THE TRIUMPH OF LIFE
Maggie, before she left London, had written both to Paul and Mr.
Magnus giving them her new address.She had intended to see Magnus, but Martin's illness had absorbed her so deeply that she could not proceed outside it.She told him quite frankly that she was going down to Glebeshire with Martin and that she would remain with him there until he was well.She did not try to defend herself; she did not argue the case at all; she simply stated the facts.
Mr.Magnus wrote to her at once.He was deeply concerned, he did not chide her for what she had done, but he begged her to realise her position.She felt through every line of his letter that he disapproved of and distrusted Martin.His love for Maggie (and she felt that he had indeed love for her) made him look on Martin as the instigator in this affair.He saw Maggie, ignorant of the world, led away by a seducer from her married life, persuaded to embark upon what his own experience had taught him to be a dangerous, lonely, and often disastrous voyage.He had never heard of any good of Martin; he had been always in his view, idle, dissolute, and selfish.What could he think but that Martin had, most wickedly, persuaded her to abandon her safety?
She answered his letter, telling him in the greatest detail the truth.She told him that Martin had done all he could to refuse, that, had he not been so ill, he would have left her, that he had threatened her, again and again, with what he would do if she did not the him.
She showed him that it had been her own determination and absolute resolve that had created the situation--and she told him that she was happy for the first time in her life.
But his letter did force her to realise the difficulties of her position.In writing to Mrs.Bolitho she had spoken of herself as Martin's wife, and now when she was called "Mrs.Warlock" she tacitly accepted that, hating the deceit, but wishing for anything that might keep the situation tranquil and undisturbed.She asked Mrs.Bolitho to let her have a small room near the big one, telling her that Martin was so ill that he must be undisturbed at night.
Then Mr.Magnus's letter arrived addressed to "Miss Cardinal," and she thought that Mrs.Bolitho looked at her oddly when she gave it to her.Martin's illness, too, seemed to disturb the household.He cried out in his dreams, his shouts waking the whole establishment.
Bolitho, once, thinking that murder was being committed, went to his room, found him sitting up in bed, sweating with terror.He caught hold of Bolitho, flung his arms around him, would not let him go, urging him "not to help them, to protect him.They would catch him...they would catch him.They would catch him."The stout and phlegmatic farmer was himself frightened, sitting there on the bed, in his night-shirt, and "seeing ghosts" in the flickering light of the candle.Martin's conduct during the day was not reassuring.He had lost all his ferocity and bitterness; he was very quiet, speaking to no one, lying on a sofa that over-looked the moor, watching.
Mrs.Bolitho's really soft heart was touched by his pallor and weakness, but she could not deny that there was something queer here." Maggie almost wished that his old mood of truculence would return.She was terrified, too, of these night scenes, because they were so bad for his heart.The local doctor, a clever young fellow called Stephens, told her that he was recovering from the pneumonia, but that his heart was "dickey.""Mustn't let anything excite him, Mrs.Warlock," he said.
There came then gradually over the old house and the village the belief that Martin was "fey." Mrs.Bolitho was in most ways a sensible, level-headed, practical woman, but like many of the inhabitants of Glebeshire, she was deeply superstitious.It was not so very many years since old Jane Curtis had been ducked in the St.
Dreot's pond for a witch, and even now, did a cow fall sick or the lambs die, the involuntary thought in the Glebeshire "pagan mind"was to look for the "evil eye." But Mrs.Bolitho herself had had a very recent example in her own family of "possession." There had been her old grandfather, living in the farm with them, as hale and hearty a human of sixty-five years as you'd be likely to find in a day's march through Glebeshire."He lost touch with them," as Mrs.
Bolitho put it.In a night his colour failed him, his cheerful conversation left him, he could "do nought but sit and stare out o'
window." A month later he died.
Martin had not been long at Borhedden before she came to her conclusions about him, told them to her James, and found that his slow but sure brains had come to the same decision.In the sense of the tragedy overhanging the poor young man she forgot to consider the possible impropriety of his relations with Maggie.He was removed at once from human laws and human judgment.He became "a creature of God" and was surrounded with something of the care and reverence with which the principal "softie" in the village was regarded.
It was not that Martin's behaviour was in any way odd.After a few days in the utter peace and quiet of the moor and farm he screamed no more at night.He was gentle and polite to every one, ate his meals, took little walks out on to the moor and into the village, but liked best to sit in front of the parlour window and look out on to the heath and grass, watching the shadows and the sunlight and the driving sheets of rain.