Sanctuary | Page 6

blessedly--into darkness and cessation. She must go bounding on, racked, broken, but alive in every fibre. The most she could hope was a few hours' respite, not from her own terrors, but from the pressure of outward claims: the midday halt, during which the victim is unbound while his torturers rest from their efforts. Till her father's return she would have the house to herself, and, the question of the venison despatched, could give herself to long lonely pacings of the empty rooms, and shuddering subsidences upon her pillow.
Her first impulse, as the mist cleared from her brain, was the habitual one of reaching out for ultimate relations. She wanted to know the worst; and for her, as she saw in a flash, the worst of it was the core of fatality in what had happened. She shrank from her own way of putting it--nor was it even figuratively true that she had ever felt, under faith in Denis, any such doubt as the perception implied. But that was merely because her imagination had never put him to the test. She was fond of exposing herself to hypothetical ordeals, but somehow she had never carried Denis with her on these adventures. What she saw now was that, in a world of strangeness, he remained the object least strange to her. She was not in the tragic case of the girl who suddenly sees her lover unmasked. No mask had dropped from Denis's face: the pink shades had simply been lifted from the lamps, and she saw him for the first time in an unmitigated glare.
Such exposure does not alter the features, but it lays an ugly emphasis on the most charming lines, pushing the smile to a grin, the curve of good-nature to the droop of slackness. And it was precisely into the flagging lines of extreme weakness that Denis's graceful contour flowed. In the terrible talk which had followed his avowal, and wherein every word flashed a light on his moral processes, she had been less startled by what he had done than by the way in which his conscience had already become a passive surface for the channelling of consequences. He was like a child who had put a match to the curtains, and stands agape at the blaze. It was horribly naughty to put the match--but beyond that the child's responsibility did not extend. In this business of Arthur's, where all had been wrong from the beginning--where self-defence might well find a plea for its casuistries in the absence of a definite right to be measured by--it had been easy, after the first slip, to drop a little lower with each struggle. The woman--oh, the woman was--well, of the kind who prey on such men. Arthur, out there, at his lowest ebb, had drifted into living with her as a man drifts into drink or opium. He knew what she was--he knew where she had come from. But he had fallen ill, and she had nursed him--nursed him devotedly, of course. That was her chance, and she knew it. Before he was out of the fever she had the noose around him--he came to and found himself married. Such cases were common enough--if the man recovered he bought off the woman and got a divorce. It was all a part of the business--the marriage, the bribe, the divorce. Some of those women made a big income out of it--they were married and divorced once a year. If Arthur had only got well--but, instead, he had a relapse and died. And there was the woman, made his widow by mischance as it were, with her child on her arm--whose child?--and a scoundrelly black-mailing lawyer to work up her case for her. Her claim was clear enough--the right of dower, a third of his estate. But if he had never meant to marry her? If he had been trapped as patently as a rustic fleeced in a gambling-hell? Arthur, in his last hours, had confessed to the marriage, but had also acknowledged its folly. And after his death, when Denis came to look about him and make inquiries, he found that the witnesses, if there had been any, were dispersed and undiscoverable. The whole question hinged on Arthur's statement to his brother. Suppress that statement, and the claim vanished, and with it the scandal, the humiliation, the life-long burden of the woman and child dragging the name of Peyton through heaven knew what depths. He had thought of that first, Denis swore, rather than of the money. The money, of course, had made a difference,--he was too honest not to own it--but not till afterward, he declared--would have declared on his honour, but that the word tripped him up, and sent a flush to his forehead.
Thus, in broken phrases,