Katherine Lauderdale; Vol. 2 of 2

by F. Marion Crawford

Katharine tried to think it over in some other way. The snow-glare was more grey than ever, and her eyes ached with it, whichever way she turned. The room was cold, and her teeth chattered as she sat there, half dressed. Then, when she let in the hot air from the furnace, it was dry and unbearable. And she tried hard to find some other way in which to save her breaking heart—if so be that she might look at it so as not to see the break, and so, perhaps—if there were mercy in heaven, beyond that aching snow-glare—that by not seeing she might feel a little less, only a little less. It was hard that she should have to feel so much and so very bitterly, and all at once. But there was no other way. Instead of facing life with John Ralston, she had now to face life and John Ralston. How could she guess what he might do next? A drunken man has little control of his faculties—John might suddenly publish in the club the fact that he was her husband.

He was not the same John Ralston whom she had married yesterday morning, and whom she had seen yesterday afternoon for one moment at her door. The hours had changed him. Instead of his face there was a horrible mask; instead of his straight, elastic figure there was the reeling, delapidated body of the drunken wretch her father had once shown her in the streets. How could she love that thing? It was not even a man. She loathed it and hated it, for it had broken her life. She remembered having once broken a thermometer when she had been a little girl. She remembered the jagged edge of glass, and how the bright mercury had all run out and lost itself in tiny drops in the carpet. She recalled it vividly, and she felt that she was like the broken thermometer, and the idea was not ridiculous to her, as it must be to any one else, because she was badly hurt.

Vague ideas of a long and painful sacrifice rose before her—of something which must inevitably be begun and ended, like an execution. She had never understood what the inevitable meant until to-day.

Then, all at once, the great question presented itself clearly, the great query, the enormous interrogation of which we are all aware, more or less dimly, more or less clearly—the question which is like the death-rattle in the throat of the dying nineteenth century,—‘What is it all for?’

It came in a rush of passionate disappointment and anger and pain. It had come to Katharine before then, and she had faced it with the easy answer, that it was for love—that it was all for love of John Ralston—life, its thoughts, its deeds, its hopes, its many fears—all for him, so far as Katharine Lauderdale was concerned. Love made God true, and heaven a fact, the angels her guardians now and her companions hereafter. And her love had been so great that it had seemed to demand a wider wealth of heavenly things wherewith to frame it. God was hardly good enough nor heaven broad enough.

But if this were to be the end, what had it all meant? She stood before the window and looked at the grey sky till the reflection from the dead white snow beneath her window and on the opposite roof was painful. Yet the little physical pain was a relief. She turned, quite suddenly, and fell upon her knees beside the corner of the toilet table, and buried her face in her hands and became conscious of prayer.

That seems to be the only way of describing what she felt. The wave of pain beat upon her agonized heart, and though the wave could not speak words, yet the surging and the moaning, and the forward rushing, and the backward, whispering ebb, were as the sounds of many prayers.

Was God good? How could she tell? Was He kind? She did not know. Merciful? What would be mercy to her? God was there—somewhere beyond the snow-glare that hurt so, and the girl’s breaking heart cried to Him, quite incoherently, and expecting nothing, but consciously, though it knew more of its own bitterness than of God’s goodness, just then.

Momentarily the great question sank back into the outer darkness with which it was concerned, and little by little the religious idea of a sacrifice to be made was restored with greater stability than before. She had chosen her own burden, her own way of suffering, and she must bear all as well as she could. The waves of pain beat and crashed against her heart—she wondered, childishly, whether it were broken yet. She knew it was breaking, because it hurt her so.

There was no connected thread of thought in the torn tissue of her mind, any more than there was any coherence in the few words which from time to time tried to form themselves on her lips without her knowledge. So long as she had been lying still and staring at the grey ceiling, the storm had been brooding. It had burst now, and she was as helpless in it as though it had been a real storm on a real sea, and she alone on a driving wreck.