And neither did it allay my uneasiness to glance at my father, where he stood at the end of the room, watching, with a look of triumph in his glistening black eyes, his proud guests coming up to me one by one, and seeming to say to himself, "They're here at last! I've bet them! Yes, by gough, I've bet them!"
Many a time since I have wondered if his conscience did not stir within him as he looked across at his daughter in the jewels of the noble house he had married her into—the pale bride with the bridegroom he had bought for her—and thought of the mockery of a sacred union which he had brought about to gratify his pride, his vanity, perhaps his revenge.
But it was all over now. I was married to Lord Raa. In the eyes equally of the law, the world and the Church, the knot between us was irrevocably tied.
MEMORANDUM BY MARTIN CONRAD
I am no mystic and no spiritualist, and I only mention it as one of the mysteries of human sympathy between far-distant friends, that during a part of the time when my dear one was going through the fierce struggle she describes, and was dreaming of frozen regions and a broken pen, the ship I sailed on had got itself stuck fast in a field of pack ice in latitude 76, under the ice barrier by Charcot Bay, and that while we were lying like helpless logs, cut off from communication with the world, unable to do anything but groan and swear and kick our heels in our bunks at every fresh grinding of our crunching sides, my own mind, sleeping and waking, was for ever swinging back, with a sort of yearning prayer to my darling not to yield to the pressure which I felt so damnably sure was being brought to bear on her.
M.C.