Part 5

"Oh, Hannah, I am so unhappy," she said. "I want to tell you but I don't know how. Oh, my child, I am so miserable."

Her utterance had still that little foreign accent that made it so pathetic, although, in spite of some odd blunders, she had become almost fluent in the English tongue. There was still no indication of tears in either her voice or her eyes, as she leaned back in the padded chair, her head supported by its top, and her long bare arms with their picturesque Greek bracelets resting wearily on its cushioned sides.

Hannah looked at her with the tenderness of her kind heart overflowing in great tears from her eyes and rolling down her cheeks. She pressed her handkerchief to her face in the vain effort to keep them back, but the woman for whom they fell shed no tears. She sat there calm and quiet in her youth and beauty and looked at the plain little school-teacher with a wistful gaze that seemed as if it might be envy.

"Tell me, Hannah," she said presently, when the girl had dried her eyes and grown more calm, "tell me frankly, no matter how strange it may seem to you to have the question asked, what do you think of my husband?"

This startling question naturally found Hannah unprepared with an answer, and after clearing her throat and getting rather red, she said confusedly that she had seen so little of Mr. Dallas, her intercourse with him had been so slight, that she really did not feel that she knew him well enough to give an answer.

"You know him as well as I do," his wife replied. "As he is to you--as you see him daily, exactly so he is to me. I have waited and waited for something more, but in vain. I have come at last to the conclusion that this is all."

Hannah, between wonder and distress, began to feel the tears rise again. The other saw them and bent forward and took her hand.

"Don't cry, poor little thing," she said. "Yes--cry if you can. It shows your heart is soft still--mine is as hard as stone. Oh, God, how I have cried!" she broke off, in a voice grown suddenly passionate. "How I have laid awake at night and cried until my body was exhausted with the sobs. I have thought of my little white bed in the convent, where I slept so placidly, for every night of all those blessed, quiet, peaceful years, until my whole longing would be that I might once more lay myself down upon it and close my eyes forever. If an angel from Heaven had offered me a wish it would have been that one. Oh, Hannah, you do not know. You ought to be so happy. You are so happy. Do you know it? I didn't know it, and I was never grateful for it, but always looking forward to being happy in the future, and oh, how I am punished!"

She wrung her hands together and bit the flesh of her soft lips, as if with a sense of anguish too bitter to be borne.

"I always thought," said Hannah, in a husky voice that sounded still of tears, "that a woman who was beautiful and gifted and admired, and had a husband to take care of her, must be the happiest creature in the world. I used to look at you with envy, but I knew, before to-night, that you suffered sometimes."

"Sometimes! Oh, Hannah, it is not sometimes--but always--continually--evening and morning--day-time and night-time, for when I sleep I have such dreams! The things that were my day dreams long ago come back to me in sleep, and when I wake and think of myself as I am, I know not why I do not die of it. Oh, Hannah, if you have dreamed of marriage, give it up. Live your life out as you are. Die a dear, sweet, good, old maid, teaching little children and being kind to them and taking care of your old mother. Oh, my dear, don't call yourself lonely. Don't dare to say it, lest you should be punished. There is no loneliness that a woman can know which can be compared to a marriage like mine. Oh, I am so lonely every moment that I live, that I feel there is no companionship for me in all this crowded world, for the bitterness of my heart is what no one can feel or share."

"Why did you marry your husband?" said Hannah, surprised at her own boldness.

"Why? I am glad you asked me that. I will tell you, and perhaps you may be saved what I have suffered. If my mother had lived it might have been all different. Surely, surely a mother would have known how to save her child from what I have suffered. A father might not--perhaps a father might not be to blame, though sometimes--oh, Hannah, it is dreadful, but my father seems to me a cruel, wicked man. It was he that did it. What did I know? Why your knowledge of the world is great and vast compared to mine! I had had only the sisters to teach me, and they were as ignorant as I. My father told me he had no home to take me to, and that Robert would give me a sweet home, and love and protection and kindness, and that I would be so happy and must consider myself very fortunate. He told me that Robert could not express himself very well, speaking a different tongue from my own, but that he loved me devotedly and that the great object of his life would be to make me happy. And so I married him, glad to please my father, pleased myself, as a child, at the idea of having a home of my own, and ignorant as a child of what I was doing."

"And without loving your husband?" said the little teacher, with a look that showed she could be severe.

"What did I know about love? I thought I loved him. He was handsome and kind to me and my father said he adored me--he told me himself that he loved me. If his manner was not very ardent, what did I know about ardor in love-making? I knew my not being able to speak English fluently must be a hindrance to him in expressing himself, and I thought he was everything I could wish, and never doubted I should be as happy as a child with a doll-house and everything else that she wanted. As I remember now," she said reflectingly, as if searching back into her memory, "Robert was different in those days--not an impassioned lover, compared to the tenor who sang in the opera to-night, but compared to what he is now, he was so. There was once that he seemed to care a little--"

She broke off and Hannah spoke:

"I was thinking to-night about you and whether you were not in danger," she said, with a certain air of wisdom which her somewhat hard experience of life had given her. "How that man looked at you as he sang those words! That wild passion of love which they expressed seemed a reality. I wondered if you could hear them unmoved--and a thought of danger for you made me feel unhappy."

Christine did not answer her for a moment. A strange smile came to her lips as her eyes rested gently on the little teacher. Eyes and smile had both something of hopelessness in them, as if she despaired of making herself understood.

"That was sweet of you, Hannah," she said presently, a look of simple affectionateness chasing away the other. "It is good to think that there was any one, in all that great crowd of people, who cared so much about me, but, my good little friend, never trouble yourself with that thought in connection with me again. My heart is dead--so dead that it seem weary waiting for the rest of me to die, and nothing but the resurrection morning that renews it all can ever give me back the heart I had before I was married. It did not die suddenly at one blow, but it died a lingering death of slow, slow pain. Think what it is! I am younger than you, and already joy and pleasure and hope are words that have no meaning for me. Oh, poor Hannah! I oughtn't to make you cry, and yet your tears are blessed things. When I could cry I was not so wretched."

She leaned toward the girl and clasped her close, kissing the teardrops from each eye and soothing her, as if hers had been the sorrow.

"I want to be just to my husband," she went on presently. "I do believe he is not to blame. He gives me all he has to give, but there is nothing! Oh, when I look into my heart and see its power of suffering, and see, too, how marvellously happy I might once have been, I seem a thousand worlds away from him--my husband, who ought to be the very closest, nearest, likest thing to me! Perhaps he is not happy, but at least he does not suffer, and he is always contented to live on as we are--no work, no friends, no ambition, no interest in life, except mere living. Oh, but it is hard! How long will it go on so, Hannah?" she broke out suddenly, with a ring of fervor in her voice. "Did you ever hear of any one living on and on and on, in a life like this? Could it go on until one got old and deaf and wrinkled, and can anything end it but death? It seems so impossible that I can be the little Christine who used to sit and dream of happiness in marriage, and of the handsome lover who would come some day and carry me off to a beautiful land where all my dreams would be realized. I came out on that stage to-night," she went on, sitting upright and folding her beautiful arms, "and while the people were looking at me and clapping, a thought came to me that made me feel like sobbing. I wondered in my soul how many broken hearts were covered by those lace and velvet garments, and those smiling, superficial faces. The thought absorbed me so that I forgot everything and the prompter thought I'd forgotten my part entirely and gave me my cue."

"I saw you. I saw the strange look that came over your face, but I did not know what it meant. And perhaps the people envied you and thought you must be so happy, to be so beautiful and admired. Oh, poor Christine! I am sorry for you. I wish you could be happy. It seems as if you might."

"You might! Everything is possible to you. There is no reason, I suppose, why you may not have all the happiness I ever dreamed of, for, after all, the beginning and end of it was love. And yet I have advised you never to marry--for I often disbelieve in the existence of the sort of love that I have dreamed of--but how can I tell? I know nothing but my own life, and I tell you that is an intolerable pain. I sit here and say the words and you hear them, but they are words only to you, shut off as you are from all the experiences that make up my suffering. Lately there has been a new one. If anything could make my life more miserable it would be the addition of poverty and privation to what I bear already--and that is what I am threatened with--what may probably be just ahead of me. Suppose that should come too! Why, then I should be more unhappy yet, I suppose, although I have thought I couldn't be."

She spoke still with that strange calm which her companion had wondered at from the beginning of their conversation. Her manner in the carriage seemed to be a part of the excitement of the evening's performance, but now the cold calm of reaction had come on and she was very quiet. She had leaned back again in the big chair, and looked at Hannah gravely. Neither of them thought of sleep, and their faces expressed its nearness as little as if it were afternoon, instead of midnight. The last words uttered by Christine had presented a practical difficulty to her friend which her own experiences brought home to her forcibly, while they shut her off from a just sympathy with some of her other trials.

"What do you mean?" she said. "Isn't your husband well off and able to support you comfortably?"

"How do I know? How am I to find out?"

"Ask him. Make him explain to you exactly what his circumstances are. I wonder you haven't done that long ago."

"You will wonder at a good deal more if you go on. For my part, I have wondered and wondered until I have no power to wonder left. I did ask him--that and many other things--and the result is I am as blind and ignorant this moment as you are." She spoke almost coldly. One would have thought it was another and an almost indifferent person whose affairs she was discussing.