Chapter 2

Those
blue eyes and something in their expression moved me strangely; but I
could not tell why. When I said good-bye to her that night, I asked to
be allowed to call.

She assented.

That was the beginning of a very beautiful courtship, which gave a
colour to life, a music to existence, a meaning to every slightest
sensation.

And was it love that laid to sleep recollection, that sang a lullaby to
awakening horror, and strewed poppies over it till it sighed itself into
slumber? Was it love that drowned my mind in deep and charmed waters,
binding the strange powers that every mind possesses in flowery garlands
stronger than any fetters of iron? Was it love that, calling up dreams,
alienated my thoughts from their search after reality?

I hardly know. I only know that I grew to love Margot, and only looked
for love in her blue eyes, not for any deed of the past that might be
mirrored there.

And I made her love me.

She gave her child’s heart to my keeping with a perfect confidence
that only a perfect affection could engender. She did love me then. No
circumstances of to-day can break that fact under their hammers. She
did love me, and it is the knowledge that she did which gives so much of
fear to me now.

For great changes in the human mind are terrible. As we realize them we
realize the limitless possibilities of sinister deeds that lie hidden in
every human being. A little child that loves a doll can become an old,
crafty, secret murderer. How horrible!

And perhaps it is still more horrible to think that, while the human
envelope remains totally unchanged, every word of the letter within may
become altered, and a message of peace fade into a sentence of death.

Margot’s face is the same face now as it was when I married
her--scarcely older, certainly not less beautiful. Only the expression
of the eyes has changed.

For we were married. After a year of love-making, which never tired
either of us, we elected to bind ourselves, to fuse the two into one.

We went abroad for the honeymoon, and, instead of shortening it to the
fashionable fortnight, we travelled for nearly six months, and were
happy all the time.

Boredom never set in. Margot had a beautiful mind as well as a beautiful
face. She softened me through my affection. The current of my life began
to set in a different direction. I turned the pages of a book of pity
and of death more beautiful than that of Pierre Loti. I could hear at
last the great cry for sympathy, which is the music of this strange
suffering world, and, listening to it, in my heart there rang an echo.
The cruelty in my nature seemed to shrivel up. I was more gentle than I
had been, more gentle than I had thought I could ever be.

At last, in the late spring, we started for home. We stayed for a week
in London, and then we travelled north. Margot had never seen her
future home, had never even been in Cumberland before. She was full
of excitement and happiness, a veritable child in the ready and ardent
expression of her feelings. The station is several miles from the house,
and is on the edge of the sea. When the train pulled up at the wayside
platform the day drew towards sunset, and the flat levels of the beach
shone with a rich, liquid, amber light. In the distance the sea was
tossing and tumbling, whipped into foam by a fresh wind. The Isle of Man
lay far away, dark, mysterious, under a stack of bellying white clouds,
just beginning to be tinged with the faintest rose.

Margot found the scene beautiful, the wind life-giving, the flat
sand-banks, the shining levels, even the dry, spiky grass that fluttered
in the breeze, fascinating and refreshing.

“I feel near the heart of Nature in a place like this,” she said,
looking up at a seagull that hovered over the little platform, crying to
the wind on which it hung.

The train stole off along the edge of the sands, till we could see only
the white streamer of its smoke trailing towards the sun. We turned away
from the sea, got into the carriage that was waiting for us, and set
our faces inland. The ocean was blotted out by the low grass and
heather-covered banks that divided the fields. Presently we plunged into
woods. The road descended sharply. A village, an abruptly winding river
sprang into sight.

We were on my land. We passed the inn, the Rainwood Arms, named after
my grandfather’s family. The people whom we met stared curiously and
saluted in rustic fashion.

Margot was full of excitement and pleasure, and talked incessantly,
holding my hand tightly in hers and asking a thousand questions. Passing
through the village, we mounted a hill towards a thick grove of trees.

“The house stands among them,” I said, pointing.

She sprang up eagerly in the carriage to find it, but it was hidden.

We dashed through the gate into the momentary darkness of the drive,
emerged between great green lawns, and drew up before the big doorway of
the hall. I looked into her eyes, and said “Welcome!”

She only smiled in answer.

I would not let her enter the house immediately, but made her come with
me to the terrace above the river, to see the view over the Cumbrian
mountains and the moors of Eskdale.

The sky was very clear and pale, but over Styhead the clouds were
boiling up. The Screes that guard ebon Wastwater looked grim and sad.

Margot stood beside me on the terrace, but her chatter had been
succeeded by silence. And I, too, was silent for the moment, absorbed in
contemplation. But presently I turned to her, wishing to see how she was
impressed by her new domain.

She was not looking towards the river and the hills, but at the terrace
walk itself, the band of emerald turf that bordered it, the stone pots
full of flowers, the winding way that led into the shrubbery.

She was looking at these intently, and with a strangely puzzled, almost
startled expression.

“Hush! Don’t speak to me for a moment,” she said, as I opened my lips.
“Don’t; I want to---- How odd this is!”

And she gazed up at the windows of the house, at the creepers that
climbed its walls, at the sloping roof and the irregular chimney-stacks.

Her lips were slightly parted, and her eyes were full of an inward
expression that told me she was struggling with forgetfulness and
desired recollection.

I was silent, wondering.

At last she said: “Ronald, I have never been in the North of England
before, never set foot in Cumberland; yet I seem to know this terrace
walk, those very flower-pots, the garden, the look of that roof, those
chimneys, even the slanting way in which that great creeper climbs. Is
it not--is it not very strange?”

She gazed up at me, and in her blue eyes there was an expression almost
of fear.

I smiled down on her. “It must be your fancy,” I said.

“It does not seem so,” she replied. “I feel as if I had been here
before, and often, or for a long time.” She paused; then she said: “Do
let me go into the house. There ought to be a room there--a room--I seem
almost to see it. Come! Let us go in.”

She took my hand and drew me towards the hall door. The servants were
carrying in the luggage, and there was a certain amount of confusion and
noise, but she did not seem to notice it. She was intent on something; I
could not tell what.

“Do show me the house, Ronald--the drawing-room, and--and--there is
another room I wish to see.”

“You shall see them all, dear,” I said. “You are excited. It is natural
enough. This is the drawing-room.”

She glanced round it hastily.

“And now the others!” she exclaimed.

I took her to the dining-room, the library, and the various apartments
on the ground-floor.

She scarcely looked at them. When we had finished exploring, “Are these
all?” she asked, with a wavering accent of disappointment.

“All,” I answered.

“Then--show me the rooms upstairs.”

We ascended the shallow oak steps, and passed first into the apartment
in which my grandmother had died.

It had been done up since then, refurnished, and almost completely
altered. Only the wide fireplace, with its brass dogs and its heavy
oaken mantelpiece, had been left untouched.

Margot glanced hastily round. Then she walked up to the fireplace, and
drew a long breath.

“There ought to be a fire here,” she said.

“But it is summer,” I answered, wondering.

“And a chair there,” she went on, in a curious low voice, indicating--I
think now, or is it my imagination?--the very spot where my grandmother
was wont to sit. “Yes--I seem to remember, and yet not to remember.”

She looked at me, and her white brows were knit.

Suddenly she said: “Ronald, I don’t think I like this room. There is
something--I don’t know--I don’t think I could sit here; and I seem to
remember--something about it, as I did about the terrace. What can it
mean?”

“It means that you are tired and overexcited, darling. Your nerves are
too highly strung, and nerves play us strange tricks. Come to your own
room and take off your things, and when you have had some tea, you will
be all right again.”

Yes, I was fool enough to believe that tea was the panacea for an
undreamed-of, a then unimaginable, evil.

I thought Margot was simply an overtired and imaginative child that
evening. If I could believe so now!

We went up into her boudoir and had tea, and she grew more like
herself; but several times that night I observed her looking puzzled and
thoughtful, and a certain expression of anxiety shone in her blue eyes
that was new to them then.

But I thought nothing of it, and I was-happy. Two or three days
passed, and Mar-got did not again refer to her curious sensation of
pre-knowledge of the house and garden. I fancied there was a slight
alteration in her manner; that was all. She seemed a little restless.
Her vivacity flagged now and then. She was more willing to be alone than
she had been. But we were old married folk now, and could not be always
in each other’s sight. I had a great many people connected with the
estate to see, and had to gather up the tangled threads of many affairs.

The honeymoon was over. Of course we could not always be together.

Still, I should have wished Margot to desire it, and I could not hide
from myself that now and then she scarcely concealed a slight impatience
to be left in solitude. This troubled me, but only a little, for she was
generally as fond as ever. That evening, however, an incident occurred
which rendered me decidedly uneasy, and made me wonder if my wife were
not inclined to that curse of highly-strung women--hysteria!

I had been riding over the moors to visit a tenant-farmer who lived at
some distance, and did not return until twilight. Dismounting, I let
myself into the house, traversed the hall, and ascended the stairs. As I
wore spurs, and the steps were of polished oak and uncarpeted, I walked
noisily enough to warn anyone of my approach. I was passing the door
of the room that had been my grandmother’s sitting-room, when I noticed
that it stood open. The house was rather dark, and the interior was dim
enough, but I could see a figure in a white dress moving about inside.
I recognised Margot, and wondered what she was doing, but her movements
were so singular that, instead of speaking to her, I stood in the
doorway and watched her.

She was walking, with a very peculiar, stealthy step, around the room,
not as if she were looking for anything, but merely as if she were
restless or ill at ease. But what struck me forcibly was this, that
there was something curiously animal in her movements, seen thus in a
dim half-light that only partially revealed her to me. I had never
seen a woman walk in that strangely wild yet soft way before. There was
something uncanny about it, that rendered me extremely discomforted; yet
I was quite fascinated, and rooted to the ground.

I cannot tell how long I stood there. I was so completely absorbed in
the passion of the gazer that the passage of time did not concern me
in the least. I was as one assisting at a strange spectacle. This white
thing moving in the dark did not suggest my wife to me, although it
was she. I might have been watching an animal, vague, yet purposeful of
mind, tracing out some hidden thing, following out some instinct quite
foreign to humanity. I remember that presently I involuntarily clasped
my hands together, and felt that they were very cold. Perspiration broke
out on my face. I was painfully, unnaturally moved, and a violent desire
to be away from this white moving thing came over me. Walking as softly
as I could, I went to my dressing-room, shut the door, and sat down on a
chair. I never remember to have felt thoroughly unnerved before, but now
I found myself actually shaken, palsied. I could understand how deadly
a thing fear is. I lit a candle hastily, and as I did so a knock came to
the door.

Margot’s voice said, “May I come in?” I felt unable to reply, so I got
up and admitted her.

She entered smiling, and looking such a child, so innocent, so tender,
that I almost laughed aloud. That I, a man, should have been frightened
by a child in a white dress, just because the twilight cast a phantom
atmosphere around her! I held her in my arms, and I gazed into her blue
eyes.

She looked down, but still smiled.

“Where have you been, and what have you been doing?” I asked gaily.

She answered that she had been in the drawing-room since tea-time.

“You came here straight from the drawing-room?” I said.

She replied, “Yes.”

Then, with an indifferent air which hid real anxiety, I said:

“By the way, Margot, have you been into that room again--the room you
fancied you recollected?”

“No, never,” she answered, withdrawing herself from my arms. “I
don’t wish to go there. Make haste, Ronald, and dress. It is nearly
dinner-time, and I am ready.” And she turned and left me.

She had told me a lie. All my feelings of uneasiness and discomfort
returned tenfold.

That evening was the most wretched one, the only wretched one, I had
ever spent with her.

*****

I am tired of writing. I will continue my task to-morrow. It takes me
longer than I anticipated. Yet even to tell everything to myself brings
me some comfort. Man must express himself; and despair must find a
voice.

III.

_Thursday Night, December 5th_.

That lie awoke in me suspicion of the child I had married. I began to
doubt her, yet never ceased to love her. She had all my heart, and must
have it till the end. But the calm of love was to be succeeded by love’s
tumult and agony. A strangeness was creeping over Margot. It was as if
she took a thin veil in her hands, and drew it over and all around her,
till the outlines I had known were slightly blurred. Her disposition,
which had been so clear cut, so sharply, beautifully defined, standing
out in its innocent glory for all men to see, seemed to withdraw itself,
as if a dawning necessity for secrecy had arisen. A thin crust of
reserve began to subtly overspread her every act and expression. She
thought now before she spoke; she thought before she looked. It seemed
to me that she was becoming a slightly different person.

The change I mean to imply is very difficult to describe. It was not
abrupt enough to startle, but I could feel it, slight though it was.
Have you seen the first flat film of waveless water, sent by the
incoming tides of the sea, crawling silently up over the wrinkled brown
sand, and filling the tiny ruts, till diminutive hills and valleys are
all one smooth surface? So it was with Margot. A tide flowed over her
character, a waveless tide of reserve. The hills and valleys which I
loved disappeared from my ken. Behind the old sweet smile, the old frank
expression, my wife was shrinking down to hide herself, as one escaping
from pursuit hides behind a barrier. When one human being knows another
very intimately, and all the barricades that divide soul from soul have
been broken down, it is difficult to set them up again without noise and
dust, and the sound of thrust-in bolts, and the tap of the hammer that
drives in the nails. It is difficult, but not impossible. Barricades
can be raised noiselessly, soundless bolts--that keep out the soul--be
pushed home. The black gauze veil that blots out the scene drops, and
when it is raised--if ever--the scene is changed.

The real Margot was receding from me. I felt it with an impotence of
despair that was benumbing. Yet I could not speak of it, for at first I
could hardly tell if she knew of what was taking place. Indeed, at this
moment, in thinking it over, I do not believe that for some time she had
any definite cognisance of the fact that she was growing to love me
less passionately than of old. In acts she was not changed. That was the
strange part of the matter. Her kisses were warm, but I believed them
premeditated. She clasped my hand in hers, but now there was more
mechanism than magic in that act of tenderness. Impulse failed within
her; and she had been all impulse? Did she know it? At that time I
wondered. Believing that she did not know she was changing, I was at the
greatest pains to guard my conduct, lest I should implant the suspicion
that might hasten what I feared. I remained, desperately, the same as
ever, and so, of course, was not the same, for a deed done defiantly
bears little resemblance to a deed done naturally. I was always
considering what I should say, how I should act, even how I should
look. To live now was sedulous instead of easy. Effort took the place
of simplicity. My wife and I were gazing furtively at each other through
the eye-holes of masks. I knew it. Did she?

At that time I never ceased to wonder. Of one thing I was certain,
however--that Margot began to devise excuses for being left alone. When
we first came home she could hardly endure me out of her sight. Now she
grew to appreciate solitude. This was a terrible danger signal, and I
could not fail to so regard it.

Yet something within me held me back from speaking out. I made no
comment on the change that deepened day by day, but I watched my wife
furtively, with a concentration of attention that sometimes left me
physically exhausted. I felt, too, at length, that I was growing morbid,
that suspicion coloured my mind and caused me, perhaps, to put a wrong
interpretation on many of her actions, to exaggerate and misconstrue
the most simple things she did. I began to believe her every look
premeditated. Even if she kissed me, I thought she did it with a
purpose; if she smiled up at me as of old, I fancied the smile to be
only a concealment of its opposite. By degrees we became shy of each
other. We were like uncongenial intimates, forced to occupy the same
house, forced into a fearful knowledge of each other’s personal habits,
while we knew nothing of the thoughts that make up the true lives of
individuals.

And then another incident occurred, a pendant to the incident of
Margot’s strange denied visit to the room she affected to fear. It was
one night, one deep dark night of the autumn--a season to affect even a
cheerful mind and incline it towards melancholy. Margot and I were now
often silent when we were together. That evening, towards nine, a dull
steady rain set in. I remember I heard it on the window-panes as we sat
in the drawing-room after dinner, and remarked on it, saying to her that
if it continued for two or three days she might chance to see the floods
out, and that fishermen would descend upon us by the score.

I did not obtain much response from her. The dreariness of the weather
seemed to affect her spirits. She took up a book presently, and appeared
to read; but, once in glancing up suddenly from my newspaper, I thought
I caught her gaze fixed fearfully upon me. It seemed to me that she was
looking furtively at me with an absolute terror. I was so much affected
that I made some excuse for leaving the room, went down to my den, lit
a cigar, and walked uneasily up and down, listening to the rain on the
window. At ten Margot came in to tell me she was going to bed. I wished
her good-night tenderly, but as I held her slim body a moment in my arms
I felt that she began to tremble. I let her go, and she slipped from
the room with the soft, cushioned step that was habitual with her. And,
strangely enough, my thoughts recurred to the day, long ago, when I
first held the great white cat on my knees, and felt its body shrink
from my touch with a nameless horror. The uneasy movement of the woman
recalled to me so strongly and so strangely the uneasy movement of the
animal.

I lit a second cigar. It was near midnight when it was smoked out, and I
turned down the lamp and went softly up to bed. I undressed in the room
adjoining my wife’s, and then stole into hers. She was sleeping in the
wide white bed rather uneasily, and as I leaned over her, shading the
candle flame with my outspread hand, she muttered some broken words that
I could not catch. I had never heard her talk in her dreams before. I
lay down gently at her side and extinguished the candle.

But sleep did not come to me. The dull, dead silence weighed upon
instead of soothing me. My mind was terribly alive, in a ferment;
and the contrast between my own excitement and the hushed peace of my
environment was painful, was almost unbearable. I wished that a wind
from the mountains were beating against the window-panes, and the
rain lashing the house in fury. The black calm around was horrible,
unnatural. The drizzling rain was now so small that I could not even
hear its patter when I strained my ears. Margot had ceased to mutter,
and lay perfectly still. How I longed to be able to read the soul hidden
in her sleeping body, to unravel the mystery of the mind which I had
once understood so perfectly! It is so horrible that we can never open
the human envelope, take out the letter, and seize with our eyes upon
its every word. Margot slept with all her secrets safeguarded, although
she was unconscious, no longer watchful, on the alert. She was so
silent, even her quiet breathing not reaching my ear, that I felt
impelled to stretch out my hand beneath the coverlet and touch hers ever
so softly. I did so.

Her hand was instantly and silently withdrawn. She was awake, then.

“Margot,” I said, “did I disturb you?”

There was no answer.

The movement, followed by the silence, affected me very disagreeably.

I lit the candle and looked at her. She was lying on the extreme edge
of the bed, with her blue eyes closed. Her lips were slightly parted. I
could hear her steady breathing. Yet was she really sleeping?

I bent lower over her, and as I did so a slight, involuntary movement,
akin to what we call a shudder, ran through her body. I recoiled from
the bed. An impotent anger seized me. Could it be that my presence was
becoming so hateful to my wife that even in sleep her body trembled when
I drew near it? Or was this slumber feigned? I could not tell, but I
felt it impossible at that moment to remain in the room. I returned to
my own, dressed, and descended the stairs to the door opening on to the
terrace. I felt a longing to be out in the air. The atmosphere of the
house was stifling.

Was it coming to this, then? Did I, a man, shrink with a fantastic
cowardice from a woman I loved? The latent cruelty began to stir within
me, the tyrant spirit which a strong love sometimes evokes. I had been
Margot’s slave almost. My affection had brought me to her feet, had
kept me there. So long as she loved me I was content to be her captive,
knowing she was mine. But a change in her attitude toward me might rouse
the master. In my nature there was a certain brutality, a savagery,
which I had never wholly slain, although Margot had softened me
wonderfully by her softness, had brought me to gentleness by her
tenderness. The boy of years ago had developed toward better things, but
he was not dead in me. I felt that as I walked up and down the terrace
through the night in a wild meditation. If my love could not hold
Margot, my strength should.

I drew in a long breath of the wet night air, and I opened my shoulders
as if shaking off an oppression. My passion for Margot had not yet drawn
me down to weakness; it had raised me up to strength. The faint fear
of her, which I had felt almost without knowing it more than once, died
within me. The desire of the conqueror elevated me. There was something
for me to win. My paralysis passed away, and I turned toward the house.

And now a strange thing happened. I walked into the dark hall, closed
the outer door, shutting out the dull murmur of the night, and felt in
my pocket for my matchbox. It was not there. I must inadvertently have
laid it down in my dressing-room and left it. I searched about in the
darkness on the hall table, but could find no light. There was nothing
for it, then, but to feel my way upstairs as best I could.

I started, keeping my hand against the wall to guide me. I gained the
top of the stairs, and began to traverse the landing, still with my hand
upon the wall. To reach my dressing-room I had to pass the apartment
which had been my grandmother’s sitting-room.

When I reached it, instead of sliding along a closed door, as I had
anticipated, my hand dropped into vacancy.

The door was wide open. It had been shut, like all the other doors
in the house, when I had descended the stairs--shut and locked, as it
always was at night-time. Why was it open now?

I paused in the darkness. And then an impulse seized me to walk forward
into the room. I advanced a step; but, as I did so, a horrible low cry
broke upon my ears out of the darkness. It came from immediately in
front of me, and sounded like an expression of the most abject fear.

My feet rooted themselves to the ground.

“Who’s there?” I asked.

There came no answer.

I listened for a moment, but did not hear the minutest sound. The desire
for light was overpowering. I generally did my writing in this room,
and knew the exact whereabouts of everything in it. I knew that on the
writing-table there was a silver box containing wax matches. It lay on
the left of my desk. I moved another step forward.

There was the sound of a slight rustle, as if someone shrank back as I
advanced.

I laid my hand quickly on the box, opened it, and struck a light. The
room was vaguely illuminated. I saw something white at the far end,
against the wall. I put the match to a candle.

The white thing was Margot. She was in her dressing-gown, and was
crouched up in an angle of the wall as far away from where I stood
as possible. Her blue eyes were wide open, and fixed upon me with an
expression of such intense and hideous fear in them that I almost cried
out.

“Margot, what is the matter?” I said. “Are you ill?”

She made no reply. Her face terrified me.

“What is it, Margot?” I cried in a loud, almost harsh voice, determined
to rouse her from this horrible, unnatural silence. “What are you doing
here?”

I moved towards her. I stretched out my hands and seized her. As I did
so, a sort of sob burst from her. Her hands were cold and trembling.

“What is it? What has frightened you?” I reiterated.

At last she spoke in a low voice.

“You--you looked so strange, so--so cruel as you came in,” she said.

“Strange! Cruel! But you could not see me.