The Battle Of The Strong: Chapter 37

Chapter 37

Guida sat by the fire sewing, Biribi the dog at her feet. A little
distance away, to the right of the chimney, lay Guilbert asleep. Twice
she lowered the work to her lap to look at the child, the reflected light
of the fire playing on his face. Stretching out her hand, she touched
him, and then she smiled. Hers was an all-devouring love; the child was
her whole life; her own present or future was as nothing; she was but
fuel for the fire of his existence.

A storm was raging outside. The sea roared in upon Plemont and Grosnez,
battering the rocks in futile agony. A hoarse nor'-easter ranged across
the tiger's head in helpless fury: a night of awe to inland folk, and of
danger to seafarers. To Guida, who was both of the sea and of the land,
fearless as to either, it was neither terrible nor desolate to be alone
with the storm. Storm was but power unshackled, and power she loved and
understood. She had lived so long in close commerce with storm and sea
that something of their keen force had entered into her, and she was kin
with them. Each wind to her was intimate as a friend, each rock and cave
familiar as her hearthstone; and the ungoverned ocean spoke in terms
intelligible. So heavy was the surf that now and then the spray of some
foiled wave broke on the roof, but she only nodded at that, as though the
sea were calling her to come forth, tapping on her rooftree in joyous
greeting.

But suddenly she started and bent her head. It seemed as if her whole
body were hearkening. Now she rose quickly to her feet, dropped her work
upon the table near by, and rested herself against it, still listening.
She was sure she heard a horse's hoofs. Turning swiftly, she drew the
curtain of the bed before her sleeping child, and then stood quiet
waiting--waiting. Her hand went to her heart once as though its fierce
throbbing hurt her. Plainly as though she could look through these stone
walls into clear sunlight, she saw some one dismount, and she heard a
voice.

The door of the but was unlocked and unbarred. If she feared, it was easy
to shoot the bolt and lock the door, to drop the bar across the little
window, and be safe and secure. But no bodily fear possessed her--only
that terror of the spirit when its great trial comes suddenly and it
shrinks back, though the mind be of faultless courage.

She waited. There came a knocking at the door. She did not move from
where she stood.

"Come in," she said. She was composed and resolute now.

The latch clicked, the door opened, and a cloaked figure entered, the
shriek of the storm behind. The door closed again. The intruder took a
step forward, his hat came off, the cloak was loosed and dropped upon the
floor. Guida's premonition had been right: It was Philip.

She did not speak. A stone could have been no colder as she stood in the
light of the fire, her face still and strong, the eyes darkling,
luminous. There was on her the dignity of the fearless, the pure in
heart.

"Guida!" Philip said, and took a step nearer, and paused.

He was haggard, he had the look of one who had come upon a desperate
errand. When she did not answer he said pleadingly:

"Guida, won't you speak to me?"

"The Duc de Bercy chooses a strange hour for his visit," she said
quietly.

"But see," he answered hurriedly; "what I have to say to you--" he
paused, as though to choose the thing he should say first.

"You can say nothing I need hear," she answered, looking him steadily in
the eyes.

"Ah, Guida," he cried, disconcerted by her cold composure, "for God's
sake listen to me! To-night we have to face our fate. To-night you have
to say--"

"Fate was faced long ago. I have nothing to say."

"Guida, I have repented of all. I have come now only to speak honestly of
the wrong I did you. I have come to--"

Scorn sharpened her words, though she spoke calmly: "You have forced
yourself upon a woman's presence--and at this hour!"

"I chose the only hour possible," he answered quickly. "Guida, the past
cannot be changed, but we have the present and the future still. I have
not come to justify myself, but to find a way to atone."

"No atonement is possible."

"You cannot deny me the right to confess to you that--"

"To you denial should not seem hard usage," she answered slowly, "and
confession should have witnesses--"

She paused suggestively. The imputation that he of all men had the least
right to resent denial; that, dishonest still, he was willing to justify
her privately though not publicly; that repentance should have been open
to the world--it all stung him.

He threw out his hands in a gesture of protest. "As many witnesses as you
will, but not now, not this hour, after all these years. Will you not at
least listen to me, and then judge and act? Will you not hear me, Guida?"

She had not yet even stirred. Now that it had come, this scene was all so
different from what she might have imagined. But she spoke out of a
merciless understanding, an unchangeable honesty. Her words came clear
and pitiless:

"If you will speak to the point and without a useless emotion, I will try
to listen. Common kindness should have prevented this intrusion--by you!"

Every word she said was like a whip-lash across his face. A devilish
light leapt into his eye, but it faded as quickly as it came.

"After to-night, to the public what you will," he repeated with dogged
persistence, "but it was right we should speak alone to each other at
least this once before the open end. I did you wrong, yet I did not mean
to ruin your life, and you should know that. I ought not to have married
you secretly; I acknowledge that. But I loved you--"

She shook her head, and with a smile of pitying disdain--he could so
little see the real truth, his real misdemeanour--she said: "Oh no,
never--never! You were not capable of love; you never knew what it means.
From the first you were too untrue ever to love a woman. There was a
great fire of emotion, you saw shadows on the wall, and you fell in love
with them. That was all."

"I tell you that I loved you," he answered with passionate energy. "But
as you will. Let it be that it was not real love: at least it was all
there was in me to give. I never meant to desert you. I never meant to
disavow our marriage. I denied you, you will say. I did. In the light of
what came after, it was dishonourable--I grant that; but I did it at a
crisis and for the fulfilment of a great ambition--and as much for you as
for me."

"That was the least of your evil work. But how little you know what true
people think or feel!" she answered with a kind of pain in her voice, for
she felt that such a nature could never even realise its own enormities.
Well, since it had gone so far she would speak openly, though it hurt her
sense of self-respect.

"For that matter, do you think that I or any good woman would have had
place or power, been princess or duchess, at the price? What sort of mind
have you?" She looked him straight in the eyes. "Put it in the clear
light of right and wrong, it was knavery. You--you talk of not meaning to
do me harm. You were never capable of doing me good. It was not in you.
From first to last you are untrue. Were it otherwise, were you not from
first to last unworthy, would you have--but no, your worst crime need not
be judged here. Yet had you one spark of worthiness would you have made a
mock marriage--it is no more--with the Comtesse Chantavoine? No matter
what I said or what I did in anger, or contempt of you, had you been an
honest man you would not have so ruined another life. Marriage, alas! You
have wronged the Comtesse worse than you have wronged me. One day I shall
be righted, but what can you say or do to right her wrongs?"

Her voice had now a piercing indignation and force. "Yes, Philip
d'Avranche, it is as I say, justice will come to me. The world turned
against me because of you; I have been shamed and disgraced. For years I
have suffered in silence. But I have waited without fear for the end. God
is with me. He is stronger than fortune or fate. He has brought you to
Jersey once more, to right my wrongs, mine and my child's."

She saw his eyes flash to the little curtained bed. They both stood
silent and still. He could hear the child breathing. His blood quickened.
An impulse seized him. He took a step towards the bed, as though to draw
the curtain, but she quickly moved between.

"Never," she said in a low stern tone; "no touch of yours for my
Guilbert--for my son! Every minute of his life has been mine. He is
mine--all mine--and so he shall remain. You who gambled with the name,
the fame, the very soul of your wife, you shall not have one breath of
her child's life."

It was as if the outward action of life was suspended in them for a
moment, and then came the battle of two strong spirits: the struggle of
fretful and indulged egotism, the impulse of a vigorous temperament,
against a deep moral force, a high purity of mind and conscience, and the
invincible love of the mother for the child. Time, bitterness, and power
had hardened Philip's mind, and his long-restrained emotions, breaking
loose now, made him a passionate and wilful figure. His force lay in the
very unruliness of his spirit, hers in the perfect command of her moods
and emotions. Well equipped by the thoughts and sufferings of five long
years, her spirit was trained to meet this onset with fiery wisdom. They
were like two armies watching each other across a narrow stream, between
one conflict and another.

For a minute they stood at gaze. The only sounds in the room were the
whirring of the fire in the chimney and the child's breathing. At last
Philip's intemperate self-will gave way. There was no withstanding that
cold, still face, that unwavering eye. Only brutality could go further.
The nobility of her nature, her inflexible straight-forwardness came upon
him with overwhelming force. Dressed in molleton, with no adornment save
the glow of a perfect health, she seemed at this moment, as on the
Ecrehos, the one being on earth worth living and caring for. What had he
got for all the wrong he had done her? Nothing. Come what might, there
was one thing that he could yet do, and even as the thought possessed him
he spoke.

"Guida," he said with rushing emotion, "it is not too late. Forgive the
past-the wrong of it, the shame of it. You are my wife; nothing can undo
that. The other woman--she is nothing to me. If we part and never meet
again she will suffer no more than she suffers to go on with me. She has
never loved me, nor I her. Ambition did it all, and of ambition God knows
I have had enough! Let me proclaim our marriage, let me come back to you.
Then, happen what will, for the rest of our lives I will try to atone for
the wrong I did you. I want you, I want our child. I want to win your
love again. I can't wipe out what I have done, but I can put you right
before the world, I can prove to you that I set you above place and
ambition. If you shrink from doing it for me, do it"--he glanced towards
the bed--"do it for our child. To-morrow--to-morrow it shall be, if you
will forgive. To-morrow let us start again--Guida--Guida!"

She did not answer at once; but at last she said "Giving up place and
ambition would prove nothing now. It is easy to repent when our pleasures
have palled. I told you in a letter four years ago that your protests
came too late. They are always too late. With a nature like yours nothing
is sure or lasting. Everything changes with the mood. It is different
with me: I speak only what I truly mean. Believe me, for I tell you the
truth, you are a man that a woman could forget but could never forgive.
As a prince you are much better than as a plain man, for princes may do
what other men may not. It is their way to take all and give nothing. You
should have been born a prince, then all your actions would have seemed
natural. Yet now you must remain a prince, for what you got at such a
price to others you must pay for. You say you would come down from your
high place, you would give up your worldly honours, for me. What madness!
You are not the kind of man with whom a woman could trust herself in the
troubles and changes of life. Laying all else aside, if I would have had
naught of your honours and your duchy long ago, do you think I would now
share a disgrace from which you could never rise? For in my heart I feel
that this remorse is but caprice. It is to-day; it may not--will not--be
tomorrow."

"You are wrong, you are wrong. I am honest with you now," he broke in.

"No," she answered coldly, "it is not in you to be honest. Your words
have no ring of truth in my ears, for the note is the same as I heard
once upon the Ecrehos. I was a young girl then and I believed; I am a
woman now, and I should still disbelieve though all the world were on
your side to declare me wrong. I tell you"--her voice rose again, it
seemed to catch the note of freedom and strength of the storm without--"I
tell you, I will still live as my heart and conscience prompt me. The
course I have set for myself I will follow; the life I entered upon when
my child was born I will not leave. No word you have said has made my
heart beat faster. You and I can never have anything to say to each other
in this life, beyond"--her voice changed, she paused--"beyond one
thing--"

Going to the bed where the child lay, she drew the curtain softly, and
pointing, she said:

"There is my child. I have set my life to the one task, to keep him to
myself, and yet to win for him the heritage of the dukedom of Bercy. You
shall yet pay to him the price of your wrong-doing."

She drew back slightly so that he could see the child lying with its rosy
face half buried in its pillow, the little hand lying like a flower upon
the coverlet.

Once more with a passionate exclamation he moved nearer to the child.

"No farther!" she said, stepping before him.

When she saw the wild impulse in his face to thrust her aside, she added:
"It is only the shameless coward that strikes the dead. You had a
wife--Guida d'Avranche, but Guida d'Avranche is dead. There only lives
the mother of this child, Guida Landresse de Landresse."

She looked at him with scorn, almost with hatred. Had he touched her--but
she would rather pity than loathe!

Her words roused all the devilry in him. The face of the child had sent
him mad.

"By Heaven, I will have the child--I will have the child!" he broke out
harshly. "You shall not treat me like a dog. You know well I would have
kept you as my wife, but your narrow pride, your unjust anger threw me
over. You have wronged me. I tell you you have wronged me, for you held
the secret of the child from me all these years."

"The whole world knew!" she exclaimed indignantly. "I will break your
pride," he said, incensed and unable to command himself. "Mark you, I
will break your pride. And I will have my child too!"

"Establish to the world your right to him," she answered keenly. "You
have the right to acknowledge him, but the possession shall be mine."

He was the picture of impotent anger and despair. It was the irony of
penalty that the one person in the world who could really sting him was
this unacknowledged, almost unknown woman. She was the only human being
that had power to shatter his egotism and resolve him into the common
elements of a base manhood. Of little avail his eloquence now! He had
cajoled a sovereign dukedom out of an aged and fatuous prince; he had
cajoled a wife, who yet was no wife, from among the highest of a royal
court; he had cajoled success from Fate by a valour informed with vanity
and ambition; years ago, with eloquent arts he had cajoled a young girl
into a secret marriage--but he could no longer cajole the woman who was
his one true wife. She knew him through and through.

He was so wild with rage he could almost have killed her as she stood
there, one hand stretched out to protect the child, the other pointing to
the door.

He seized his hat and cloak and laid his hand upon the latch, then
suddenly turned to her. A dark project came to him. He himself could not
prevail with her; but he would reach her yet, through the child. If the
child were in his hands, she would come to him.

"Remember, I will have the child," he said, his face black with evil
purpose.

She did not deign reply, but stood fearless and still, as, throwing open
the door, he rushed out into the night. She listened until she heard his
horse's hoofs upon the rocky upland. Then she went to the door, locked
it, and barred it. Turning, she ran with a cry as of hungry love to the
little bed. Crushing the child to her bosom, she buried her face in his
brown curls.

"My son, my own, own son!" she said.

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