“Won't you be perfectly kind, and come for a walk?”
She saw the saloon on her engagement night when she sang at the ship's concert. What were the last words she had sung?
“Then come kiss me, sweet and twenty—
Love's a stuff will not endure.”
Alas, how unconsciously prophetic she had been. Nothing had endured, neither love, nor faith, nor the great ship of their pilgrimage herself.
Other memories crowded. Their honeymoon at Shadeham, the sweet early days of their studio life, her glorious pride in his great painting of love exalted.... The night of Constance's party, when, after her singing, her husband had left his place by Miss Berber and crossed the room so eagerly to her side. Their first weeks at the Byrdsnest—how happy they had been then, and how worshipfully he had looked at her the morning their son was born. All gone. She had another baby now, but he had never seen it—never would see it, she supposed. Her memory traveled on, flitting over the dark places and lingering at every sunny peak of their marriage journey. Their week in Vermont! How they had skated and danced together; how much he seemed to love her then! Even the day he sailed for France he seemed to care for her. “Why are we parting?” he had cried, kissing her. Yes, even then their marriage, for all the clouds upon it, had seemed real—she had never doubted in her inmost heart that they were each other's.
With a stab of the old agony, Mary remembered the day she got his letter admitting his relations with Felicity. The unbelievable breakdown of her whole life! His easy, lightly made excuses. He, in whose arms she had lain a hundred times, with whom she had first learnt the sacrament of love, had given himself to another woman, had given all that most close and sacred intimacy of love, and had written, “I cannot say with truth that I regret it.” How she had lived through the reading of those words she did not know. Grief does not kill, or surely she would have died that hour. Her own strength, and the miracle of life within her, alone stayed her longing for death. It was ten months ago; she had lived down much since then, had schooled herself daily to forgetfulness; yet now again the unutterable pang swept over her—the desolation of loss, and the incapacity to believe that such loss could be.
She rebelled against the needlessness of it all now, as she had done then, in those bitter days before her little Rosamond came to half-assuage her pain.
Well, he had redeemed himself in a way. The day James Farraday came to tell her that Stefan had enlisted, some part of her load was eased. The father of her children was not all ignoble.
Mary mused on. How would it end? Would Stefan live? Should she—could she—ever see him again? She thanked God he was there, serving the country he loved. “The only thing he ever really loved, perhaps,” she thought. She supposed he would be killed—all that genius lost like so much more of value that the world was scrapping to-day—and then it would all be quite gone—
Through the trees dropped the insistent sound of a baby's cry to its mother. She rose; the heavy clouds of memory fell away. The past was gone; she lived for the future, and the future was in her children.