on to talk calmly of things that hadno reference to their feelings--a talk which, in its constraint, wasinfinitely sad to both of them.
One more reference was made to the state of things between them latethat night, when Elizabeth had gone to her room, and the two young menhad stumbled off to bed in such a state of sleep that they hardly feltthe floor beneath their feet after a day's shooting.
Mary drew her chair a little nearer to the fire, for the logs wereburning low, and at this time of night it was hardly worth while toreplenish them. Ralph was reading, but she had noticed for some timethat his eyes instead of foll
owing the print were fixed rather above thepage with an intensity of gloom that came to weigh upon her mind. Shehad not weakened in her resolve not to give way, for reflection had onlymade her more bitterly certain that, if she gave way, it would be to herown wish and not to his. But she had determined that there was no reasonwhy 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. "Ithink there's only one thing. When you asked me to marry you, I don'tthink you meant it. That made me angry--for the moment. Before, you'dalways spoken the truth."
Ralph's book slid down upon his knee and fell upon the floor. He restedhis forehead on his hand and looked into the fire. He was trying torecall 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 wantto marry me. But love--don't we all talk a great deal of nonsense aboutit? What does one mean? I believe I care for you more genuinely thannine men out of ten care for the women they're in love with. It's only astory one makes up in one's mind about another person, and one knows allthe time it isn't true. Of course one knows; why, one's always takingcare not to destroy the illusion. One takes care not to see them toooften, or to be alone with them for too long together. It's a pleasantillusion, but if you're thinking of the risks of marriage, it seems tome that the risk of marrying a person you're in love with is somethingcolossal."
"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 tounderstand." She shifted her position, as if she were about to go. Aninstinctive desire to prevent her from leaving the room made Ralph riseat 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 stepout into the garden. A moralist might have said that at this point hismind should have been full of self-reproach for the suffering he hadcaused. On the contrary, he was extremely angry, with the confusedimpotent anger of one who finds himself unreasonably but efficientlyfrustrated. He was trapped by the illogicality of human life. Theobstacles in the way of his desire seemed to him purely artificial, andyet he could see no way of removing them. Mary's words, the tone of hervoice even, angered him, for she would not help him. She was part of theinsanely jumbled muddle of a world which impedes the sensible life. Hewould 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 hismind.
"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 youdon'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 thinkI've behaved very badly," he continued, as she did not speak. "Of courseI behave badly; but you can't judge people by what they do. You can'tgo through life measuring right and wrong with a foot-rule. That's whatyou're always doing, Mary; that's what you're doing now."
She saw herself in the Suffrage Office, delivering judgment, metingout right and wrong, and there seemed to her to be some justice in thecharge, although it did not affect her main position.
"I'm not angry with you," she said slowly. "I will go on seeing you, asI said I would."
It was true that she had promised that much already, and it wasdifficult for him to say what more it was that he wanted--some intimacy,some help against the ghost of Katharine, perhaps, something that heknew he had no right to ask; and yet, as he sank into his chair andlooked once more at the dying fire it seemed to him that he had beendefeated, not so much by Mary as by life itself. He felt himself thrownback to the beginning of life again, where everything has yet to be wonbut in extreme youth one has an ignorant hope. He was no longer certainthat he would triumph.