The Destroying Angel

"Hugh, I could never forgive you if you'd been pretending. It would be too cruel… Ah, but you haven't been! Tell me you haven't!"

"I don't understand… Pretending what?"

"Pretending you didn't know who I was – pretending to fall in love with me just because you were sorry for me, to make me think it was me you loved and not the woman you felt bound to take care of, because you'd – you had – "

"Mary, listen to me," he interrupted. "I swear I didn't know you. Perhaps you don't understand how wonderfully you've changed. It's hard for me to believe you can be one with the timid and distracted little girl I married that rainy night. You're nothing like… Only, that night on the stage, as Joan Thursday, you were that girl again. Max told me it was make-up; I wouldn't believe him; to me you hadn't changed at all; you hadn't aged a day… But that morning when I saw you first on the Great South Beach – I never dreamed of associating you with my wife. Do you realize I had never seen you in full light – never knew the colour of your hair?.. Dear, I didn't know, believe me. It was you who bewitched me – not the wife for whose sake I fought against what I thought infatuation for you. I loved – I love you only, you as you are – not the poor little girl of the Commercial House."

"Is it true?" she questioned sadly, incredulous.

"It is true, Mary. I love you."

"I have loved you always," she said softly between barely parted lips – "always, Hugh. Even when I thought you dead… I did believe that you were drowned out there, Hugh! You know that, don't you?"

"I have never for an instant questioned it."

"It wouldn't be like you to, my dear; it wouldn't be you, my Hugh… But even then I loved the memory of you… You don't know what you have meant in my life, Hugh. Always, always you have stood for all that was fine and strong and good and generous – my gentlest man, my knight sans peur et sans reproche… No other man I ever knew – no, let me say it! – ever measured up to the standard you had set for me to worship. But, Hugh – you'll understand, won't you? – about the others – ?"

"Please," he begged – "please don't harrow yourself so, Mary!"

"No; I must tell you… The world seemed so empty and so lonely, Hugh: my Galahad gone, never to return to me… I tried to lose myself in my work, but it wasn't enough. And those others came, beseeching me, and – and I liked them. There was none like you, but they were all good men of their kind, and I liked them. They made love to me and – I was starving for affection, Hugh. I was made to love and to be loved. Each time I thought to myself: 'Surely this time it is true; now at last am I come into my kingdom. It can't fulfil my dreams, for I have known the bravest man, but' – "

Her voice broke and fell. Her eyes grew dull and vacant; her vision passed through and beyond him, as if he had not been there; the bitter desolation of all the widowed generations clouded her golden face. Her lips barely moved, almost inaudibly enunciating the words that were shaken from her as if by some occult force, ruthless and inexorable:

"Each time, Hugh, it was the same. One by one they were taken from me, strangely, terribly… Poor Tom Custer, first; he was a dear boy, but I didn't love him and couldn't marry him. I had to tell him so. He killed himself… Then Billy Hamilton; I became engaged to him; but he was taken mysteriously from a crowded ship in mid-ocean… A man named Mitchell Thurston loved me. I liked him; perhaps I might have consented to marry him. He was assassinated – shot down like a mad dog in broad daylight – no one ever knew by whom, or why. He hadn't an enemy in the world we knew of… And now Drummond…!"

"Mary, Mary!" he pleaded. "Don't – don't – those things were all accidents – "

She paid him no heed. She didn't seem to hear. He tried to take her hand, with a man's dull, witless notion of the way to comfort a distraught woman; but she snatched it from his touch.

"And now" – her voice pealed out like a great bell tolling over the magnificent solitude of the forsaken island – "and now I have it to live through once again: the wonder and terror and beauty of love, the agony and passion of having you torn from me!.. Hugh!.. I don't believe I can endure it again. I can't bear this exquisite torture. I'm afraid I shall go mad!.. Unless … unless" – her voice shuddered – "I have the strength, the strength to – "

"Good God!" he cried in desperation. "You must not go on like this! Mary! Listen to me!"

This time he succeeded in imprisoning her hand. "Mary," he said gently, drawing closer to her, "listen to me; understand what I say. I love you; I am your husband; nothing can possibly come between us. All these other things can be explained. Don't let yourself think for another instant – "

Her eyes, fixed upon the two hands in which he clasped her own, had grown wide and staring with dread. Momentarily she seemed stunned. Then she wrenched it from him, at the same time jumping up and away.

"No!" she cried, fending him from her with shaking arms. "No! Don't touch me! Don't come near me, Hugh! It's … it's death! My touch is death! I know it now – I had begun to suspect, now I know! I am accursed – doomed to go through life like pestilence, leaving sorrow and death in my wake… Hugh!" She controlled herself a trifle: "Hugh, I love you more than life; I love you more than love itself. But you must not come near me. Love me if you must, but, O my dear one! keep away from me; avoid me, forget me if you can, but at all cost shun me as you would the plague! I will not give myself to you to be your death!"

Before he could utter a syllable in reply, she turned and fled from him, wildly, blindly stumbling, like a hunted thing back up the ascent to the farm-house. He followed, vainly calling on her to stop and listen to him. But she outdistanced him, and by the time he had entered the house was in her room, behind a locked door.

XIX

CAPITULATION

Grimly Whitaker sat himself down in the kitchen and prepared to wait the reappearance of his wife – prepared to wait as long as life was in him, so that he were there to welcome her when, her paroxysm over, she would come to him to be comforted, soothed and reasoned out of her distorted conception of her destiny.

Not that he had the heart to blame or to pity her for that terrified vision of life. Her history was her excuse. Nor was his altogether a blameless figure in that history. At least it was not so in his sight. Though unwittingly, he had blundered cruelly in all his relations with the life of that sad little child of the Commercial House.

Like sunlight penetrating storm wrack, all the dark disarray of his revery was shot through and through by the golden splendour of the knowledge that she loved him…

As for this black, deadly shadow that had darkened her life – already he could see her emerging from it, radiant and wonderful. But it was not to be disregarded or as yet ignored, its baleful record considered closed and relegated to the pages of the past. Its movement had been too rhythmic altogether to lack a reason. His very present task was to read its riddle and exorcise it altogether.

For hours he pondered it there in the sunlit kitchen of the silent house – waiting, wondering, deep in thought. Time stole away without his knowledge. Not until late in the afternoon did the shifted position of the sun catch his attention and arouse him in alarm. Not a sound from above…!

He rose, ascended the stairs, tapped gently on the locked door.

"Mary," he called, with his heart in his mouth – "Mary!"

Her answer was instant, in accents sweet, calm and clear:

"I am all right. I'm resting, dear, and thinking. Don't fret about me. When I feel able, I will come down to you."

"As you will," he assented, unspeakably relieved; and returned to the kitchen.

The diversion of thought reminded him of their helpless and forlorn condition. He went out and swept the horizon with an eager and hopeful gaze that soon drooped in disappointment. The day had worn on in unbroken calm: not a sail stirred within the immense radius of the waters. Ships he saw in plenty – a number of them moving under power east and west beyond the headland with its crowning lighthouse; others – a few – left shining wakes upon the burnished expanse beyond the farthest land visible in the north. Unquestionably main-travelled roads of the sea, these, so clear to the sight, so heartbreakingly unattainable…

And then his conscience turned upon him, reminding him of the promise (completely driven out of his mind by his grim adventure before dawn, together with the emotional crisis of mid-morning) to display some sort of a day-signal of distress.

For something like half an hour he was busy with the task of nailing a turkey-red table-cloth to a pole, and the pole in turn (with the assistance of a ladder) to the peak of the gabled barn. But when this was accomplished, and he stood aside and contemplated the drooping, shapeless flag, realizing that without a wind it was quite meaningless, the thought came to him that the very elements seemed leagued together in a conspiracy to keep them prisoners, and he began to nurse a superstitious notion that, if anything were ever to be done toward winning their freedom, it would be only through his own endeavour, unassisted.

Thereafter for a considerable time he loitered up and down the dooryard, with all his interest focussed upon the tidal strait, measuring its greatest and its narrowest breadth with his eye, making shrewd guesses at the strength and the occasions of the tides.

If the calm held on and the sky remained unobscured by cloud, by eleven there would be clear moonlight and, if he guessed aright, the beginning of a period of slack water.

Sunset interrupted his calculations – sunset and his wife. Sounds of some one moving quietly round the kitchen, a soft clash of dishes, the rattling of the grate, drew him back to the door.

She showed him a face of calm restraint and implacable resolve, if scored and flushed with weeping. And her habit matched it: she had overcome her passion; her eyes were glorious with peace.

"Hugh" – her voice had found a new, sweet level of gentleness and strength – "I was wondering where you were."

"Can I do anything?"

"No, thank you. I just wanted to tell you how sorry I am."

"For what, in Heaven's name?"

She smiled… "For neglecting you so long. I really didn't think of it until the sunlight began to redden. I've let you go without your lunch."

"It didn't matter – "

"I don't agree. Man must be fed – and so must woman. I'm famished!"

"Well," he admitted with a short laugh – "so am I."

She paused, regarding him with her whimsical, indulgent smile. "You strange creature!" she said softly. "Are you angry with me – impatient – for this too facile descent from heroics to the commonplace? But, Hugh" – she touched his arm with a gentle and persuasive hand – "it must be commonplace. We're just mortals, after all, you know, no matter how imperishable our egos make us feel: and the air of the heights is too fine and rare for mortals to breathe long at a time. Life is, after all, an everyday affair. We've just got to blunder through it from day to day – mostly on the low levels. Be patient with me, dear."

But, alarmed by his expression, her words stumbled and ran out. She stepped back a pace, a little flushed and tremulous.