The Passionate Friends
and whither we might go. It must have made an extraordinary jumble of
protest, persuasion and practicality. It never reached her; it was
intercepted by Justin.
I have gathered since that after I left Martens he sent telegrams to Guy
and Philip and her cousin Lord Tarvrille. He was I think amazed beyond
measure at this revelation of the possibilities of his cold and distant
wife, with a vast passion of jealousy awaking in him, and absolutely
incapable of forming any plan to meet the demands of his extraordinary
situation. Guy and Philip got to him that night, Tarvrille came down
next morning, and Martens became a debate. Justin did not so much
express views and intentions as have them extracted from him; it was
manifest he was prepared for the amplest forgiveness of his wife if only
I could be obliterated from their world. Confronted with her brothers,
the two men in the world who could be frankly brutal to her, Mary's
dignity suffered; she persisted she meant to go on seeing me, but she
was reduced to passionate tears.
Into some such state of affairs I came that morning on the heels of my
letter, demanding Lady Mary of a scared evasive butler.
Maxton and Tarvrille appeared: "Hullo, Stratton!" said Tarvrille, with a
fine flavor of an agreeable chance meeting. Philip had doubts about his
greeting me, and then extended his reluctant hand with a nervous grin to
excuse the delay.
"I want to see Lady Mary," said I, stiffly.
"She's not up yet," said Tarvrille, with a hand on my shoulder. "Come
and have a talk in the garden."
We went out with Tarvrille expanding the topic of the seasons. "It's a
damned good month, November, say what you like about it." Philip walked
grimly silent on my other hand.
"And it's a damned awkward situation you've got us into, Stratton," said
Tarvrille, "say what you like about it."
"It isn't as though old Justin was any sort of beast," he reflected,
"or anything like that, you know. He's a most astonishing decent chap,
clean as they make them."
"This isn't a beastly intrigue," I said.
"It never is," said Tarvrille genially.
"We've loved each other a long time. It's just flared out here."
"No doubt of that," said Tarvrille. "It's been like a beacon to all
Surrey."
"It's one of those cases where things have to be readjusted. The best
thing to do is for Mary and me to go abroad----"
"Yes, but does Mary think so?"
"Look here!" said Philip in a voice thick with rage. "I won't have Mary
divorced. I won't. See? I won't."
"What the devil's it got to do with _you_?" I asked with an answering
flash of fury.
Tarvrille's arm ran through mine. "Nobody's going to divorce Mary," he
said reassuringly. "Not even Justin. He doesn't want to, and nobody else
can, and there you are!"
"But we two----"
"You two have had a tremendously good time. You've got found out--and
there you are!"
"This thing has got to stop absolutely now," said Philip and echoed with
a note of satisfaction in his own phrasing, "absolutely _now_."
"You see, Stratton," said Tarvrille as if he were expanding Philip's
assertion, "there's been too many divorces in society. It's demoralizing
people. It's discrediting us. It's setting class against class.
Everybody is saying why don't these big people either set about
respecting the law or altering it. Common people are getting too
infernally clear-headed. Hitherto it's mattered so little.... But we
can't stand any more of it, Stratton, now. It's something more than a
private issue; it's a question of public policy. We can't stand any more
divorces."
He reflected. "We have to consider something more than our own personal
inclinations. We've got no business to be here at all if we're not a
responsible class. We owe something--to ourselves."
It was as if Tarvrille was as concerned as I was for this particular
divorce, as if he struggled with a lively desire to see me and Mary
happily married after the shortest possible interval. And indeed he
manifestly wasn't unsympathetic; he had the strongest proclivity for the
romantic and picturesque, and it was largely the romantic
picturesqueness of renunciation that he urged upon me. Philip for the
most part maintained a resentful silence; he was a clenched anger
against me, against Mary, against the flaming possibilities that
threatened the sister of Lord Maxton, that most promising and
distinguished young man.
Of course their plans must have been definitely made before this talk,
probably they had made them overnight, and probably it was Tarvrille had
given them a practicable shape, but he threw over the whole of our talk
so satisfying a suggestion of arrest and prolonged discussion that it
never occurred to me that I should not be able to come again on the
morrow and renew my demand to see Mary. Even when next day I turned my
face to Martens and saw the flag had vanished from the flagstaff, it
seemed merely a token of that household's perturbation. I thought the
house looked oddly blank and sleepy as I drew near, but I did not
perceive that this was because all the blinds were drawn. The door upon
the lawn was closed, and presently the butler came to open it. He was in
an old white jacket, and collarless. "Lady Mary!" he said. "Lady Mary
has gone, sir. She and Mr. Justin went yesterday after you called."
"Gone!" said I. "But where?"
"I _think_ abroad, sir."
"Abroad!"
"I _think_ abroad."
"But---- They've left an address?"
"Only to Mr. Justin's office," said the man. "Any letters will be
forwarded from there."
I paused upon the step. He remained stiffly deferential, but with an air
of having disposed of me. He reproved me tacitly for forgetting that I
ought to conceal my astonishment at this disappearance. He was indeed an
admirable man-servant. "Thank you," said I, and dropped away defeated
from the door.
I went down the broad steps, walked out up the lawn, and surveyed house
and trees and garden and sky. To the heights and the depths and the
uttermost, I knew now what it was to be amazed....
§ 12
I had felt myself an actor in a drama, and now I had very much the
feeling an actor would have who answers to a cue and finds himself in
mid-stage with the scenery and the rest of the cast suddenly vanished
behind him. By that mixture of force and persuasion which avails itself
of a woman's instinctive and cultivated dread of disputes and raised
voices and the betrayal of contention to strangers, by the sheer tiring
down of nerves and of sleepless body and by threats of an immediate
divorce and a campaign of ruin against me, these three men had obliged
Mary to leave Martens and go with them to Southampton, and thence they
took her in Justin's yacht, the _Water-Witch_, to Waterford, and thence
by train to a hired house, an adapted old castle at Mirk near Crogham in
Mayo. There for all practical purposes she was a prisoner. They took
away her purse, and she was four miles from a pillar-box and ten from a
telegraph office. This house they had taken furnished without seeing it
on the recommendation of a London agent, and in the name of Justin's
solicitor. Thither presently went Lady Ladislaw, and an announcement
appeared in the _Times_ that Justin and Lady Mary had gone abroad for a
time and that no letters would be forwarded.
I have never learnt the particulars of that abduction, but I imagine
Mary astonished, her pride outraged, humiliated, helpless, perplexed and
maintaining a certain outward dignity. Moreover, as I was presently to
be told, she was ill. Guy and Philip were, I believe, the moving spirits
in the affair; Tarvrille was their apologetic accomplice, Justin took
the responsibility for what they did and bore the cost, he was bitterly
ashamed to have these compulsions applied to his wife, but full now of a
gusty fury against myself. He loved Mary still with a love that was
shamed and torn and bleeding, but his ruling passion was that infinitely
stronger passion than love in our poor human hearts, jealousy. He was
prepared to fight for her now as men fight for a flag, tearing it to
pieces in the struggle. He meant now to keep Mary. That settled, he was
prepared to consider whether he still loved her or she him....
Now here it may seem to you that we are on the very verge of romance.
Here is a beautiful lady carried off and held prisoner in a wild old
place, standing out half cut off from the mainland among the wintry
breakers of the west coast of Ireland. Here is the lover, baffled but
insistent. Here are the fierce brothers and the stern dragon husband,
and you have but to make out that the marriage was compulsory, irregular
and, on the ground of that irregularity, finally dissoluble, to furnish
forth a theme for Marriott Watson in his most admirable and adventurous
vein. You can imagine the happy chances that would have guided me to the
hiding-place, the trusty friend who would have come with me and told the
story, the grim siege of the place--all as it were _sotto voce_ for fear
of scandal--the fight with Guy in the little cave, my attempted
assassination, the secret passage. Would to heaven life had those rich
simplicities, and one could meet one's man at the end of a sword! My
siege of Mirk makes a very different story from that.
In the first place I had no trusted friend of so extravagant a
friendship as such aid would demand. I had no one whom it seemed
permissible to tell of our relations. I was not one man against three or
four men in a romantic struggle for a woman. I was one man against
something infinitely greater than that, I was one man against nearly all
men, one man against laws, traditions, instincts, institutions, social
order. Whatever my position had been before, my continuing pursuit of
Mary was open social rebellion. And I was in a state of extreme
uncertainty how far Mary was a willing agent in this abrupt
disappearance. I was disposed to think she had consented far more than
she had done to this astonishing step. Carrying off an unwilling woman
was outside my imaginative range. It was luminously clear in my mind
that so far she had never countenanced the idea of flight with me, and
until she did I was absolutely bound to silence about her. I felt that
until I saw her face to face again, and was sure she wanted me to
release her, that prohibition held. Yet how was I to get at her and hear
what she had to say? Clearly it was possible that she was under
restraint, but I did not know; I was not certain, I could not prove it.
At Guildford station I gathered, after ignominious enquiries, that the
Justins had booked to London. I had two days of nearly frantic
inactivity at home, and then pretended business that took me to London,
for fear that I should break out to my father. I came up revolving a
dozen impossible projects of action in my mind. I had to get into touch
with Mary, at that my mind hung and stopped. All through the twenty-four
hours my nerves jumped at every knock upon my door; this might be the
letter, this might be the telegram, this might be herself escaped and
come to me. The days passed like days upon a painful sick-bed, grey or
foggy London days of an appalling length and emptiness. If I sat at home
my imagination tortured me; if I went out I wanted to be back and see if
any communication had come. I tried repeatedly to see Tarvrille. I had
an idea of obtaining a complete outfit for an elopement, but I was
restrained by my entire ignorance of what a woman may need. I tried to
equip myself for a sudden crisis by the completest preparation of every
possible aspect. I did some absurd and ill-advised things. I astonished
a respectable solicitor in a grimy little office behind a queer little
court with trees near Cornhill, by asking him to give advice to an
anonymous client and then putting my anonymous case before him.