Katherine Lauderdale; Vol. 2 of 2

by F. Marion Crawford

CHAPTER XXI.

In the grey dawn of Friday morning Katharine woke from broken sleep to face the reality of what she had done twenty-four hours earlier. It had snowed very heavily during the night, and her first conscious perception was of that strange, cold glare which the snow reflects, and which makes even a bedroom feel like a chilly outer hall into which the daylight penetrates through thick panes of ground glass.

She had slept very little, and against her will, losing consciousness from time to time out of sheer exhaustion, and roused again by the cruel reuniting of the train of thought. Those who have received a wound by which a principal nerve has been divided, know how intense is the suffering when the severed cords begin to grow together, with agonizing slowness, day by day and week by week, convulsing the whole frame of the man in their meeting. Katharine felt something like that each time that the merciful curtains of sleep were suddenly torn asunder between herself and the truth of the present.

The pain was combined of many elements, too, and each hurt her in its own way. There was the shame of the thing, first, the burning, scarlet shame—the thought of it had a colour for her. John Ralston was disgraced in the eyes of all the world. Even the smooth-faced dandy, fresh from college, young Van De Water, might sneer at him and welcome, and feel superior to him, for never having gone so far in folly. Now if such men as Van De Water knew the story, it was but a question of hours, and all society must know it, too. Society would set down John Ralston as a hopeless case. Katharine wondered, with a sickening chill, whether the virtuous—like her father—would turn their backs on Ralston and refuse to know him. She did not know. But Ralston was her husband.

The thought almost drove her mad. There was that condition of the inevitable in her position which gives fate its hold over men’s minds. She could not escape. She could not go back to the point where she had been yesterday morning, and begin her life again. As she had begun it, so it must go on to the very end, ‘until death them should part’—the life of a spotless girl married to a man who was the very incarnation of a disgusting vice. In those first moments it would have been a human satisfaction to have been free to blame some one besides herself for what she had done.

But even now, when every bitter thought seemed to rise up against John Ralston, she could not say that the fault had been his if she had bound herself to him. To the very last he had resisted. This was Friday morning, and on the Wednesday night at the Thirlwalls’ he had told her that he could not be sure of himself. By and by, perhaps, that brave act of his might begin to tell in his favour with her, but not yet. The faces, the expressions, the words, of those from whom she had learned the story of his doings were before her eyes and present in her hearing now, as she lay wide awake in the early morning, staring with hot eyes at the cold grey ceiling of her room.

It was only yesterday that her sister Charlotte had sat there, lamenting her imaginary woes. How Katharine had despised her! Had she not deliberately chosen, of her own free will, and was she not bound to stand by her choice, out of mere self-respect? And Katharine had felt then that, come what might, for good or ill, better or worse, honour or dishonour, she was glad that she had married John Ralston and that she would face all imaginable deaths to help him, even a little. But now—now, it was different. He had failed her at the very outset. It was not that others had turned upon him, despising him wholly for a partial fault. The public disgrace made it all worse than it might have been, but it was only secondary, after all. The keenest pain was from the thrust that had entered Katharine’s own heart. It had been with him as though she had not existed. He had not been strong enough, for her sake, on their wedding day—the day of days to her—to keep himself sober from three o’clock in the afternoon until ten o’clock at night. Only seven hours, Katharine repeated to herself in the cold snow-glare of the early morning—seven little hours; her lips were hot and dry with anger, and her hands were cold, as she thought of it. It was not only the weakness of him, contemptible as that was—if it had at least been weakness for something less brutal, less beastly, less degrading. Katharine chose the strongest words she could think of, and smote him with them in her heart. Was he not her husband, and had she not the right to hate and despise what he had done? It was bad enough, as she said it, and as it appeared to most people that morning. There was not a link missing in the evidence, from the moment when John had begun to lose his temper with Miner at the club, until he had been brought home insensible to his mother’s house by a couple of policemen. His relations and his best friends were all convinced that he had been very drunk, and there was no reason why society in general should be more merciful than his own people. Robert Lauderdale said nothing, but when he saw the paragraph in a morning paper describing ‘Mr. John R——’s drunken encounter with a professional pugilist,’ he regarded the statement as an elucidatory comment on his interview with his great-nephew. No one spoke of the matter in Robert Lauderdale’s presence, but the old gentleman felt that it was a distinct shame to the whole family, and he inwardly expressed himself strongly. The only one who tried to make matters look a little better than every one believed they were, was Hamilton Bright. He could not deny the facts, but he put on a cheerful countenance and made the best of them, laughing good-humouredly at John’s misfortune, and asking every one who ventured an unfavourable comment whether John was the only man alive on that day in the city of New York who had once been a little lively, recommending the beardless critics of his friend’s conduct to go out and drive cattle in the Nacimiento Valley if they wished to understand the real properties of alcohol, and making the older ones feel uncomfortable by reminding them vividly of the errors of their youth. But no one else said anything in Ralston’s favour. He was down just then, and it was as well to hit him when everybody was doing the same thing.

Katharine tried to make up her mind as to what she should do, and she did not find it an easy matter. It would be useless to deny the fact that what she felt for Ralston on that morning bore little resemblance to love. She remembered vaguely, and with wonder, how she had promised to stand by him and help him to her utmost to overcome his weakness. How was she to help him now? How could she play a part and conceal the anger, the pain, the shame that boiled and burned in her? If he should come to her, what should she say? She had promised that she would never refer to the matter in any way, when it had seemed but the shadow of a possibility. But it had turned into the reality so soon, and into such a reality—far more repulsive than anything of which she had dreamed. Besides, she added in her heart, it was unpardonable on that day of all days. Married she was, but forgive she could not and would not. Wounded love is less merciful than any hatred, and Katharine could not help deepening the wound by recalling every circumstance of the previous evening, from the moment when she had looked in vain for John’s face in the crowded room, until she had broken down and asked Hester Crowdie to bring her home.

She rose at last to face the day, undecided, worn out with fatigue, and scared, had she been willing to admit the fact, by the possibilities of the next twelve hours. Half dressed, she paused and sat down to think it all over again—all she knew, for she had yet to learn the end of the story.

She had been married just four and twenty hours. Yesterday, at that very time, life had been before her, joyous, hopeful, merry. All that was to be had glistened with gold and gleamed with silver, with the silver of dreamland and the gold of hope, having love set as a jewel in the midst. To-day the precious things were but dross and tinsel and cheap glass. For it was all over, and there was no returning. Real life was beginning, began, had begun—the reality of an existence not defined except in the extent of its suffering, but desperately limited in the possibilities of its happiness.