When we reached the Castle I found to my surprise that every window was ablaze.
The thrum of the automobile brought Price into the hall. She told me that the yachting party had come back, and were now in their bedrooms dressing for dinner.
As I went upstairs to my own apartments I heard trills of laughter from behind several of the closed doors, mingled with the muffled humming of various music-hall ditties.
And then suddenly a new spirit seemed to take possession of me, and I knew that I had become another woman.
MEMORANDUM BY MARTIN CONRAD
My darling was right. For a long hour after leaving Blackwater I continued to stand on the captain's bridge, looking back at the lighted windows of the house above Port Raa, and asking myself the question which for sixteen months thereafter was to haunt me day and night—Why had I left her behind me?
In spite of all her importunities, all her sweet unselfish thought of my own aims and interests, all her confidence in herself, all her brave determination to share responsibility for whatever the future might have in store for us—Why had I left her behind me?
The woman God gave me was mine—why had I left her in the house of a man who, notwithstanding his infidelities and brutalities, had a right in the eyes of the law, the church, and the world to call her his wife and to treat her accordingly?
Let me make no pretence of a penitence I did not feel. Never for one moment did I reproach myself for what had happened. Never for the shadow of a moment did I reproach her. She had given herself to me of her queenly right and sovereign grace as every good woman in the world must give herself to the man she loves if their union is to be pure and true.
But why did I not see then, as I see now, that it is the law of Nature—the cruel and at the same time the glorious law of Nature—that the woman shall bear the burden, the woman shall pay the price?