The Fall Of Atlantis

Chapter Nine: THE DIFFERENCE

I

For the first two years of their marriage, Arvath had deceived himself into believing that he could make Domaris forget Micon. He had been kind and forbearing, trying to understand her inward struggle, conscious of her bravery, tender after the loss of their child.

Domaris was not versed in pretense, and in the last year a tension had mounted between them despite all their efforts. Arvath was not entirely blameless, either; no man can quite forgive a woman who remains utterly untouched by emotion.

Still, in all outward things, Domaris made him a good wife. She was beautiful, modest, conventional, and submissive; she was the daughter of a highly-placed priest and was herself a priestess. She managed their home well, if indifferently, and when she realized that he resented her small son, she arranged to keep Micail out of Arvath's sight. When they were alone, she was compliant, affectionate, even tender. Passionate she was not, and would not pretend.

Frequently, he saw a curious pity in her grey eyes—and pity was the one thing Arvath would not endure. It stung him into jealous, angry scenes of endless recrimination, and he sometimes felt that if she would but once answer him hotly, if she would ever protest, they would at least have some place for a beginning. But her answers were always the same; silence, or a quiet, half-shamed murmur—"I am sorry, Arvath. I told you it would be like this."

And Arvath would curse in frustrated anger, and look at her with something approaching hate, and storm out to walk the Temple precincts alone and muttering for hour after hour. Had she ever refused him anything, had she ever reproached him, he might in time have forgiven her; but her indifference was worse, a complete withdrawal to some secret place where he could not follow. She simply was not there in the room with him at all.

"I'd rather you made a cuckold of me in the court with a garden slave, where everyone could see!" he shouted at her once, in furious frustration. "At least then I could kill the man, and be satisfied!"

"Would that satisfy you?" she asked gently, as if she only awaited his word to pursue exactly the course of action he had outlined; and Arvath felt the hot bitter taste of hate in his mouth and slammed out of the room with fumbling steps, realizing sickly that if he stayed he would kill her, then and there.

Later he wondered if she were trying to goad him to do just that... .

He found that he could break through her indifference with cruelty, and he even began to take a certain pleasure in hurting her, feeling that her hot words and her hatred were better than the indifferent tolerance which was the most his tenderness had ever won. He came to abuse her shamefully, in fact, and at last Domaris, hurt past enduring, threatened to complain to the Vested Five.

"You will complain!" Arvath jeered. "Then I will complain, and the Vested Five will throw us out to settle it ourselves!"

Bitterly, Domaris asked, "Have I ever refused you anything?"

"You've never done anything else, you ..." The word he used was one which had no written form, and hearing it from a member of the Priest's Caste made Domaris want to faint with sheer shame. Arvath, seeing her turn white, went on pouring out similar abuse with savage enjoyment. "Of course I shouldn't talk this way, you're an Initiate," he sneered. "You know the Temple secrets—one of which allows you to deliberately refuse to conceive my child!" He made a little mocking bow. "All the while protesting your innocence, of course, as befits one so elevated."

The injustice of this—for Domaris had hidden Mother Ysouda's warning in her heart and forgotten her counsel as soon as it was given—stung her into unusual denial. "You lie!" she said shakily, raising her voice to him for the first time. "You lie, and you know you lie! I don't know why the Gods have denied us children, but my child bears my name—and the name of his father!"

Arvath, raging, advanced to loom over her threateningly. "I don't see what that has to do with it! Except that you thought more of that Atlantean swine-prince than of me! Don't you think I know that you yourself frustrated the life of the child you almost gave me? And all because of that—that ..." He swallowed, unable to speak, and caught her thin shoulders in his hands, roughly dragging her to her feet. "Damn you, tell me the truth! Admit what I say is true or I will kill you!"

She let herself go limp between his hands. "Kill me, then," she said wearily. "Kill me at once, and make an end of this."

Arvath mistook her trembling for fear; genuinely frightened, he lowered her gently, releasing her from his harsh clasp. "No, I didn't mean it," he said contritely; then his face crumpled and he flung himself to his knees before her, throwing his arms around her waist and burying his head in her breast. "Domaris, forgive me, forgive me, I did not mean to lay rough hands on you! Domaris, Domaris, Domaris ..." He kept on saying her name over and over in incoherent misery, sobbing, the tight terrible crying of a man lost and bewildered.

The woman leaned over him at last, clasping him close, her eyes dark with heartbroken pity, and she, too, wept as she rocked his head against her breast. Her whole body, her heart, her very being ached with the wish that she could love him.

II

Later, full of dread and bitter conflict, she was tempted to speak at last of Mother Ysouda's warnings; but even if he believed her—if it did not start the whole awful argument over again—the thought that he might pity her was intolerable. And so she said nothing of it.

Shyly, wanting fatherly advice and comfort, she went to Rajasta, but as she talked with him, she began to blame herself: it had not been Arvath who was cruel, but she who shirked sworn duty. Rajasta, watching her face as she spoke, could find no comfort to offer, for he did not doubt that Domaris had made a deliberate display of her passivity, flaunted her lack of emotion in the man's face. What wonder if Arvath resented such an assault on his manhood? Domaris obviously did not enjoy her martyrdom; but, equally certainly, she took a perverse satisfaction in it. Her face was drawn with shame, but a soft light glowed in her eyes, and Rajasta recognized the signs of a self-made martyr all too easily.

"Domaris," he said sadly, "do not hate even yourself, my daughter." He checked her reply with a raised hand. "I know, you make the gestures of your duty. But are you his wife, Domaris?"

"What do you mean?" Domaris whispered; but her face revealed her suspicions.

"It is not I who ask this of you," said Rajasta, relentlessly, "but you who demand it of yourself, if you are to live with yourself. If your conscience were clean, my daughter, you would not have come to me! I know what you have given Arvath, and at what cost; but what have you withheld?" Pausing, he saw that she was stricken, unable to meet his gaze. "My child, do not resent that I give you the counsel which you, yourself, know to be right." He reached to her and picked up one of her tautly clenched and almost bloodlessly white hands in his own and stroked it gently, until her fingers relaxed a little. "You are like this hand of yours, Domaris. You clasp the past too tightly, and so turn the knife in your own wounds. Let go, Domaris!"

"I—I cannot," she whispered.

"Nor can you will yourself to die any more, my child. It is too late for that."

"Is it?" she asked, with a strange smile.

III

Rajasta's heart ached for Domaris; her stilled, bitter smile haunted him day after day, and at last he came to see things more as she did, and realized that he had been remiss. In his innermost self he knew that Domaris was widowed; she had been wife in the truest sense to Micon, and she would never be more than mistress to Arvath. Rajasta had never asked, but he knew that she had gone to Micon as a virgin. Her marriage to Arvath had been a travesty, a mockery, a weary duty, a defilement—and for nothing.

One morning, in the library, unable to concentrate, Rajasta thought in sudden misery, It is my doing. Deoris warned me that Domaris should not have another child, and I said nothing of it! I could have stopped them from forcing her into marriage. Instead I have sanctimoniously crushed the life from the girl who was child to me in my childless old age—the daughter of my own soul. I have sent my daughter into the place of harlots! And my own light is darkened in her shame.

Throwing aside the scroll he had ineffectually been perusing, Rajasta rose up and went in search of Domaris, intending to promise that her marriage should be dissolved; that he would move heaven and earth to have it set aside.

He told her nothing of the kind—for before he could speak a word she told him, with a strange, secret, and not unhappy smile, that once again she was bearing Arvath a child.