Twilight, Julia Frankau [100 books to read in a lifetime txt] 📗

was to be hers, only humiliation. Death was preferable, a thousand times preferable. She was impulsive and leaped to this conclusion.

“Can’t I do anything?” he said again.

“Peter, Peter Kennedy, you say you would do anything, anything, for me. I wonder what you mean by it…. How much or how little?”

“Lay down my life.”

“Or risk it? There must be a way, you must know a way of… of shortening things. I could not go through it all again… not now. If the worst came to the worst, if I can’t make him listen to reason, if he won’t forgive or understand. If I have to face the court again, my father and stepmother to know of my… my imprudence, all the horrors to be repeated. To have to stand up and deny… be crossexamined. About you as well as him…”

Again she hid her face. Then, after a pause in which she saw her life befouled, and Gabriel Stanton as her judge or executioner, she lifted a strained and desperate face. “You would find a way to end it?”

She waited for his answer.

“I don’t know what you mean.”

“Yes, you do. If it became unbearable. Life no longer a gift, but leprous…”

“It isn’t as if you had done anything,” he exclaimed.

“I’ve promised and broken my promise, lied, deceived him. It was only to secure his happiness, mine… ours… But if he takes it differently, and must have publicity…”

“I don’t believe you could go through it,” he said gloomily. “One of those heart attacks of yours might come on.”

“You know the pain is intolerable.”

“That amyl helps you.”

“Not much.”

“Morphia.”

“Was a failure last time. Peter, think, won’t you think? Couldn’t you give me anything? Isn’t there any drug? You are fond of drugs, learned in them. Isn’t there any drug that would put me out of my misery?”

He listened and she pressed him.

“Think, think.”

“Of course there are drugs.”

“But the drug.”

“There’s hyoscine…”

“Tell me the effect of that?”

“It depends how it is given… what it is given for.”

“For forgetfulness?”

“A quarter of a grain injection.”

“And, and…”

“Nothing, nothingness.”

“If you love me, Peter… You say you love me… If the worst came to the worst, you will help me through…?”

“Don’t.”

“I must…. I want your promise.”

“What is the good of promising? I couldn’t do it.”

“You said you could die for me.”

“It isn’t my death you are asking. Unless I should be hanged!”

“You can safeguard yourself.”

“You will never ask me.”

“But if I did?”

“Oh, God knows!”

“If I not only asked but implored? Give me this hope, this promise. If I come to the end of my tether, can bear no more; then ask you for release, the great release…?”

“My hand would drop off.”

“Lose your hand.”

“My heart would fail.”

“Other men have done such things for the woman they love.”

“It won’t come to that.”

“But if it did…?”

She pressed him, pressed him so hard that in the end he yielded, gave her the promise she asked. His night had been sleepless, he had been without breakfast. He scarcely knew what he was saying, only that he could not say “No “to her. And that when he said “Yes,” she took his hand in hers a moment, his reluctant hand, and laid her cheek against it.

“Dear friend,” she said tenderly, “you give me courage.”

When he went away she looked happier, or at least quieter. He cursed himself for a fool when he got into the car. But still against his hand he felt the softness of her cheek and the fear of unmanly tears made him exceed the speed limit.

Margaret, left alone, calculated her resources and for all her whilom amazing vanity found them poor and wanting. What would Gabriel say to her this morning, how could she answer him? If he truly loved her and she pointed out to him, proved to him that their marriage, their happiness, need not be postponed, would he listen? She saw herself persuading him, but remembered that her father in many an argument had failed in making him admit that there was more than one standard of ethics, of right conduct. If he truly loved her! In this black moment she could doubt it. For unlike Peter Kennedy he would put honour before her love.

Gabriel, her lover, came late, on slow reluctant feet. He loved her no less, although he knew she had deceived him, kept things back from him, complicated, perhaps, both their lives by her action. He knew her motives also, that it was because she loved him. He had no harsh judgment, only an overwhelming pang of tenderness. He, too, had faced the immediate future. He knew there must be no marriage whilst this thing hung over and menaced them. Yet to take her into his own keeping, guard and cherish her, was a desire sharp as a sword is sharp, and too poignant for words. He thought she would understand him. But more definitely perhaps he feared her opposition. The fear had slowed his feet. She did not know her lover when she dreaded his reproaches. When he came into the music room this grey, wet morning, he saw that she looked ill, but hardly guessed that she was apprehensive, and of him. He bent over her hands, kissed her hands, held them against his lips.

“My dear, my dear.” Her mercurial spirits rose at a bound.

“I thought you would reproach me.”

“My poor darling!”

“I wish I had told you.”

“Never mind that now.”

“But that was the worst of everything. You don’t know how I have reproached myself.”

“You must not.”

“You have not left off caring for me, then?”

“I never cared for you so much.”

“Why do you look so grave, so serious?”

Her heart was shaking as she questioned him.

In his tenderness there was something different, something inflexible.

“My darling,” he said again.

“That means…?”

“I am going to ask you to let me stop that cheque.”

“No.”

“Fortunately it is Sunday. We have the day before us. I am going up by the two-o’clock. I’ve sent my bag down to the station. I’ve already been on to my lawyer by telephone and he will see me at his private house this afternoon. In my opinion we have nothing at all to fear. The King’s Proctor will not move on such evidence as she has to offer, she has overreached herself. We ought to have her in gaol by tomorrow night.”

“In gaol!”

“That is where she should be. She frightened you… she shall go to gaol for it. Margaret, will you write to your bankers… let me write…”

“No!” she said again.

“Sweetheart!” and he caressed her.

“No. Gabriel, listen to me. I am overwhelmed because I broke my promise to you, was not candid. But though I am overwhelmed and unhappy…”

“I will not let you be unhappy…”

She brushed that aside and went on:

“I am not sorry for what I have done. There is not a word of truth in what she says. As you say, I have admitted guilt, being innocent. Gabriel, I was innocent before, but racked, tortured to prove it. Here I have only paid five hundred pounds. Oh, Heaven! give me words, the power to show you. I am pleading with you for my life. For my life, Gabriel… ours. Let the cheque go through, give her another if necessary, and yet another. I don’t mind buying my happiness.” She pleaded wildly.

“Hush! Hush!” He hushed her on his breast, held her to him.

“Dear love…” She wept, and the tortures of which she spoke were his. “If only I might yield to you.”

“What is it stops you? Obstinacy, selfrighteousness…”

“If it were either would I not yield now, now, with your dear head upon my breast?” She was sobbing there. “Dear love, you unman me.” His breathing was irregular. “Listen, you unman me, you weaken me. We were both looking forward, and must still be able to look forward. And backward, too. Not stain our name, more than our name, our own personal honour. Margaret, we are clean, there must be no one who can say, ‘Had they been innocent, would they have paid to hide it?’ And this fresh charge, this fresh and hideo.us accusation! And you would accept all, admit all! My dear, my dear, it must not be, we have not only ourselves to consider.”

“Not only ourselves!” He held her closer, whispered in her ear.

She had heard him discuss commercial morality with her father, had seen into both their souls; learnt her lover’s creed. One must not best a fellowman, fool though he might be, nor take advantage of his need nor ignorance. She had learnt that there were such things as undue percentage of profit, although no man might know what that profit was. “Child’s talk,” her father had called it, and told him Wall Street would collapse in a day if his tenets were to hold good. Margaret had been proud of him then, although secretly her reason had failed to support him, for it is hard to upset the teaching of a lifetime. To her, it seemed there were conventions, but common sense or convenience might override them. In this particular instance why should she not submit to blackmail, paying for the freedom she needed? But he could not be brought to see eye to eye with her in this. She used all the power that was in her to prove to him that there is no sharp line of demarcation between right and wrong, that one can steer a middle course.

The short morning went by whilst she argued. She put forth all her powers, and in the end, quite suddenly, became conscious that she had not moved him in the least, that as he thought when he came into the room, so he thought now. He used the same words, the same hopeless unarguable words. “Being innocent we cannot put in this plea of guilty.” She would neither listen nor talk any more, but lay as a wrestler, who, after battling again and again until the whistle blew and the respite came, feels both shoulders touching the ground, and suddenly, without appeal, admits defeat.

When Gabriel wrote the letter to the bank stopping the cheque that was to be paid to Mrs. Roope on the morrow, she signed it silently. When he asked her to authorise him to see her father if necessary, to allow either or both of them to act for her, she acquiesced in the same way. She was quite spent and exhausted.

“I will let you know everything we do, every step we take.”

“I don’t want to hear.” She accepted his caresses without returning them, she had no capacity left for any emotion.

Then, after he had gone, for there was no time to spare and he must not miss his train, she remained immobile for a time, the panorama of the future unfolding before her exhausted brain. What a panorama it was! She was familiar with every sickening scene that passed before her. Lawyer’s office, documents going to and fro, delay and yet more delay. Appeal to Judge in Chambers, and from Judge in Chambers, interrogatories and yet more interrogatories, demands for further particulars, the further particulars questioned; Counsel’s opinion, the case set down for hearing, adjournments and yet further adjournments.

At last the Court. Speeches. And then, standing behind the rail in the witness-box, the cynosure of all eyes, she saw herself as in the stocks, for all to pelt with mud… herself, her wretched, cowering self! Gabriel said they were clean people; she and he were clean. So far they were, but they would be pelted with mud nevertheless; perhaps all the