Farquharson of Glune

by May Bateman

Mental pain is, after all, very like physical. Acute shock paralyzes mind and soul; it puts a clog in the wheel of human machinery. Great calamities do not necessarily stop human functions from fulfilling their duties; a man eats or drinks, or may, in exceptional cases, even sleep as well in the first moment of a great crisis as before. Body and soul are braced to the day's routine; for a time they continue their offices unchecked. But presently the chill and paralysis of thought and action spread throughout his being. Then ordinary work is impossible. Merely to live is a labour, the most trivial effort an arduous achievement.

In paralysis, limbs refuse to obey the message of the brain, or, misinterpreting it, do the thing they would not. So, when the roots of a life's happiness have been struck, the soul cannot hear the message of the over-wrought body that pleads to it for help in vain.

In the days that followed, Farquharson and Evelyn travelled again, invisible companions, down the same via crucis of agony and shame. To Evelyn, perhaps, the path was the more difficult to tread because for the first time faith had failed her. "Doubt comes," says the Catholic Church, "to those who wilfully play with sin." Unyielding, inflexible, she would have those who profess her faith remove themselves from the first taint of guilt, failing to help even the sorely wounded if he who suffered were one whose imminence brought danger. It is another of the paradoxes with which faith abounds; there are times when these same paradoxes raise an impenetrable wall against which the human heart beats vainly—bruised, bleeding, outwardly broken.

Doggedly Evelyn kept to the open evidences of her belief, sure of their truth, though unable to find comfort in them. She knew priests who had done the same, men who had striven for weeks and years against overwhelming apathy, alone in the desert of temptation. She knew one who had died so, to whom no ray of illumination had come even at the last, although only she and his confessor knew as much. He was a man who had helped more men and women than any other member of his brotherhood; faith seemed to be given him merely to be spent in the service of others.

But he was a man, and she was only a woman. And peace of some kind must surely have approached him, if one believes at all in supernatural influences, from the very atmosphere of the praying souls he stood amongst at Mass, from the mere nearness of the Sacred Host. Evelyn lived in an atmosphere of cynicism and doubt; it pressed upon her, bearing her down now that she had no rival force with which to combat it. And because by the narrow channel through which one doubt enters a thousand may follow, she found that the silence and solitude she had once loved were now thronged with ghosts, ghostly visions of the love she might have had but would not, and the life she might have lived with him she loved, one in companionship, one in ambition, one in the most dear and sacred intimacy of marriage, one in failure, one in success, one in the love of the children whose feet they would never now hear, whose lips would never now meet their own.

There is no hell which equals in intensity the hell of an imagination so vivid as to create being from what is void. When Farquharson left the church with his wife, Evelyn followed them every step of the way home. She looked on to the future; she forced herself to pray for their happiness, while in her heart she knew that happiness would be her death-blow. As she had striven for him in the past, using all the human forces at her command in helping him attain the thing he wished, so she strove now to make herself desire that he should have the best life has to offer, not the mere earthly wreath of laurels, but the unfading crown of peace.

But Farquharson, although she did not know it, had a harder task. He had tied himself for life to a woman who violated his every belief, whose nature warred with his at every turn. Realist and man of purpose as he was, his dear belief that in the world somewhere, somehow, there lived a second Margaret Cunningham whom he would ultimately possess, had sweetened all his work since he left Glune. When he met Evelyn he knew the dream was true, and Glune and she were absolutely at one. He pictured her its fitting mistress, visiting every haunt of his childhood, satisfying every memory and tradition, washing away with her tender tears the bitterness that had grown part of his heritage, as labourers would clear away useless timber and refuse, making all wholesome and clean.

Glune was his now again, a princely wedding gift from Calvert and Beadon, but all pleasure in the possession was gone.

A French writer once said that it is impossible to predict of any woman the exact change that marriage will make in her. We have all seen love turn to hate in a few hours under certain circumstances, but there are subtler changes still. Great emotions may bring havoc to certain natures; change comes inevitably, whether the emotions be great or small. Perhaps Dora had cared for Farquharson so far as in her lay before he became her husband, but now he was her property, an object of daily use, as important, perhaps, as her sponge or toothbrush, but quite unworthy of any deep regard. It was better to be with him than without him. It never struck her that she owed him any duty; if she thought about the matter at all it was merely to consider that a beneficent Creator had brought him into being for the special purpose of accompanying her when she wanted him, and transacting the business that she had slurred even as an unmarried woman; investing her money to its best advantage, and paying bills about whose magnitude she no longer felt even the smallest compunction.

With those early days of marriage she was entirely content and satisfied. No doubt of her ability to please him crossed her mind; the useless are invariably self-satisfied. She had mapped out a motor tour which was intended to outdo anything that other brides had accomplished; restless, untiring, she swept Farquharson on from place to place, great towns and cities whose very stones breathed glory and mystery, under the shadows of mountains which at night looked cold and full of awe, types of the crushing power that seemed to rule men's destinies, but which were warmed and quickened to life by the first gleam of the morning sun. Beauty, tradition, mystery, these things meant nothing to Dora, and Farquharson, who longed to stay, was openly derided. Of late years he had had little or no time to spare for the love of nature which had trained him as a boy; he steeped his soul in colour which she did not even see.