[COPYRIGHT STORY.] FOR THE SAKE OF A WOMAN

New Zealand Graphic, Volume XLI, Issue 3, 15 July 1908, Page 54

[COPYRIGHT STORY.] FOR THE SAKE OF A WOMAN

By

EDWIN L. ARNOLD.

(Author of “I’hra the Phoenician,” etc.)

TAWNY yellow tideway with the dimness of a busy town beyond, 71 a M rp y sky overhead with packs / JL of Heecy clouds hurrying down W it towards the great sullen sea,

whose black expanses were just visible in the west. A wet jetty whence

a party of emigrants were putting off to the big steamer that lay a few hundred yards a wav out on the stream. A

squally wind and biting rainstorms that stung and splashed those too busy and too careless to shelter themselves—such were the outlines of the picture. For filling in there was one group of two men and a woman in the foreground more noteworthy than all the rest. Even as they stood together, damp and commonplace, am-mgst those dingy surroundings, they caught the attention, hut none even of those who looked at them with strange curiosity could guess the strange drama of love and envy which was gathering to their midst. It was the men obviously who were going away, good looking fellows both of them, while the woman who IPad come to see them off was not less pleasant to look at, a fair English girl, over whose face tenderness and grief passed like the shadow of clouds over an April country as. she turned first to one of those two and then to the other, saying confident and happy things with lip?; that trembled in spite of herself, and eyes too truthful for their task, until presently the moment of parting came, and putting a hand into each of theirs, “Good-bye, dear John!” she said, “ —• good-bye, Ralph. ’Tis but a little voyage in a strong ship, and the time will go quickly until you send for me. See! J am so confident and certain that all will l>e well, that I will not cry one single tear —” and with an effort the brave girl choked down the grief within her. And before those three met again there was placed between them tho crudest chance that treachery could plan or honest simplicity suffer by! From their earliest years the girl and he whom she first addressed had been the happiest of playmates. The father of John Barton had tried for tho best part of a long life to coax a living out of a couple of hundred stony Shropshire acres, and each year had failed more signally in the attempt. At last when those flinty fields of his seemed incapable of supporting for another twelve months even such a modest household as himself, his son, and adopted daughter, the old man died suddenly; and John B-arton and his playmate Margaret Thane were in an hour thrown face to face with a new order of things. They had grown up together in a mutual companionship which had ripened as they became man and woman into an affection of such depth as neither of them guessed its measure until its measure •was brought to the test by that sudden catastrophe. To Margaret, handsome Barton with his broad shoulders, and dauntless heart that knew nothing of fear or weariness, was a hero, one who was as necessary to her life, she thought, as rain to the meadows, and the strong September sunshine to the apple orchards. Barton in his turn loved that friendless little waif whom the winds of misfortune cast many years ago into his father’s charge, with a deep if silent affection. Iler sunny, never-failing smile; had beepin o light and life to him, her presence, as they grew up, tho one saving clause that made disaster and misfortune tolerable. And then in a day those two were suddenly east upon Cheir own resources, the presence gone

which had made their close deep friendship natural and unquestionable, while for maintenance there was that upon their hands which was in fact but a stony debt from which not even Barton’s skill and courage could extract enough for them to live upon.

They talked it over while the old man was lying, more silent than ever, upstairs under the little niullioned window

looking out over the barren lands he had wrestled with so long, and they talked it over again on the settle by the great hearthplace after' the funeral, and always it seemed to them that for him nothing held out a promise, but that new world over seas, crying for strong arms and stout hearts—and fof Margaret!—but they never quite knew what Margaret was to do. That question was still unsettled, John had gone baek to the farm, and the girl had taken a village woman in to keep her in countenance, when help came from an unexpected quarter. About three miles away over the low grass hills there lived a young farmer, Ralph Standish, who, though better off than Barton, had nevertheless felt the pinch of hard times and sat no less lightly tl» an unproductive holding. Standish long admired Margaret; he had nursed that admiration as young men will into love, and now at this sudden turn of her fate he had gone over to the homestead, never dreaming of a rival in John Barton, to find out how matters stood, what share the girl had in the old man’s will, and if fortune smiled to disclose a love which handsome Ralph could not but believe Margaret would willingly listen to. He had ridden over on the day after the funeral, and finding the pair in close talk in the low-ceilinged, grey-flagged kitchen, it was only natural he should be admitted to their council. To put the matter briefly, before those three rose again it was decided that Standish should join his resources to Barton’s, that the latter should sell his farm, and from the proceeds give Margaret enough to live on for the time in the' home of a poor kinswoman in a neighboring town, while the two men should try the unknown wonders of the South. So far the arrangement was open enough, but to each it had occurred as they fac/l each other how it would gild the plan if he were to marry at once, and presently to call out to the new land, tlis beautiful, sad-faced girl, who stood over against them, courageously giving her approval to schemes that condemned her indefinite loneliness! So the matter was settled, and the very next day when Barton came in dusty and tired from work he threw himself down upon a bench, and after staring a minute out of the little mullioned window, suddenly faced round to where the brown-haired Margaret was wiping the old pewter plates and dishes before she set them in shining rows upon the dresser, and, “Margaret!” lie said, without preface, “Margaret, will you marry me?” And that lady, though her heart stood still within her in shy delight, answered not less briefly, “Yes, John!—if you wish it!” So that was all right, and a fortnight later on they drove without a word to anyone into the nearest town, and wore married—-John Barton afterwards driving her home in the cool of the evening just as the dew was falling, and the scent of the mcadow-sweft Ijbgari to rise heavy and soft from the j river pastures ’ and tho. hedge-roses were gleaming out pale and white in the evening twilight. It was a drive through fairyland to Margaret, and she would have been well

content could it have lasted for ever. But presently the familiar gateway was reached, and while her husband —how strange and sweet that word sounded as it trembled on her tongue—while he led the horse round to the stables she walked slowly up under the nut bushes through the sweet-scented, unkempt garden, every nook and corner, every flower and twig of which was familiar to her, thinking thoughts of unlimited happiness on the brink of catastrophe. And there in the shadiest part, where a gable fall of the house and the last of the hazels made it too dark to more than distinguish the outline of a familiar figure, Standish himself sprang up from the log upon which he had been sitting waiting for her. “This is a happy chance, Miss Thane,” he said, “to meet you thus! I heard you had been out and thought by staying here, I might sqe you alone when you come back ” “And I,” said the girl extending her pretty hand, “am glad indeed to see you; but why wait for me here, come in and have supper with us, for John and 1 have something to tell you which may alter those plans we thought out yesterday.” “No, no!” he cried, trying to keep in his those soft fingers whose touch tilled him with strange fire—“not in to supper yet—come down the garden with me for but five minutes, and no further than the gate—Margaret let me beg it as a favour—l have ridden over only on the chance of seeing .you like this, and indeed J have that to say which may alter those same plans of ours more than anything yourself or Barton can tell me.” “Then Come in an say it,” laughed Margaret lightly, -holding back, still too happy and full of her own fancies to guess what the other meant. “You know how John' loves to talk our prospects over; anything you have to say he will be pleased to hear —see! old Janet lights the candles and supper waits -” “It is always ‘John- now, Miss Thane,” retorted Ralph letting go her hand, and selkily flicking with his riding-whip a” the dusky heads of the poppies in the border, “he has been with you all day, I warrant, and can I not hive a single moment in the evening?” Whereon the lady gave a merry bashful little laugh, she was so light of heart, and answered; “And who is it likelier I should have been with to-day of all days! Only to think you do not know our secret — oh, I could laugh outright if it were not unkind; to think you do not know ” “What should I know?” asked jealous Ralph, scenting a mystery which all lovers dread. “What should you know! why then that—that, in fact, since you will not wait, John asked me of myself but a few days baek—and I could not say no! He drove me into yonder town this very morning, and—and we were married not six hours gone by!” “Were what?” gasped Standish step-

ping back a pace, “married! Oh, im» possible! ”

“Come in,” laughed that gleeful bride, “and ask John if it be impossible”—and waiting not for any further talk she fled blushing through the shadows, and left the other to follow at his leisure.

Thereafter followed <a ..busy week for Barton and his wife, during wh.tJf plain hard work and radiant romance went hand-in-hand; after which the inevitable hour of parting came, a parting Barton told the tearful girl, who clung to him, should be but for a day, until he had taken off trie hard edge of the new life and made a home —“even though it were but a bark shanty under a gum tree”—to shelter her, and thus finally, after half a dozen of the shortest days, those two believed in their hearts, that ever man and woman had lived together, they parted at the quay. ■At the end of a year Margaret had got to the very bottom of her slender store of money, and out in Australia the hope of Barton had at last fructified into reality; things had gone well during the last six months with him who toiled fiercely night and day to abridge the patience of the sweet wife waiting patiently at home—at last it seemed the period of separation was almost over. One day the happy fellow turned to Standish as the latter sat upon a log outside their door; “Standish!” Ife said in his honest way, “I have been thinking over many things, and especially about my Madge, and the holiday you told me a few days back you wished to take to England. Well, comrade,” laughed Barton, clapping his hand upon the shoulder of the other, “why not kill two birds with one stone! why not get off at once, have your outing, and bring back Margaret with you —she’ll feel all the better for an escort?” “Can you wait 'so Icing for her?”

Barton stood thoughtful for a minute, then he said, “It will not be so very long. I suppose- a month would do for you in England ?” “Quite well.”“Why, then, I can manage to wait so long.”

“And if I go and take your errand will you write to her—to your wife to say 1 am coming.

Not I, Ralph. You shall just do the whole thing yourself; 1 have hardly written to her twice since we came out, and she knows why; she knows I hate ink and paper at the best of times, and when it comes to getting all I would say to her down a pen point ’tis like driving five thousand sheep over a one-plank bridge. No! you just go and tell her, Ralph—tell her, comrade, from me, that all my heart is wrapped up in her, say that the love I thought had got as big as any mortal love could do when we parted has grown hour by hour since then—say that every minute is dull and vacant till she comes, every place is void and lonely to me —■” and Barton moved! by his own emotion turned his face away and stared over his sheep hills while that man in whom he trusted sat silent and thoughtful by the door.

' A week later Standish was upon the high seas; and it was only when the solitudes of the sea gave him time to think, and he found himself pacing the dark deck alone at night that temptation first came upon him. He knew how slender were the means of communication between the husband and wife, how it was he, and! he alone, through whom those two now communicated, and how easy it would be to separate them past all finding of each other! . - Stronger and stronger grew the temptation, at first vague and robbed of acute ehame by remoteness, then clearer and clearer, until one evening as he leaned over the side of the ship and watched at last the faint, small lights on the English shore grow upon fife dark his honesty gave way, and the cruel resolution was taken.

He landed and made an appointment to meet Margaret the afternoon after his arrival, and! now that hour had come ! Walking slowly down to the humble quarter of the town where she lodged, the man could not help noticing the poverty, even while he was conning a hundred alternative ways rtf putting his tale before her, and thus meditating, almost before he had decided how the tragedy was to come about, Standish found himself at the door- of the house in which Margaret lived.

He had not long to wait. Almost before the echo of his knock had died away there came the patter of feet on the passage within, the door was opened and before him stood Margaret herself.

She drew him into the house, and breathless with impatience, the joy of I’eing face to face with someone who only, a few weeks ago was face to face with the man who had her whole heart in his keeping, strangely mixed even then with an intangible fear, she. led him into the little dingy parlour, its quaint stuffiness so different from the great gray stone country witchen where he bad last sat with her, and! there upon the table was her little brown teapot, and two cups and half a loaf, but that modest meal was meaningless to both of them. It Was news of Barton Margaret thirsted for; she was so eager after the first few moments were over, she could not understand the slow return he gave to impatient questions, and still more impatient eyes, “ How was John ? ” the longing wife gasped out, and Ralph’s courage was not yet ripe, his heart not hard enough in the presence of that sweet girl, and he dared no more for the moment than to drop his eyes and! mutter, “Oh, well enough maybe ! ’’.then again, “ presently—presently we will come to him. let us talk of ourselves for a minute.” .

Again and again she tried, and as many times the traitor would not meet the bewildered! enquiry of her clear eyes but, talking of commonplaces, put -it off still a little longer, being coward no less than traitor. And gradually a kind of torpor fell upon Margaret, she ceased listening and sat there with the colour slowly fading from her face until it was as white as the cloth under her nervous hands. Had Standish looked at her he would have known she was guessing—the lie was prospering — but he dared .not glance that way. For a minute or two his voice was the only sound in the room -—then, al lof a sudden. Margaret Barton's hand was clenched tight upon his arm, her' white face to his, —and as he started guiltily and turned full upon her for the first time, she said with terrible calmness, “ H.e. is not dead, is he 1 ”

And Standish in the extreme moment of Ids temptation still . hesitated.' . But the lie was too easy, the prize too, great, too near, he could not resist, and very slowly and deliberately he answered, “ Yes ! ”

.If luckless Margaret wanted details sh> had them now! That cleyer rogue wlio.knew everything against the.nothing that the girl was aware of. worked him-

self up to a fine excellence of pathos and sympathy. He sketched his life and Barton’s—how they had fought and struggled, and all but. won, and then, dropping his voice, told the tearless wife., of that last illness which had never happened, how he had nursed that friend in losing whom, ho said., he had lost one half of his life, how at hist Barton had died, his head upon his shoulder, and with his last words begging Standish to befriend the helpless girl in England. : It was a melting tale. Standish as he told it marvelled at its honest sound while Margaret punctuated every sentence with bitter sobs; now it was done there she Was—fallen forward upon the table, her tangled hair loose upon her white hands, Und giving way to such grief as Ralph

had never seen before. He guessed how hopeless it would be to stem that tide, and after waiting a time rose, and gently bending over the girl, “Good-bye, Margaret,” he said, “your grief, I know, will bear no sharing, mine brooked none for many days,—good-bye, and to-morrow I will come again if you wish it —” “Oh, yes,” said Margaret, “go, for today my sorrow is too new to talk about— I -hardly understand it even now,” and then, as he was silently leaving the room, seeming to honour her tears like the crafty actor that he was, she went after him. “And yet,” she said, “you must not go until I have thanked you. Oh, thank you,” she sobbed, “thank you a thousand times for what you did for him—my husband ; ’tis the single bright thought in my mind that John had such a one as you beside him when he—when he died. Thank you from my heart for your goodness to him—” and then as speech failed and the rebellious tears flooded her eyes again, she lifted the hand of the betrayer to her lips, and kissing it twice, let him go!

Fate, Standish felt that night as he walked back to his lodging, was fighting on his side,' and a new sense of strength nerved him to the next step. He did not like that step, he scowled a little to think of it, yet it had to be taken for to falter now would bring disaster on him. Therefore as soon as he was locked into his room he took pen and paper, and wrote six sheets of sympathy to John Barton, waiting for his bride out in the Australian bush, telling him how he had landed, had gone directly to the house where Margaret lodged, and there had heard to his infinite sorrow that the unhappy wife had died, and had been buried three weeks before! In fact Standish had won. the fatal trustfulness of those two whom he had defrauded of their happiness, could not stand against his villainy. In a month he asked Margaret to be his wife, and was not down-cast when she said that it was impossible; “love and life seemed dead within her, she who had been friendless all her time save for the lifelong love of that one honest man, wished now to live friendless but for the companionship of his memory.” That was no more than Standish had expected. He waited three days then came again telling her gently “no” was no answer for him. He made her see how everything countenanced his wish, how their mutual love for the dead man told towards

it, her poverty, too; ay, and he told her what her woman instinct had almost guessed, how he had come to ask her as a wife that evening they met in the hazel garden long ago. And thereat that lady’s heart was softened, “Oh, poor, poor Ralph!” she said,” looking ruefully at him with kind sad eyes, “I am so sorry,—how you must have suffered! ’ What could that -unhappy woman do? Standish . was bound to win, and in a week Barton’s faithful and steadfast wife had married him! She cried for the man she thought dead, upon the altar steps, and she cried plenteously for him again over the girl baby that came a year later. Then she settled down into a dull monotony of existence, an episode of vacant resignation with but one-plea-sure in it, the little lisping maid, who grew fairer and taller, ami more like her mother every month, and but one sorrow, the memory of that dead man, who lived and mourned for her in turn! For seventeen years that went on, until when Margaret was a comely woman still, with just a touch of white in her brown hair, like the shine of the hoar frost amongst the yellow chestnut leaves in September, Standish died suddenly, silent, unrepentant, and in the full contentment of his villainy to the end. But the old first love would not die. It was stronger than ever when one day Margaret came home, and found an envelope lying face downwards upon the table in her sitting-room. It did not attract her for a moment, no doubt, she thought, it contained some light matter of neighbourliness such as one who knew even so few friends as she might now ami again receive, yet there was something strange about it! It was a thin grey envelope, like none she had seen for - many years, .the betrayed woman noticed with a start—the exact fashion and counterpart of half a dozen such that lay tied up with ribbon in her workbox. And there were two writings on it—one that of Standish’s solicitor who had sent it on to her, the other crabbed and angular, scrawled across the paper in poor ink; oh, why did her heart give such a start to see those rough letters—it must be some new madness, some new chimera, she gasped

as she swept across to the- window, and read with incredible wonder that ragged superscription which the lawyer s pen had veiled but not obliterated—read with dazed eyes and number faculties — read and read again what looked so impossibly, so tragically like Barton s own handwriting! What could it be but sheer madness, ■Margaret thought, that could tempt her for one minute to think that dead Barton was thus writing to dead Ralph—(No! she was brain-sick and heart-sick, and would not give way to it; she smiled through her frightened tears, and tearing the letter open turned to the signature at the end—it was John Barton’s, she saw with a stifled cry,, clear and fresh; not two months’ old; then back to the date at the top, her eyes sped with a fierce defiant readiness to be cheated somehow, a reckless expectation of having this mad fancy shattered, and herself hurled back into the plain world of dull prosaic patience, and read with eyes that scarcely saw, and heart that scarcely beat, on top of that letter the very date of the day when, as Barton in Australia had sat writing it to Standish, Standish was being buriod by Barton’s dead “wife” in England!

There was nothing wonderful in the letter save its existence. It was a plain, emotionless message of friendship between two men long parted; full of figures and details of the “run” and the Tecord of the fortune the writer had made out of it—the mere fact of the letter was so wonderful to the woman who sat mechanically reading it again and again, that when Barton went on to say a great thirst for a sight of the Old Country possessed him, and he was coming back for a few months’ holiday —indeed, that he would be in England shortly after this letter had arrived—naming the very ship by which he had taken passage, poor bewildered Margaret had hardly enough comprehension left to be more astonished.

She had scarcely read the letterthrough a fourth time when in came her daughter, and to that marvelling girl the mother poured out her troubled soul. It was a story to move even those less closely alfected by it than the two who sat there hand in hand thinking it over, now that the first shock had passed, in silent amazement. And of the two, the younger was the more collected. She suggested presently that they should get a paper, and see when the ship, meaning so much for them, would arrive. The paper was fetched, the telegram was found, and as the girl looked up from it with finger on the passage and wonderin her eyes, “Why, mother,” she said, “the ship will be here to-morrow morning!”

And on the morrow they went down to the quay; the big ship came, true to her time, and they were rowed on board of her. But Barton was not amongst the noisy crowd struggling’ on deck, and Margaret, who had suffered so much already, sank frightened and weary upon a bench, and could seek no further. “Go down below, dearest,” she said to the girl, “see if he is there; ami if you meet him tell him gently, or it will kill him, my courage and strength give out together ”

But that dubious messenger hesitated. “Oh, mother,” she said, “must I go, alone, to find him—think, mother! I, of all people in the world, to greet him first in England!” But the much tried wife cbuld not think, and seeing that that was so, Madge (for she bore her mother’s name) sighed, and started on the act of restitution fate had decreed for her.

She went down below, and wandered through corridors and past empty cabins in all the disarray of their new desertion, seeing nobody until, just at the entrance of the main saloon, she came face to face all on a sudden with a stalwart man of downcast eyes and grizzled beard, handsome still in spite of his sadness—she knew him in a minute from many a description of her mother’s, and stepping back with a start and a half stilled cry—-the meeting was so sudden—she grasped the brass handrail and stood Staring at him. And that man who would have passed her unnoticed but for the up, anc

movement ais<> , starting hi turn, looked again, staring harder than she did, and so they stood for a minute, until Barton, for it was he, made an effort, and said with deep emotion:—

“I am sorry, madam, if T should seem, rude, but indeed you startled me—you. arc so like to one I once knew—and lost."

“And lost, sir?” “Yes, and lost —the very face, and

hair, and bearing, the same voice—in mercy, madam, let me pass ” “Oh, wait sir; wait a minute. How long ago was it you lost that friend who was so like me?” Madge asked, standing manfully in the way, with her brown eyes full of great pity. “Eighteen years all but,” he answered, hardly daring to look at her. “And I have known a woman, sir, for near so many years,” burst out that fair, tall girl, “the gentle woman who is my mother, oh, sir, a woman so faithful, and steadfast, and simple—she who has given me of her face with scarce a portion of her worth or sweetness —sir! If it were but the same one you had loved and lost—if, perhaps, some horrible mistake, or wickedness, had happened ” “Woman! woman,” cried Barton in an ug°ny, “you know not what you say; you torture me; there, let me hide my eyes and pass you—and forget and forgive, I beg, the rudeness of a poor fool, whose mind the sight of English shore, and all it recalls, unhinges ” “Ay, but, sir, wait a moment,” cried Madge, swiftly drawing him into the empty saloon, and seating him on a ehair, and there, bending over the strong man, who buried his face in his hands, she laid her light touch upon his shoulder, and said in a voice whose very accent thrilled into his soul, “Oh, Mr. Barton, that woman still lives; she is near—no, no, do not cry out and look at me like that—she is here, here on this very ship—Mr. Barton! Mr. Barton!” cried she, dropping on her knees beside him in the excess of emotion, and pull-

Ing down his hands from his face, “she is here, I say, ready and -waiting to come to you—she, your wife—oh, let me fetch her, sir; let me do but that one thing that I can to atone for the wrong I represent!” and without wafting for permission the girl sprang to her feet and sped across the cabin. At the curtain she paused a moment, looking back .to be assured Barton was ready for that meeting; then fled down the passage, and up the gangway, and found the other one.

“Mother, mother,” she cried, “it is •well; he is below—--waiting for you!” and with a single kiss pointed the way, and sent the dazed happy woman to that wondrous meeting, then sank down herself breathless on a scat on deck.

When, ten minutes later, she stole into the saloon, one glance told her all was well. There was Barton and his recovered wife sitting hand in hand together upon a couch at the further end, so radiantly happy it was a pleasure merely to look at them. Then it was poor Madge’s turn to cry, and, all too conscious of her sweet invidiousness, she sat down, remote and humble, by tlfe door, and, not venturing even to look at them, fell to weeping silent, bitter tears of shame for a dead man’s fault behind the white screen of her hands.

And before she had wept a single minute, generous John Barton, who now knew everything, strode over to her, and taking both her hands in his, looked down into her eyes for a space, then drew her silently to him, and kissed her twice in friendship and forgiveness upon the forehead!