CHAPTER XVI
The clustering hillsmen followed Traherne, but Yazok, the temple priest, did not. His penance and oblations done at last, he stood immovable, his deep-set, inimical eyes fixed, cold and narrowed, on Crespin and Lucilla.
With eyes even more venomous Major Crespin watched Traherne out of sight. Then he seated himself with a bulky, determined assertion of a right—a proprietor’s right—beside his wife on the broad flat stone.
She took no notice.
“Well, Lucilla!” he said. There was insult in the tone, and there was pain and appeal. The insult was veiled; the pain and appeal were not. But the woman heard the accusation, and was deaf to the cry.
“Well?” she answered indifferently, and without looking at him.
He fumbled for another cigarette, saying, “That was a narrow squeak!”
“Yes, I suppose so,” she said, still more indifferently. It lashed him and he winced, because he knew that her indifference was for him, and not for the accident or for their plight, and because he thought that she had meant him to know that it was. Crespin was wrong there—she did not care whether he knew, or what he knew, and she cared even less what he felt.
“All’s well that ends well, eh?” he persisted, looking at her ominously through gloomy, blood-shot eyes.
“Of course,” she said listlessly.
“You don’t seem very grateful to Providence.” He would not leave her alone.
“For sending the fog?” his wife returned contemptuously.
“For getting us down safely—all three,” Crespin corrected her, with a significant emphasis on the last two words.
Lucilla Crespin took the gauntlet up then. “It was Dr. Traherne’s nerve that did that,” she told him, looking him full in the face. He had been watching her narrowly, hungrily too, all the time, but she had not given him a glance till now. “If he hadn’t kept his head—”
“We should have crashed. I wish to God we had. One or other of us would probably have broken his neck; and, if Providence had played up, it might have been the right one.”
His wife swung round to him at that, as they sat, “What do you mean?” she demanded.
“It might have been me,” he told her in a harsh, smoldering voice. “Then you’d have thanked God right enough!”
The woman caught the insinuation and held it squarely. But the pain and the prayer she did not hear—or, if she heard, she scorned to heed. There is no other mercilessness so hard and cold as that of one ultra type of good woman. Lucilla Crespin was of that type—now. Her days of forgiveness and bending had passed—at least for him. Ancestry had so predisposed her, and the last bad years had frozen it in. Should her boy live to sin as his father had sinned, probably the flood-gates of understanding and pity would open again, and grief and womanliness sweeten her soul again—but never again for the man beside her. Had her heart stirred to him now, far as he’d gone, she might have saved and remanned him. But her heart was dead to him, as hard and unresponsive as the flint on which they sat.
That they quarreled here—for it was quarrel bitter and violent, for all the yearning in him, for all her high-bred self-control—that they could quarrel here, after such an adventure and mishap as they had just shared, in the thick of such unfathomed peril as they were sharing, showed what the breach between them meant to them both—despair and soul-damnation to the man, love and comradeship quite dead to the woman. It was hopeless—the life-split and abyss, or else the hours they’d just come through, the peril they’d escaped, the less-known, and for that the more unnerving peril that menaced them now as they sat side by side on the stone, must have reunited and reconciled them.
Lucilla Crespin faced her husband squarely, more in unveiled contempt than in courage or in injured pride. “Why,” she complained impatiently, “will you talk like this, Antony? If I hadn’t sent Dr. Traherne away just now, you’d have been saying these things in his hearing.”
“Well, why not?” Crespin retorted hotly. “Don’t tell me he doesn’t know all about the ‘state of our relations,’ as they say in the divorce court.”
“If he does, it’s not from me,” the wife said coldly, then added sourly: “No doubt he knows what the whole station knows.”
What the whole station knew! Aye, there was the rub—the blistering rub to her woman’s pride and shame, the galling, smarting rub to the man’s. How often life’s chasms could be bridged, even its cesspools purged and sweetened, if only no others knew. Lucilla said it not unnastily, all the more so for the high-bred quality of civility and self-control with which she spoke. A husband’s faults—not even the unbearable fault of infidelity—never in themselves bear on a woman so crushingly and painfully as does having others know of them. For a husband’s sins and malodorous peccadilloes are the damnable hall-mark of a wife’s failure, branded on her soul and her flesh in a festering sore that never heals, and that all can see. Thousands of women go to the scaffold of the divorce court because what others know compels them. Lucilla Crespin knew what it had cost her that the whole station knew, but she gave no thought at all to what it had cost Antony. Only the highest souls realize and accept that he who sins is far more to be pitied, aye, and loved, if love is what the highest human passion should be, than is the one against whom the sinner has sinned.
“And what does the whole station know?” Crespin demanded. His eyes blazed through their blear, and the hand on his knee trembled. “What does the whole station know? Why, that your deadly coldness drives me to drink!” His voice broke just a little. “I’ve lived for three years in an infernal clammy fog like that we’ve passed through. Who’s to blame if I take a whiskey peg now and then, to keep the chill out? Who?”
“Oh, Antony, why go over it all again?” She half rose, and then, as if it were not worth while to move, sank back as she’d been. “You know very well it was drink—and other things—that came between us; not my coldness, as you call it, that drove you to drink.”
“Oh,” Crespin cried in a rasping voice, “you good women! You patter after the parson, ‘Forgive us as we forgive those who trespass against us.’ But you don’t know what forgiveness means. ‘Plaster saints’ every one of you, your vaunted Christianity to be shattered at the first hammer-tap of what you don’t like. Blind to every fault of your own, fiendish and merciless to every fault of another, if it happens to nick you on your own petty raw. Damn such ‘good women’ I say. You’ll make a fine show on Judgment Day when you file up one by one to have your sins forgiven even as you have forgiven us poor rotten scum that have trespassed against you. You—you don’t know your own faults, I tell you. You take them for virtues, even when they smell to heaven. You have no faults, you, you scourgers of others, not a fault of your own. Forgiveness! You don’t know what it means. You’re not fit to know!”
Never had Antony Crespin spoken to her so before. The force of his terrible passion reached her, but not its meaning. She heard the storm, and she saw its wreck: knotting muscles, quivering nostrils, wild, agonized eyes. But its pathos never reached her. He cried out to her for bread—new, clean, white bread, and she pitched a stone of contempt into his outstretched hand. Perhaps, if Basil Traherne had not been there behind the rock—perhaps, if she and Traherne had never met—Antony Crespin’s wife might have heard his appeal and responded to it in his hour of utmost need, utmost abasement—for that was what his outburst of rage and accusation was: shame, longing, the old, old cry for one more chance.
But Lucilla was dead now to any need or appeal of his. Well, he had earned it. Alas, for life’s heaviest tragedy—we usually have. We earn what we get—most of us—and, sweet heaven help us! we get it God does not always pay on Saturday—but He pays.
Mrs. Crespin, her eyes strained for what might come from the Raja’s castle, her ears strained to catch Traherne’s returning footsteps, answered his words, but only his words.
“What’s the use of it, Antony?” she said drearily. “Forgive? I have forgiven you. I don’t try to take the children from you, though it might be better for them if I did. But to forgive is one thing, to forget another. When a woman has seen a man behave as you have behaved, do you think it is possible for her to forget it, and to love afresh? There are women in novels, and perhaps in the slums, who have such short memories; but I am not one of them.”
“No, by God, you’re not!” And at the passion in the Englishman’s voice, Yazok the priest, still watching them steadily, moved a little. “So a whole man’s life is to be ruined—”
“Do you think yours is the only life to be ruined?” She, too, moved as she spoke, and left an inch or two more space between them on the stone where they both still sat, Crespin too shaken to rise, she too indifferent.
He had forgotten where they were, forgotten their danger even. The woman had not. She thrust her chin in her palms, her elbows on her knees, and searched the path to the castle with anxious eyes. Her nerves were aching now with the strain of delay and uncertainty, and because her nerves ached so, she prodded back at him again with her vicious question, viciously asked, “Do you think yours is the only life to be ruined?”
Crespin crouched over towards her like some jungle beast crouching to spring. “Ah!” he snapped. “There we have it! I’ve not only offended your sensibilities; I’m in your way. You love this other man, this model of all the virtues!”
His wife made no pretense of not understanding him. “You have no right to say that,” she said simply.
Crespin disregarded her protest—if it was protest she had deigned to make—as he must have disregarded any interruption now that was less than some yielding, some warming of hers.
“He’s a paragon!” he pounded on. “He’s a wonder! He’s a mighty microbe-killer before the Lord; he’s going to work heaven knows what miracles, only he hasn’t brought them off yet. And you’re cursing the mistake you made in marrying a poor devil of a soldier-man instead of a first-class scientific genius. Come! Make a clean breast of it! You may as well!”
One word from her—just one word of denial—would have healed and helped him, and she knew, at least, that it would have slaked his angry fever. But she did not give that cup of cold water; perhaps because she held truth too sacred—the virtues are an almost supreme asset, but they can be terribly cruel, and they should not be made of cast-iron—perhaps because she had for him too little kindness left.
“Come on, Lu,” he urged. “Tell me. Do.”
“I have nothing to answer,” she returned without troubling to look at him even. “While I continue to live with you, I owe you an account of my actions—but not of my thoughts.”
“Your actions? Oh, I know very well you’re too cold—too damned respectable—to kick over the traces. And then you have the children to think of.”
“Yes,” the wife said sadly. “I have the children to think of. I have the children.”
“Besides,” Crespin went on, torturing himself, which is the success that often crowns our efforts to torture others, “there’s no hurry. If you only have patience for a year or two, I’ll do the right thing for once, and drink myself to death.”
A year or two more of his cups! That would be hard and long to bear. Again and again she had felt that she had reached her tether’s taut-pulled length—and then again and again she had tried once more. Why was Traherne so long? She had asked him to look at the crashed aeroplane, not to build a new one. Or, was it possible, the wreck was less hopeless than he’d thought, and already he was seeing a way to patch and repair? When would some word or move be made from the great sullen castle-place, with its gray turrets and scalloped arches turning to silver and pink now as the Asian sun slipped down the sapphire sky? A year or two more! And the children, still babies of course, were growing so. What might not Ronny notice and understand in another two years? Two years more! She never had measured before in her mind the probable stretch of the bad time still before her—and only for one instant did the thought come to her now—and Antony himself had put it there. His death was the one way out she never had thought of. And she would not think of it now. And even she spoke a little more kindly than she had done for some time—at least when they had been alone—and she turned and looked at him with almost a friendly look in her eyes, as she said:
“You have only to keep yourself a little in hand to live to what they call ‘a good old age.’”
The friendliness in her eyes maddened him anew—it was not her friendship he wanted—but even so he was grateful for it, it was so much better than nothing to go on with—and he pressed his hurt and anger out of sight, and, leaning away from her the better to watch her face, said slowly:
“’Pon my soul, I’ve a mind to try to, though goodness knows, my life is not worth living,” for he had caught the distraction on her face; she was listening, but not most to him. “I was a fool to come on this crazy expedition——”
“Why, it was yourself that jumped at Dr. Traherne’s proposal,” his wife reminded him.
“I thought we’d get to the kiddies a week earlier. They’d be glad to see me, poor little things. They don’t despise their daddy.”
Something of what he felt, something of what he still was—in spite of whatever he’d done—reached Antony Crespin’s wife then. He had always loved his children—there was no doubt of that. It had not served him for strength enough, even as his love of her had not, but he always had loved them, invariably he had been tender to them. And Lucilla remembered it now.
“It shan’t be my fault, Antony,” she told him gently, “if they ever do.” And then she spoilt it, soured the grace she had shown, by adding with a weary sigh, “But you don’t make it easy to keep up appearances.” O curse of woman’s tongue!
Antony Crespin rose to his feet, and stood before her. He saw the natives clustered just over there, screening the projecting wing of the broken aeroplane; he saw Yazok watching, sentineling too, perhaps; he saw the great puissant fortified castle, he recalled where they were, he knew their peril—but for all that, for all that or more, he gave not one damn. . . . He stood there before her, alone in the world with his wife, all his imperfections on his back, and put up his plea.
“Oh, Lu, Lu,” he begged, “if you would treat me like a human being—if you would help me, and make life tolerable for me, instead of a thing that won’t bear looking at except through the haze of drink—we might retrieve the early days. God knows I never cared two pins for any woman but you——”
It was the acutest moment of Antony Crespin’s life. And his wife turned him down.
“No,” she said, “the others, I suppose, only helped you, like whiskey, to see the world through a haze. I saw the world through a haze when I married you; but you have dispelled it once for all.” She saw his face blanch, she saw his fingers knot, she saw his shoulders sag; but she went on. “Don’t force me to tell you how impossible it is for me to be your wife again. I am the mother of your children—that gives you a terrible hold over me. Be content with that.”