She greeted him stonily. ‘May I ask where you have been? It is a matter that concerns us both.’
He bowed, trembling and angry: angry that she must force these formal manners upon him. ‘To Upchurch, as you well know. On the business we discussed yesterday.’
She thought: I hate him, I hate him. If she had said as much to Marden, he would perhaps have known the true violence of her love and made all right between them. But she controlled and concealed herself. ‘Very well,’ she said. And it seemed by her air to be a matter of infinite unimportance. ‘You are released from your engagement, Mr Marden.’
‘You cannot mean that—for so small a thing.’ He suddenly seized her hands, and the contact made him for a moment forget her words, so that he would have kissed her. But she, though longing to surrender, and sick with loneliness, turned sharply away and with her hands, her stiff body, her disdainful looks, repulsed him.
He bowed, accepting dismissal. ‘Your pardon, madam. I will go saddle my horse again.’
So he rode back to his Fee. The sights he had taken pleasure in a week ago because they had been the background for his vision of Celia were for the same cause hateful to him now. He looked in upon himself and shuddered at the ugliness he saw there. Because he was rejected by love he felt himself to be unlovable and loathsome, and he tried to hate the girl who had made him feel so; and did at moments hate her, with a murderous and lustful hatred, an impulse to ravish and destroy. This, he thought, proved him vile, and so justified the verdict he imputed to her; and he was alone with his vileness, an outcast from the family of mankind. That final gesture of hers, seeming to speak her disgust of his very person, had changed and unmanned him, filling him with an ugly and angry shame. Deep in his unconscious heart the child he had been ran in terror from a beloved face turned strange; but this memory lay beyond reach of his introspection and the poison worked the more shrewdly because it worked in secret. By the time he reached home he was drugged with his own gall, so that there seemed to be two of him: the man who smiled and was evasively polite with Brother Raphe, confessing to no greater disease than weariness and an aching head; and this other, this proud, tortured, and self-torturing Ishmael, this demon of hate and self-hate, this exile from life, who would never again, he vowed, allow it to be guessed that he had a heart like other men. In dreams that night, charmed by the sleek grace of her form and the shy beauty of her wondering eyes, he pursued a hind in the forest, and caught her, and coaxed her into friendship, and felt her body turn to writhing maggots under his touch. He woke sweating, and remembered Celia; but presently he found he had fallen into a deep well; his bare feet touched a slimy bottom; the water, creeping with cold life, came up to his armpits. It was dark and cold and silent, and he thought that he must stay there for ever, dreadfully immortal, and never again hear a human voice or feel the sun on his hands. The world above was infinitely remote, a mere mind-picture of something long lost or perhaps only imagined. He exhausted himself with sobbing and shouting, and the walls of the well gave back a hollow sound like madness, till at last that too failed him, and, though he seemed to be shouting still, the silence was absolute, a vast void. If only someone would let the bucket down for me, he thought; and with the thought came hope and a renewal of longing. In this expectation, with the sickness of despair often intervening, he lived many long years, years as many and as slow as the small slimy things that lived in the dank mud of the walls and were his only companions. At last, light from above blazed down on him, and in that shaft of radiance, partly obscuring it, the dark shape of the bucket slowly descended. And presently his feet were in the bucket, his hands were clinging to the rope, and he was being drawn up, up, into the world again, and could hear the rhythm and creak of the windlass—a ravishing music. And now, being within a yard of the top, and hearing a friend’s voice calling him by name, he became crazy with eagerness and joy, and thought himself already in heaven, until he saw a hand thrust over the well’s brink, and the hand held a knife, and the knife began gently, gently, sawing at the rope that supported him. He fell. The world of light became a distant star; dark water engulfed him; silence surged back into his ears. But with the terror of the fall he woke, to remember Celia and the face of her scorn. And to shut out that sight, which was so much more terrible than any nightmare, he tried to fight his way back into the country of dreams, and dozed, and woke, and dozed, and woke again. And now, at each waking, Celia came to him with love in her eyes; and he, knowing himself mocked, shuddered and shrank from her.
But in the morning the world had a different colour, so that he forgot the blackest of his resolutions and was betrayed into telling something of his story to Brother Raphe. ‘I have a mind,’ he ended bitterly,’ to marry poor Tisha Bailey, and let another man’s child inherit my patrimony.’
‘To what end?’ asked Brother Raphe mildly.
‘To no end,’ returned the young man,’ unless we account it the end of me and my hopes. Indeed the project pleases me. I have no other use for my name. Why should I not fling it as a cloak to this poor naked creature?’
‘Why indeed?’ echoed Brother Raphe, staring sideways at the floor, as was his bashful habit. ‘It has a charitable sound, your project. But God looks not only to the act, my son: He reads the heart whence it came. And even I, the least of His servants, can see an inch beyond the end of my nose, Jack. Let me see if I cannot tell you your true motive. It is in your mind, perhaps, that by means of what the world will count disgrace you may revenge yourself upon Miss Humphrey. Hearing of this she will know, you tell yourself, to what a pass she has brought you, and in that knowledge will suffer. So argue those weak souls who, in such a case as yours, lay impious hands upon their own lives. By dying thus, they say, I shall force the world to see how much I have suffered, and shall make those that wronged me writhe in remorse. That is the sad logic that seduces ’em; and I think it is this arrogant self-pity and this malice, more than the fatal act itself, that earns damnation of heaven.’
Marden shrugged his shoulders. ‘You have shrewd eyesight, sir, and cool judgement. But, with all respect, you are a stranger to love. I have suffered a gross humiliation. I am humbled to the dust, and there’s nothing left me but to make a meal of it.’
‘The remedy for humiliation is humility, Jack. Or so I read the matter. A truly humble soul knows its own worth, whether in good fortune or bad. It is your proud man alone that can suffer humiliation; for pride is the cloak of a fearful heart. Forgive me if I am sententious: I speak only in love of you.’ Marden answered nothing, and after a long silence the priest said shyly: ‘Are you still inclined to marry Tisha Bailey?’
Marden was already ashamed of that intention, and wished to forget that he had entertained it. ‘Then is there nothing I can do but sheepishly kiss the rod?’
‘Alas, how can I advise you, Jack? I am, as you say, a stranger to love,’ said Brother Raphe, his eyes twinkling. ‘But if you would indeed have counsel of this stranger, I would humbly suggest that you marry Miss Humphrey.’
Marden stared in indignation. ‘You are pleased to joke about it.’
‘Do you not love Miss Humphrey?’ persisted the priest.
‘What has that got to do with it?’ asked Marden sulkily. ‘She does not love me. That would seem to settle the affair once and for all.’