The Nymph and the Lamp (12 page)

Not consciously, but by the prompting of an inner voice, cool and rational and fatalistic, she knew that beside her lay a solution to her immediate fears and loneliness. And with a cunning quite foreign to her natural self, in fact in outrage to her virginal instincts, she found herself saying softly, “I wish you'd tell me what you mean…Matthew.”

For a few moments he was silent. Then in a low voice, “I don't know how to tell you, Miss Jardine…”

“Please call me Isabel.”

“A lovely name that. Isabel—Isabel. What I want to say is …I'm not a young man, not the sort of chap you ought to have…not the sort who has any right to say anything like this…but I can't help it, you understand? I never felt like this before. Please don't be angry. I'm just a rough chap, no education but what I picked up in books, knocking about at sea and places like Marina. You're young, you're refined—you're everything I'm not. It's a poor sort of bargain to offer, any way you look at it”

“Well…Matthew?”—in that foreign voice.

“I'm wondering if you…if you'd marry me. Don't say no yet. Hear what I have to say, my dear. I'm forty-six, what's called the prime of life—nonsense, of course. The prime of life is seventeen. But I'm healthy anyhow. I've got several thousand dollars saved in the bank. I've had fifteen years' experience in the wireless game, and I know the rigger's trade besides. Means I can walk into Hurd's office tomorrow and tell him I want a job here or I quit the service. Means I'm not asking you to go off to some wild place with me. We'd find a flat in the city somewhere—buy a little bungalow, maybe, out by the Nor'west Arm, with trees and a bit of garden, and a sight of salt water for old times' sake. I wouldn't expect you to love me—not as you'd love some younger man. If you could just like me a little, put up with me, that's enough. I'd ask nothing that you didn't want to give, my dear. I'd like to make that clear. And…and there it is. That's all. That's what I wanted to say.”

Now that the thing was out he breathed a long sigh, as if it had required a great physical effort. And Isabel Jardine had a quaint sense of recognition, as if she had known exactly what he would say and how he would say it, even to that great breath at the end. But it did not strike her as odd that she should know at once, without the slightest reflection, how she should answer him. The physical implication of marriage she refused to consider. In any case she knew, even without Carney's saying so, that as his wife she could remain mistress of herself, yielding only what she chose, and when she chose. Timidity is a relative matter and in Carney's presence she felt actually bold. What filled her mind was a picture of the bungalow beside the Northwest Arm, and herself clipping flowers in the garden or busy with housewifery, at peace and secure at last.

She bent over him, putting out a hand to his shoulder, and their lips met. Under her palm she felt a tremor in his big frame. What she had first observed to Hurd, that Carney was, in a single word, innocent, came to her now with force. And she kissed him again with an almost maternal solicitude, as if it were he and not she who needed protection from the world. He did not attempt to rise and take her in his arms, as another man might have done. He did not move, lying on the grass, supported on an elbow, with his face upturned, accepting the touch of her lips and fingers in a kind of wonder, as if they had both fallen under a happy spell that one word or gesture on his part would shatter.

They were aware of music, and now and then a patter of polite applause about the bandstand like the breaking of a sea. Without warning the Marines struck up “God Save the King,” and everywhere about the lawns and in the shadows people jumped up and stood in patriotic immobility or scurried off towards the gates to avoid the rush. Carney and Miss Jardine rose and stood together, and as the last notes died away she stooped to brush the grass from her skirts.

“Don't forget your hat,” she said.

Carney picked it up but he did not put it on. They walked sedately through the gate and down Spring Garden Road, with her hand tucked inside his arm and pressing it gently from time to time, as if to assure herself and him that they were truly together, and that those tender moments in the shadow of the syringa had really taken place.

They said very little on the way to her lodging. Carney was in a daze. Miss Jardine herself was excited; but her thoughts were very clear and she was aware of a crisis as they sauntered up to the street door at Mrs. Paradee's. She broke a long silence, looking at her watch in the light from Feder's Grill and exclaiming, “Half past eleven! Oh, dear!”

“I shouldn't have kept you out so late,” Carney murmured with concern.

“Oh, it's nothing.”

They moved on a step or two out of the light. The street was deserted and the tall shabby house had an almost ominous air of brooding over these late wanderers. Miss Jardine took her hand from Carney's arm and faced him with resolution.

“Matthew, I didn't answer your question properly, did I?”

“But I thought you did!”

She uttered a short self-conscious laugh. “Because I kissed you? Well it's true. I couldn't find words to say. Are you happy?”

“You know I am,” Carney burst out in his rich tone. “In all my life this is the most wonderful thing that ever happened. And to think it all came by chance just out of meeting you in the office and then in that glorified fish-and-chip shop! I can't believe it's true, even now. I've a feeling that tomorrow morning I'll wake up aboard the steamer, bound for Marina, with nothing but a headache from the skipper's whiskey.”

“Then suppose you kiss me again,” she said demurely. “Just to prove I'm not something out of a bottle.” As his arms went about her she slipped her own around his neck, and he found her mouth warm and alive under his. Then, breathlessly:

“Oh, Matthew, if you only knew!”

“What?”

“How much this means to me. Please hold me closer—closer than that.” They stood embraced and silent for a space of minutes.

“Matthew, don't let me go.”

“I won't.”

“I mean it. I mean don't let me go now tonight.”

“But you've got to go to bed sometime, my dear.”

“Not in there!” she said rapidly, with a sudden note of hysteria. “Matthew, I can't tell you why, but I can't go in there—not now—not after all that's happened. I didn't think I'd mind, just for one more night, but when we came to the steps and I saw that door again it made my flesh creep. Don't ask me to explain. All I can say is that if I went in there again, even for a minute, I'd lose all my happiness—I'd lose my mind.”

“But what about your things?” he said, astonished and disturbed.

“My things! As if things matter when my whole life's been changed! Matthew, do you love me?”

“Of course I do, my dear, but don't you think …”

“Then take me away with you now. I don't care where. I don't care anything, any more. All I want is to be with you. You're what I need, someone strong, and calm, and kind. And I think you need me, in your way. Perhaps you think I'm queer but I'm really quite nice, Matthew. You've been lonely—so have I. I'll make it up to you, all that long time on that awful island and the other places. You won't regret it, ever.”

He was silent, a man in a dream.

“I'm not good-looking,” she went on feverishly, “but I think you'll be pleased with me. It's everything or nothing now, Matthew. It's got to be tonight.”

She threw back her head, staring anxiously into his face in the half-light from the café window, while her body, closed in his arms, sought in some way apart from words to convey her urgency.

He was profoundly moved. “Tonight,” he repeated in a choked voice. “Tonight!”

CHAPTER 9

Miss Jardine awakened slowly, her mind groping for its bearings in a confusion of memories, half dreamed, half real. For a moment or two she was afraid she might open her eyes upon that odious bedroom at Mrs. Paradee's. The first glance reassured her; but at once she was aware of a set of realities much more disturbing than the old. All the courage, all the wild determination, of the night before had gone. Her body felt strangely boneless and relaxed, but her conscience was as taut as a fiddle string and it shrieked one long alarming note. With a swift dismay she summed up the realities; that she was in a strange bed, in a strange room, and with Matthew Carney, a strange man; that she was in fact wearing the jacket of Carney's pajamas for lack of anything else; and that she, an unmarried woman, a “nice” girl in the old-fashioned sense in which she had been reared, had committed if not the most shameful at all events the most vulgar of sins.

She was thankful that Carney slept. She could feel his warmth at her back and hear his deep untroubled breathing. The blind was drawn and flapping slowly in a light breeze through the open window. It stirred the cheap cotton curtains and sent an occasional flash of morning sunlight across the room. There was a sound of engines shunting in the railway yards, whistles, bells, the iron screech of brakes, the booming collision of empty boxcars coming to a halt, and now and then a faint but acrid reek of coal smoke.

She wondered how she could face Carney by daylight, how she could meet his eyes, and what she could say, now that the madness of last night had gone. For she had seduced him, there was no blinking that. Whatever had possessed her? Her face burned on the pillow as she recalled his bashful offer to sleep in a chair and her indignant refusal; her own fingers, trembling but resolute, turning out the light and taking off her clothes; her arms going out to him in a gesture that was at once a surrender and a command; his hesitation, his first shy and blundering caresses, and the final passion that convulsed them both.

Now I know how Eve felt, poor thing.
She wondered if this bearded Adam would reproach her as she now reproached her own quenched and lazy flesh. And with every precept of her Presbyterian childhood ringing in her ears she wondered what sort of punishment was in store. For a time she lay sunk in these depressing reveries, so full of guilt. Then, with a surge of rebellion, she felt herself the victim rather than the author of her own and Carney's downfall. It had all begun with that ridiculous scene at Mrs. Paradee's, and it occurred to her in an indignant wonder that if it had not rained that evening, if she had not taken a bath or if Klaus had not taken a drink, her life and Carney's might have gone their separate ways unblemished and unchanged.

From this it was easy and natural to recall the teachings of predestination that had so mystified her childhood. She saw at last a meaning. The meaning was far from comforting but at least it absolved her of deliberate wickedness, and it brought to life her Scotch common sense which argued that nothing past could be undone and that the only thing now was to face the facts and make the best of them. Her life had been thrust upon a new strange course, and if not redemption at least some happiness might be found along the way. Again she thought of the sailors packing merrily for a voyage as if all that had gone before were merely a preparation and a waiting, as if some wonderful promise had been held out to them beyond the sea rim somewhere and nothing else mattered a rap.

She felt the man beside her stir and turn, and knew he was awake. The moment had come. She lay very still with her face to the wall, trying to control her breathing and the slow hard thump of her heart. It was an age before he said quietly:

“Isabel, are you awake?”

“Yes.” She did not move.

“Are you all right?”

“Yes.”

“I was afraid—you lay so still.”

“I'm quite all right.”

Silence. Then, hearing him fumble for his watch, “What time is it?”

“Almost nine o'clock. I'll dress and get your breakfast—they don't serve food for the rooms here unless you take it up yourself.”

“Don't go,” she begged in a muffled voice. “I'm not hungry. And I think we ought to talk.”

“Yes?”

She turned on her back, avoiding his eyes and staring at the ceiling.

“Matthew, what about us?”

“Ah! Well, first we'll hunt up a parson and get married.”

She had expected that; nevertheless she was relieved to hear him say it. Without conviction but with a certain petulance she said quickly, “I don't want you to marry me just because it's the proper thing to do.”

Carney raised himself on an elbow, exposing a broad bare shoulder and a muscular and tattooed upper arm. He gazed down at her with a somber tenderness.

“My dear, it isn't that. Shall I tell you the truth? I want to make fast to you now, while you're still confused and helpless, while you're still in the mood that came upon you last night. I'm afraid you may come out of it and run away.”

A tremulous smile disturbed the firm set of her lips, and suddenly she turned and threw herself weeping into his arms. He stroked her hair, calling her his own dear girl, and repeating her name as if the mere sound of it gave him a profound pleasure. He was enraptured to find himself not only her lover but her comforter as well, and the slow trickle of her tears on his skin was an ecstasy. Gradually her sobbing ceased. She lay warm and inert in his arms, exhausted by this passion as she had lain after the other passions of the night.