Where the Path Breaks

The picture had been in its place for a day when her letter came, a very thick letter; and with the envelope uncut he went up to sit before her likeness and read what she had to say to John Sanbourne.

“You are a lifeline thrown to me!” he read. “I grasp it thankfully. I wonder if you will think me a silly, sentimental creature, if I tell you that even before I opened your letter a strong golden current seemed to come out through the envelope into my fingers, and up my arm? If you were just an ordinary friend, a man, living near me, I shouldn’t be able to say this to you, or tell you that I put your letter like a talisman inside my dress, so as to keep it near me, and not lose the sense of its influence after I had read it three times over. But to you at your distance I can tell many things that are sacred, because I’m only a shadow to you, not a flesh-and-blood woman, with all my faults and foolishnesses under your eyes to be judged. I’m a shadow to you, and I don’t mind being a shadow, because it gives me freedom and liberty. Yet I mustn’t abuse that liberty, and deceive you, my friend so far off – and so near. I’m afraid that I have deceived you already, and asked for your sympathy, your help, under false pretenses. Perhaps if you’d known the real truth about me and my life, you would have written me a terribly different letter. Whenever I am feeling the comfort of it most, suddenly that thought pierces through me, very cold and deadly, like a spear of ice. I want the comfort – oh, how I want it! – and so, to make sure whether I have the right to take it or not, I am going to tell you everything. You will not be bored, or think me egotistic. I know you well enough, through your book and your letters, to be sure of that. When you have read this, you will be able to judge whether I can dare to claim the consolation you offer me, and whether I have a right to comfort myself with those thoughts, about the only man I have loved or shall ever love. Because, I have given another man a place in my outer life.

“What thought comes into your mind when you read those words – cold-hearted, horrible, disloyal words? Do you slam the door of your sympathy in my face, and turn me away? No, please, please don’t do that – anyhow don’t do it quite yet. Wait till I’ve explained as well as I can – if any explanation is possible.

“I want you to know all the truth and understand entirely, so I must even tell you a thing that seems absurd to tell. It would be absurd, if it were not for the thing’s consequences. When I was fourteen my mother and I came away from America, where we’d lived ever since I was born, came to live in Paris, though she is English by birth. A cousin of hers, an officer in the British army, was on leave from his regiment just then. He ran over to Paris, to amuse himself, not to see us; but as he knew we were there, he called. He was twenty-seven – thirteen years older than I – and I thought he was like all the heroes of all the novels I’d ever read, in the form of one perfectly handsome, perfectly fascinating man. He treated me like a child, and teased me a little about being a ‘flapper,’ but that only made me look up to him more, because he seemed so high above me, and wonderful and unattainable, like a prince.

“Perhaps he saw how I felt, and gloried in it as great fun. He gave me his picture in uniform, and I worshiped it humbly, as a little Eastern girl might worship an idol. Soon he went to India, but I saw him once again, nearly two years afterwards, when I was almost sixteen. I had never forgotten my ‘prince,’ and after he came back he flirted with me – rather cruelly, I think. When I realized – just as he was saying good-by, that he’d only been playing a little, it all but broke my heart – what I thought was my heart. I used actually to enjoy being miserable, and telling myself I should never love again – just as if I’d been a grown-up woman. I was even angry with my frivolous self when I found that I was getting over it. For I did get over it very soon, and before I was seventeen I could look back and laugh at my childish silliness. That was over five years ago, for I am twenty-two now; and all my real life has come since then.

“My mother and I were poor, until a little while ago. She is very good really and very charming, and absolutely unselfish, so I’m not picking flaws in her if I have to explain to you that she was selfish for me. Being English herself, she has always thought – in spite of marrying an American and going to live in America – that there’s nothing quite so good in the world as the best kind of English life. By the ‘best kind,’ she means life among the aristocracy, in country houses, and in London in the season. She made up her mind before I was eighteen that she wanted me some day to marry a man who could give me just that life. I used to laugh then, when she mapped out my future. It seemed only funny, not vulgar and horrid to talk about marrying some vague, imaginary man for his title and money; but when Mother took a house in London – a better house than we could afford – and went into debt to buy me heaps of lovely clothes, and fussed and schemed to get me presented and dragged into the ‘right set,’ I began to be ashamed.

“Before we had been in London very long I met a man who was different from any one I had ever seen before. From the first night, when we were introduced at a dance, I could think about no one else. I wish I could make you understand what he was like, for then you would see how a woman who cared about him could never stop caring, even when he was dead; for no other man could at all take his place. He wasn’t handsome, not even what people would call ‘good looking,’ I suppose, and he didn’t talk very much. But somehow, when he came into a room with lots of other men in it, all the rest simply ceased to count. He was very tall, and a great athlete. Maybe that was one thing that pleased a woman, for we do like strength – we can’t help it. But there was so much more about him, magnetic and sincere and splendid, which would somehow have made one feel that he was near, if one were blind! He could do all the things other men do better than any of the others, yet he had thoughts such as none of the others had. One knew that a woman could have no moods or imaginings beyond his power to understand, if he cared enough, because he was fine– ‘fine’ in the French meaning of the word – as well as strong. I shall never forget the first time he looked at me. We had just been introduced. There was something wonderful about his eyes – I could hardly tell you what it was. But one suddenly felt caught and drawn into them, as into a vortex in deep, still water, clear and pure, though dark.

“I saw that he rather liked me, and even that meant a good deal from him, because he was a man’s man, and didn’t care much about laughing and talking with lots of girls. Perhaps he was shy of them. Mother saw, too, that he was interested; and that was what began all the trouble, because he was exactly what she had set her heart on for me. She wouldn’t leave him alone to make up his mind whether he really wanted to see more of me or not. She tried to force him to want me. She did all she could to bring us together. She left no stone unturned. To me it was sickening. I don’t know whether he saw it or not, but I was so afraid he might, and be disgusted with us both, that it made me feel absolutely ill. I could never be at ease with him. It was hateful, hateful that he should think my mother and I were trying to ‘catch’ him, because of his title and money, and his beautiful old house which every one admired and talked about, and heaps of women wanted.

“After we had known him for awhile, mother hinted and hinted for us to be invited to stay at his place. It was almost like asking him to marry me – at least I felt it was. He was obliged to get up a house-party for us, so that we shouldn’t be alone, for he had no mother or aunt or any one to entertain for him. We and the others were invited for a week, but the day everybody was going on somewhere else, mother was taken ill, so she and I had to stay. I was sure she was pretending, though she wouldn’t confess, and I was almost wild with misery and shame, I loved him so dreadfully.

“For days mother kept her room, and when she came down she seemed so weak, that of course he begged us not to think of going. A fortnight more passed like that. Then the first rumors of war began; and we were still with him when war was declared. That same day, out in a garden by a lake we both loved, he told me he cared, and asked if I would marry him before he went off to fight. If only I could have been sure that he did really care, and hadn’t been drawn on by things mother had said, I should have been divinely happy. But I wasn’t sure. I wasn’t at all sure. And the shame and suffering I felt, and the fear of showing that I adored the ground he walked on, when perhaps he was only being chivalrous to me, made me behave like a beast. I was just a sullen lump. I said yes, I would marry him, if he was quite, quite sure he wanted me to; and then mother came out of the house, and straight to us, as if she had known exactly what was going on and could hardly wait to make certain of him.

“He had to go so soon, to rejoin his old regiment, and leave for the front, that he got a special license, and we were married when we had been engaged just two days. If he did love me – and looking back I almost believe now that he did, for he was too true as well as strong to be ‘trapped’ by any woman – I must have hurt him by keeping him so at a distance. He couldn’t have understood, not even with the wonderful power he had of seeing deep into people, all the way through to their souls. But now I have explained to you about mother, you will understand. We were hardly alone together, he and I, for more than five minutes at a time. I always made some excuse to escape. I was afraid if I were with him for long I should break down and be a fool. And I thought if he didn’t love me I should certainly disgust him by crying. Mother had told me often, when she was training me to ‘come out’ in society, that a man must love a woman very much, not to be irritated with her when she cries, and her face crinkles up and her nose gets red.

“After our wedding he was with me for about an hour, but mother was with us too, for half the time, and even when she left us alone in an ostentatious sort of way, I could think of nothing to say to him, nothing at all. There were a thousand things in my brain, will-o’-the-wisp things, but my tongue could not catch up with them. I let him go. And then it was too late.

“Three weeks afterwards, he died, saving the life of a friend. So now you see what your book meant to me, very specially, and why I begged you to tell me whether you had found out these wonderful things by going down close to death yourself. You know why it wasn’t enough even when you answered as you did at first. I longed to hear whether you thought he would know the truth about me. Your answer to that question is all I hoped for, and more. But I don’t deserve it, for I am married now to my cousin – the one I so childishly made an idol of when I was a little girl.

“You are shocked. You think of me with horror. You are sorry you have troubled with me at all. When you read at the beginning of this letter that I had given another man a ‘place in my life,’ you didn’t dream that I had married him. But so it is. Eight months after my love died, and my youth died with him, I was my cousin’s wife.

“I won’t tell you much about that. Only this: a month after I was a widow, this cousin came to England, wounded. My mother and I were helping the nurses as best we knew how, in the private hospital of a friend. My cousin arranged to be sent there. He wasn’t seriously hurt, and we saw something of him, of course. He was immensely changed from the old days. Because he might have been a stick or a stone instead of a man for all I cared, he was piqued, I suppose. He told mother that he meant to make me fall in love with him and marry him when the war was over. And when he had gone back to the front again, she repeated what he had said to me. You see, she didn’t know how I had loved the other, so she was surprised at the way I took the message. I couldn’t help showing that I was angry because he had dared. He wrote to me later, more than once, but I didn’t answer his letters.

“Months afterwards, he was horribly wounded. As he had no near relatives, he asked to have us sent for, to Boulogne. He was supposed to be dying, and we couldn’t refuse to go. We never thought of refusing. It seemed to do him good to see us, and he grew better. His one wish, he said, was to die in England. We brought him back – a dreadful journey. He grew worse again on the way, and we were obliged to stop at Folkestone for two weeks. Then we got him to London, to see a great specialist for spinal operations. The surgeon said that such an operation as would have to be made – if any – might kill, and could not cure. At best, if he lived, my cousin would be an invalid for the rest of his life. Still, without an operation, he must surely die. It would be just a question of a few weeks. My cousin had to be told this by some one, and the surgeon thought the news of such a verdict had better be broken to him by a person he cared for. Mother felt unable to bear the strain, after all she had gone through. She isn’t strong, and since last August she has changed very much. It seems as if, now that I’m ‘provided for’ (as she says), she had let herself go. That day, when she asked if I would tell my cousin what the surgeon said, I was frightened about her, she trembled so much and suddenly turned so deathly pale, with bluish lips, and blue circles round her eyes. Without an instant’s hesitation I promised to speak to my cousin. But I didn’t realize what the scene would be like, or I could hardly have faced it. In his weakness he broke down, as I never saw any one else break down. He said, if there was no hope of his being made into a man again, what good would it bring him to be cut up and hacked about by a surgeon? Besides, the specialist was the most expensive operator in England, and he couldn’t afford such a costly experiment. The simplest thing would be to put a revolver to his head, or take an overdose of some sleeping draft, and so to be out of his misery once and for all.

“I was unnerved, and begged him to keep up hope and courage – not to think about the money, but to let us lend it. My beloved one left everything to me; and I was sure, if he were alive, he would wish me to make that offer to a brother soldier. I felt, even while I was speaking, that if I were in my cousin’s place, I should refuse the operation because I’d rather die than live on as a helpless invalid, a burden to myself and others. But it wouldn’t have been human not to encourage that poor sufferer to endure existence, if he could. So I tried my best, and I was very excited and worked up by the sight of his emotion. Suddenly he spoke again. He said that without an incentive to live, he wouldn’t trouble about the operation, and the only incentive he could possibly have would be my marrying him, before he went under the anesthetic. Besides, he couldn’t accept money from me, when he saw no way of repaying it, unless I were his wife. I would rather he had killed me than force me to make such a decision as that!

“Perhaps if I’d been calmer, I might have dared to refuse, realizing that his love of life was very strong indeed, and that when he had thought things over, he would surely consent to the operation without the horrible sacrifice he asked of me. But I was at the point of breaking down, myself. I couldn’t see anything clearly. It seemed to me that I had to save a life, if it could be saved, at any cost. And then, my future mattered so little to me then. The thought in my mind at the time was, that to be the nurse of a broken soldier who’d given himself for his country, was at least a mission in life. As it was, I had none left. Also, it may be that deep down under my conscious thought was another: that according to the surgeon’s expert opinion, my cousin was most unlikely to live. Why not give him the incentive he asked for, to face the ordeal, and let him die happy – since that one thing seemed to mean happiness for him? Almost before I knew what I was doing, I promised. Then it was sprung upon me the next day, that if the operation were to be done at all, it must be done soon. I had to keep my word. And what followed was a nightmare: a second wedding by special license, a bedside marriage with a dying man, words of farewell, and the surgeon and anesthetist arriving in their white robes – like undertakers.

“When I heard that he had come through the operation with his life, I knew instantly what wicked hope must have been hiding in my heart. A sickening disappointment crept like poison through my blood. I had to do my duty, though, and live up to the obligations I’d undertaken so recklessly. After a few weeks, mother and I brought the invalid home – to the home my beloved one had given me! My life seems to have been one long series of mistakes, but I don’t think I’ve sinned enough to deserve the punishment I have to endure now. It is too much for me. How am I to bear it, and keep my soul’s honor? The memory of my love, his ways, and his looks follow me from room to room of his house, and walk with me by the dear lake, and in the garden paths. I might have found peace if I’d left myself a right to live with that memory. But I haven’t. I’ve put a man in his place, a man whose body is helpless as that of a little child, yet whose soul is a giant of hateful jealousy. He is jealous of the dead. I hadn’t guessed a man could be like that. I must tell you no more. I must try not to be cruel or utterly disloyal both to living and dead – and to my own self-respect, such as I have left.

“I have kept my love’s name. I bargained for that, before I promised my cousin to marry him. It was the one possession I couldn’t consent to give up. If you will stand by me as my friend after all this that I’ve told you – if you can say that, in spite of everything, I have any right to the comfort you’ve given, address your next letter to Lady Denin.

“Yours gratefully, from the heart, whatever your decision may be. B. D.”