Sanctuary | Page 6

obviously
merited. And if it were not the venison it would be something else; if it
were not the housekeeper it would be Mr. Orme, charged with the
results of a conference with his agent, a committee-meeting at his club,
or any of the other incidents which, by happening to himself, became
events. Kate found herself caught in the inexorable continuity of life,
found herself gazing over a scene of ruin lit up by the punctual
recurrence of habit as nature's calm stare lights the morrow of a
whirlwind.
Life was going on, then, and dragging her at its wheels. She could
neither check its rush nor wrench loose from it and drop out--oh, how
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