Prisoners Part 20

He was absorbed in one thought.

He had loved Fay for a long time. How long was it? Five years? Ten years? Owing to his peculiar fate love had usurped in Michael's life too large a place, the place which it holds in a woman's life, but which is unnatural in a man's. He did not know it, but he had travelled a long way on the road towards an entire oblivion of Fay when he came to Rome.

But the one great precaution against her he had not taken. He had not replaced her, and "Only that which is replaced is destroyed." He had grown accustomed to loving her.

In these days he went over, slowly, minutely, every step of his long acquaintances.h.i.+p with her, from the first day, when he was nineteen and she was seventeen, to the last evening six years later, when he had kissed the cold hand that could have saved him, and did not.

Old people, wise old learned people, smoke-dried Dons and genial bishops sitting in their dignified studies, had spoken with guarded frankness to him in his youth on the temptations of life. They had told him that love, save when it was sanctified by marriage, was only a physical pa.s.sion, a temporary madness, a fever which all men who were men underwent, but to which a man of principle did not succ.u.mb, and which if vigorously suppressed soon pa.s.sed away.

Why had it not been so with him? He had never had to contend with the coa.r.s.e forms of temptation of which his elders had spoken, as if they were an integral part of his youth.

Why, then, had he loved this pretty, false, selfish woman so long? Why had he allowed himself to be drawn back into her toils after he had known she was false? Why was he more weak, more credulous, more infatuated than other men?

The duke had actually been her husband, had actually possessed that wonderful creature, and yet he, under the glamour of her personal presence, which it made Michael gasp to think of, he, the duke, had not been deceived.

Why had he, Michael, been deceived?

He remembered the exhortations of his tepid-minded, painlessly married tutor at Oxford, who read the vilest French novels as a duty, and took a walk with his wife on fine afternoons; and whose cryptic warnings on the empire of the pa.s.sions would have made a baboon blush.

Michael laughed suddenly as he recalled the mild old-maidish face. What was the old prig talking about? What did he know, dried up and shrivelled like a bit of seaweed between the leaves of a folio.

Everyone had told him wrong.

Why had they decried this awful power, why had they so confused it with sensual indulgence that he had had to disentangle it for himself? Why had they not warned him, on the contrary, that the love of woman was a living death, a pitfall from which there was no escape, from the depths of which you might stare at the sky till you starved to death, as he was doing now.

With all their warnings they had not warned him, these grave men, these instructors of youth, who had never known any world except their little world of books, who ranged women into two camps, one in which they held a docile Tennysonian place, as chaste adorners of the sacred home, mothers of children, man's property, insipid angel housekeepers of his demure middle age; the other where they were depicted as cheap, vulgar temptresses, on a level with the wine cup and the gambling table.

Why had he allowed himself to be duped and hoodwinked by his elders and by his own shyness, into chast.i.ty? They had entreated him to believe it was the only happy life. _It was not._ To be faithful to his future wife. Ha! Ha! That was the beginning of the trap, the white sand neatly raked over the hidden gin.

If he had only lived like other men! If he had only listened to the worst among them, if he had only torn the veil early from every limb of that draped female figure, that iron maiden, if he had only seen it in its horror of nudity, with its sharp nails for eyes, and its jagged knives where the bosom should be, he should not be pressed to death in its embrace now.

He had been deceived, betrayed, fooled. That was why he was shut up. He had believed in a woman, had believed that the cobra's bite was only a wasp's sting. Good Lord, what an imbecile! He was insane of course, raving mad. And he had been here eighteen months and only saw the joke now.

Michael laughed again, shouted with laughter.

The sun was setting again. It was always setting now. It set in the mornings as well. The red thong of light was on the wall again. Blood red! He rocked to and fro shaking with laughter.

The doctor and a warder came in. It was just like them. They were always coming in when they were not wanted.

He pointed at the bar of light, stumbled to it, and tried to tear it from the wall. It had been there long enough. Too long. And as he tore at it with hands dyed crimson, something that was pressing upon him lightened suddenly, and the blood gushed forth from his mouth, flooding the sun-stained wall.

"I have put out that d.a.m.ned sunset at last," he said to himself as he fell.

CHAPTER XVI

So we must keep apart, You there, I here, With just the door ajar That oceans are, And prayer, And that pale sustenance Despair!

--EMILY d.i.c.kENSON.

It was a little after Christmas when Michael first began to take notice of his surroundings once more. There was no love or tenderness that Wentworth could have shown him which the grave young Italian doctor did not lavish on him.

Little by little the mist in which Michael lay s.h.i.+fted and cleared, and closed in on him again. But the times when it cleared became nearer together. He felt that the great lethargy in which he lay would s.h.i.+ft when the mist s.h.i.+fted. Dimly, as if through innumerable veils, he was aware that something indefinable but terrible crouched behind it. Days pa.s.sed. Blank days and blank nights. He had forgotten everything.

He had been lying awake a long time, years and years. The doctor had been in to see him just before sunrise, had raised him, and made him drink, and laid him back upon his pillow. And now he felt full of rest.

How clear everything was becoming. He raised his hand to his head. He had not taken the trouble to do that before. He looked long at his wasted hands laid on the coa.r.s.e cotton sheeting. What were these marks on the wrists? They seemed like an answer to a riddle of which he had forgotten the question. If he only knew what those marks were he should know numbers of other things as well. He raised his long right hand, and held it close to his eyes.

These marks were bruises. A line of bruises went round the wrist. And here over the bone was a scar. It was healed now, but it had been a deep sore once.

_When?_

If only he could remember!

The mist in his mind cleared a little.

_Those bruises were made by chains._

A deadly faintness came over him.

Michael knew at last that he was in prison. The past filtered back into his feeble mind drop by drop. He knew why he was there. He knew what he had done to bring him there; he realised that he had been ill a long time, many weeks. But there was still something sinister, mysterious, crouching in the back of his mind.

The doctor sought to distract him, to rouse him. He was a botanist, and he shewed Michael his collection of gra.s.ses. Michael did not want to have the fatigue of looking at them, but he feigned an interest to please the doctor. He gazed languidly at a spray, now dry and old. The doctor explained to him that it was the sea lavender, which, in the early autumn, had flushed the shallows of the lagoon with a delicate grey lilac.

"I remember," said Michael, whitening.

It rushed back upon him, that time of waiting, marked by the flowering and the fading of the sea lavender. The colour was seared upon his brain.

"A hundred years it is lilac," he said, "and a hundred thousand years it is a purple brown."

The doctor, bending lovingly over a specimen of a rare water plant, looked up to see Michael's quivering face. He withdrew the book gently and took it away.

Michael trembled exceedingly. He was on the verge of some abyss which he should see clearly in another moment. The sea lavender grew on the very edge of it. It yawned suddenly at his feet. The abyss was Fay's last desertion. He looked down into it. It was quite dark.

A few days later the doctor brought another book. It was b.u.t.terflies this time. He saw that an increasing pressure was upon Michael's mind, and he feared for his brain. He was too weak to read. He might perhaps like to look at pictures.

The doctor opened the book at an attractive ill.u.s.tration of an immense b.u.t.terfly, with wings of iridescent blue and green. He could not stay, but he left the cherished volume open on Michael's knee.

Michael turned his maimed mind slowly from the abyss into which it had been looking ever since he had seen that sprig of sea lavender.

Yes. He knew that particular b.u.t.terfly. He had seen them by thousands once in a field in Corfu, long ago on an Easter holiday, when he had been abroad with Wentworth. They had all glinted together in the suns.h.i.+ne, wheeling together, sinking together, rising together like an army of fairies.