The Strand Magazine/Volume 2/Issue 11/A Breach of Confidence
By Annie Armitt.
I.
HE sat with her pen in her hand, but she could not write. Her heart was full of a story that she had heard recently and could not forget; the story of a woman who had been happier than herself, and yet more miserable. She stared at the blank paper before her instead of writing, and she said to herself: "Why are all the chances in life given to those who are not fit to use them? If such a love had been mine once I would never have let it go. There is no price that I would not have paid to keep it; and she—she threw it away for vanity!"
The story was very real to her, because she loved the man who had told it, and yet she had taken the telling of it to mean that the true history of his life was over, and that he had no love left to give again. The confidence he had reposed in her had been a compliment to her friendship, but a destruction of all her hopes of happiness. Before that confidence was made she had thought that his feeling for her was as deep as hers for him.
She had been married herself; but, though she had had a husband, she had never known a true love. Her marriage had been a sacrifice, made when she was very young, and when she acted almost entirely under the influence of a selfish mother. Her husband proved selfish, too, and—which was worse in her mother's eyes—not so prosperous as had been imagined. Eleanor's life had been a hard one always, and now she was left alone in the world, except for the little two years' old baby. It was an ailing creature, fretful, and not pretty; but it was something to hold in her arms, if not enough to fill her heart. She loved it the more passionately perhaps for its infirmities; but sometimes the loneliness of her life overpowered her like a flood of bitter waters; she wanted some mind to speak to, some heart to answer hers, some tenderness to lean upon and trust. She was yet but very young, only twenty-two years old, and all the currents of life beat strongly within her; all the imperative demands for love, for praise, for happiness, which make so large a part of our youth, were still alive in her heart, and would not easily be silenced.
Her income was insufficient for herself and her delicate child; she added to it in many little ways, as the opportunity was offered to her. She had written a few short stories for a particular magazine which could not afford to number famous authors among its contributors, and she had been paid for them. An accidental meeting with another occasional contributor had given her a friend; and Ralph Webster was at that time, perhaps, the only person with whom she was on terms of familiar friendship, and to whom she could talk on a moral and intellectual level. His sympathies and aspirations were not unlike her own; they always understood one another at least, even when they did not agree. To talk to him was, therefore, the opening of a new experience to her.
Language had before—at least, spoken language—been only a vehicle for the management of affairs, the expression of desires, the receipt of information. Now it served to exchange thought, to bring two lives into close mental relation with one another, to console, to suggest, to sustain. And she had thought he loved her. He was a little more prosperous in the world than herself, and he did not guess that she was so very poor; but he was not rich enough to make her feel that she would take much more than she gave if she became his wife. They would work together, as they lived together, and loved together. She had thought, with others,
"Our work shall still be better for our love,
And still our love be sweeter for our work,
And both commended, for the sake of each,
By all true workers and true lovers born."
And then he had received an appointment to travel as special correspondent to a great paper, and he had come to say good-bye to her, and before saying goodbye had told her this story. She had taken it for a final farewell. Since his going, three days before, she had thought of nothing else. She had work to do, but she could not do it. How could she throw herself into dream-loves and dream-troubles with this pain of loss and loneliness at her heart? And yet the work was necessary, and she dared not delay it longer than that night.
"He told her this story."
She had, the day before, received back from her editor a story which she had hoped he would accept, with the intimation that if she would write him one half as long, to be ready in two days, he would almost certainly take it, as he wished to fill up a corresponding gap in the next number of his magazine.
She urgently needed the money. Her baby, little Lorna, was paler and thinner even than usual; the doctor whom she consulted said that the child needed country air. She had hoped to earn enough money to take it away for some weeks to a farm-house, when she sent that story to the editor of the magazine. She must not lose the opportunity which he had offered in its place. She had thought of a plot—a foolish little commonplace affair—but she could not breathe any life into it. When she forced her thoughts into the necessary channel they flowed back again to another story. She saw Ralph Webster standing before her; she heard his voice again, telling her the simple tragedy of his life. How graphically he had told it, though not with many words! She could fill in the details for herself. It was a story of true and patient love, and of shameful faithlessness and falsehood; a story in which the wrongdoer pitied herself and fancied herself a victim, while she accepted her husband's sacrifice and spoilt his life. She had been cruel to him with the cruelty which demands everything, and gives less than nothing in return.
"And yet," said Ralph, when he told the story—he had never repeated it to any before—"I never ceased to love her while she lived; and when she died the world seemed empty to me. I suppose it was only this, that I could never take back what I had once given."
There was not much in the story itself, but it held Eleanor's thoughts fast, and would not let them go; because the love that had been so scorned and wasted would have made the happiness of her life. She must write her tale, but how? She could not cast into its foolish incidents the burning thoughts that possessed her; these were all woven about another thread. And while she still thought, her child cried, and she had to leave her work to soothe it.
She lay down on the bed beside it, and fell asleep. She awoke in the dead of the night. The anxious thought which watches ever beside the pillow of the unhappy leaped at once to its place in her mind, giving her no respite. "You must write your story," it said. She got up with the resolution of despair, and went back to the table. "I will write this," she said, "and have done with it."
There was no difficulty now.
The facts in her mind ranged themselves instantly into dramatic shape; living words, words that throbbed with her own love, and pain, and regret, and longing, shaped themselves into eager thought.
"When vain desire at last and vain regret,
Go hand in hand to death, and all is vain."
That was the burden of the writing, and it was a very old one; but it seemed new now, because she wrote it with all her heart. When dawn broke she had eased herself of the phantom that had haunted her, and was free. How strange it is, this relief that comes to some of us after we have put into words the thoughts that torment us! She was free now, and she wrote the other story—her tale for the magazine; but she knew that it was a miserable affair.
Lorna was worse that morning. Her mother took her into her arms and looked into her suffering face. "If I keep her here she will leave me too," she said to herself. "I shall have nothing left."
"This can go to press at once."
She wrapped up her manuscript and took it herself to the editor. She wanted to bring his answer back. He was, in fact, waiting for the story to go on printing, and he was willing to look at it at once. She sat and watched him as he did so, with very little hope in her face. He read it carefully at first, then he turned over the pages rapidly, and finally put the manuscript down.
"I am very sorry," he said, "but it won't do. It isn't up to your usual level. I would make it do if I could, but—it isn't possible."
"I knew," she said, "it wouldn't."
He looked at her in surprise, for she was unfolding another roll of manuscript.
"If you will look at this," she said, "you won't say the same."
He took the paper and began to read casually; then he became interested. He read to the end without speaking; when he had finished he rang the bell and gave the manuscript to the young man who answered his summons. "This can go to press at once," he said; "you have had the necessary directions already."
Eleanor half rose to her feet, and then sat down again. She did not utter a word.
"You have never done anything so good," said the editor; "it is an unpleasant subject, but you have treated it cleverly, very cleverly."
"I shall never do anything so good again," was her strange answer. "I knew you would take it. Would you mind paying me for it now? For I must go into the country tomorrow."
He gave her the cheque she asked for, and she took Lorna away next day.
A month after she saw Ralph Webster again. He had returned unexpectedly, and he sought her out at Southsea, where she was living with her baby. But they did not meet as friends; she saw him with a shock of surprise, and he looked at her as she had never seen him look before.
"Mrs. Wakefield," he said, "I have no right to follow you here, but I came to ask you a single question."
She understood the situation at once, and was ready. "I will answer any question that you like to ask," she said.
He had a magazine in his fingers, and he opened it at a page that she well knew. Were not the title letters of it, the whole aspect of it, burnt into her brain? They were part of the crime that she felt she had committed.
"Yes," said Eleanor, in a low voice, "I wrote it."
"There is a story here," he said, "that occupies a very prominent place. It is called 'Hand in Hand to Death.' I think that you wrote it."
"Yes," said Eleanor, in a low voice; "I wrote it."
"There is no one in the world, except you and myself, that knows the whole of that story. I told it to you because I intended, the next time I saw you, to ask you to be my wife. I wanted you to have time to think of it first. You might not have liked me so well after knowing it."
She folded her child closer in her arms, and bent over it, that he might not see her face.
"I need not speak to you of such a subject now. I know how much you value my esteem my confidence. You have sold my trouble to the world. I suppose you sold it?"
"Yes," said Eleanor, in a still, strange voice; "I was paid eight pounds for it." She was remembering that she had changed the first sovereign to purchase her railway ticket, and that she had calculated how many weeks it would keep her in the country.
"I knew that a woman I loved might despise me," said Ralph; "but I could not guess that a woman I trusted would betray me—for money."
She did not answer him anything. There was that in his tone which made her not care to defend herself. She had injured him in a deadly and cruel manner. Let him say to her what he would. But he said no more; he lifted his hat and went.
II.
A year after that found Ralph Webster a successful man. He had written a novel that hit the public taste; it was full of bitterness and scoffing; but the public liked such bitterness and scoffing, and bought the book.
He wondered sometimes what had become of Eleanor Wakefield. There was no trace of her in her old lodgings, and the editor told him that she had sent him no more contributions. She had seemed to Ralph a noble woman, a woman whom he might love on an equal footing, with all trust and reverence, without pity or forbearance. And she had failed him strangely and meanly, so that the sting of her offence had not yet left him entirely; but it troubled him a little to remember that she had made no defence. This had put him in the wrong, and made him wonder what her defence could be.
It was in the dusk of evening that he stepped into a railway carriage, which had only one occupant. It was a third-class carriage, for he had not yet adopted the ways of a prosperous man. The lady who was seated at the farther end did not move at his entrance, and it was only when he had been in his place some minutes that something in her intense stillness attracted his attention. She had desired him to forget her presence, or not to notice it, but the effort defeated itself, and his first half-curious, half-unconscious glance at her made him rise and cross to her side.
"Mrs. Wakefield!" he said.
"Yes," she answered, "it is Mrs. Wakefield." Then she added, quietly, "I should like, if I may, to congratulate you on your great success."
"You may spare me your congratulations. My success is built on my great unhappiness. None should know that better than you."
"Is it not so with many people?" she asked, gently, ignoring his last remark. "But some are unhappy without success."
He looked at her more attentively. She was in mourning, and she was much changed. The passive attitude of her hands on her lap told him this, as well as the tone of her voice.
"You never followed up your success," he remarked. "Mr. Blakely told me that he expected great things of you."
She answered him nothing.
"Mrs. Wakefield," he went on, vaguely hurt by her silence, which tormented him with an impression of his own cruelty, "I want to apologise to you for what I said when we last met. It was too much."
"It was not too much. I have said more to myself before and since. And yet," she said, turning her eyes full upon him," I do not ask you to forgive me, because I do not repent. I would do it again, if the past came back to me. It is right that you should know how evil I am. I do not repent. I would do it again. Yet I hate myself for doing it. Besides," she added, in a lower tone, which she could hardly have meant him to hear, "it spoilt my happiness as well as yours."
"I do not understand," he said.
"Why should you understand?" she answered. "It does not matter."
The train was whirling on in the darkness. The noise of its rush, the flashing of lights in the city they were leaving, seemed to increase the solitude these two, who were so near, yet so far apart; so much akin in spirit, and so hopelessly estranged.
"If it had been for fame," he said, "I could have understood the temptation better. It would have been a higher sort of temptation. But you did not even sign the story, and you have not republished it."
"I hoped," she said, "that it would be little read and soon forgotten. You had gone away for a long time. I thought that you would never see it. And no one else could ever guess where I got it from."
"You made it very clever," he replied. "I wonder, having gone so far, that you go no further."
"I shall never write again," she answered. "I have no motive. And what I did write has cost me too much."
He did not understand her; he had not known of her past poverty, nor of her recent loss. But he went on to say, "When I look at you it seems impossible to believe that you did such a thing without a reason. It may have seemed a little thing to you, but it was so much to me."
"I knew how much," she answered; "I knew all the meanness of what I did, the treachery of it, and that it would hurt you if you knew, but I thought that you would never know."
"And you did not love me," he added; but he was watching her keenly as he spoke.
Her eyes flashed upon him for a moment. "Oh," she said, "it was because I loved you that I could not help doing it. If I could have escaped from the memory of what you told me, and have thought of other things instead, it would never have been written. If only I could have forgotten you!"
He was startled and astonished. He caught her hands and then let them go again.
"I wish I could believe you," he said.
"You need not. Why should you?" she answered. "I have nothing left to give you. What is a love worth that helped me to betray you?"
"And are you still glad you did it?" He had taken her hands firmly now, that he might look into her eyes. There was no tenderness there, only a desperate heart-broken defiance.
"Am I glad of anything? Can I ever be glad of anything any more? It is only that I would do it again for the same reason. And yet I did not get the thing for which I paid such a heavy price."
"Will you tell me what the thing was?"
"It was only," she answered, "that I thought that treachery the price of my baby's life—and now my baby is dead."
She drew her hands away from his as she spoke. There had come into her eyes a grief that awed and restrained him. He could see that it had nothing to do with himself. Her tone was very quiet.
It seemed to leave him at a great distance from her. For a moment he felt that he had got his answer, and could speak of love to her no more in the presence of such a sorrow. Then his courage came back, and with it resolution. If he was sure enough of his own love for her he could not fail in the end to drive away both her sorrow and her remorse.
"I have been cruel to you," he said; "can you forgive me?"
"I?" she answered, tremulously; "how can I forgive you?"
"Because I have been a fool, and quarrelled with my own happiness." And then he added, speaking slowly, "The story was a part of your own life. You had a right to do what you wished with it. At least, you can make it a part of your life if you will be more generous to me than I was to you."
She let him take her hands again. She looked into his eyes searchingly. What she saw there seemed to satisfy her, for she answered irrelevantly, "Oh, I have been so lonely. To live in the world with nothing but myself and your contempt! You cannot guess what it was like."
"Will you live in the world with me and my love, and see if you like it better?"
She had been too long without happiness to fight against it now, and her answer ended his trouble and hers.
