The Judge Part 28

So, a week later, Susan Rodney came. Her visit was a great humiliation.

She was a woman of thirty-five, strangely and rea.s.suringly unlike her brother, having a fair, sun-burned skin with a golden down on her upper lip, and slow-moving eyes, the colour of a blue sky reflected in shallow floods. She was as clean and useful as a scrubbed deal table. And because she was wholesome in her soul, she abhorred this woman who was sending away her own child. During the twenty-four hours she was at Yaverland's End she ate sparingly, plainly because she felt reluctance at accepting hospitality from Marion, and rose very early, as if she found sleeping difficult in the air of this house. This might have been in part due to the affection she evidently felt for her brother, which was shown in the proud and grudging responses to Marion's enquiries as to how he was getting on at Dawlish.

"He's doing ever so well, and he's made the place a picture," she would begin volubly, and then would toss her head slowly like a teased heifer, and decide that Marion did not deserve to hear tidings of the glorious man she had slighted. But the greater part of her loathing was that which a woman with a simple heart of nature must feel for one who hated her child, which the sound must feel for the leprous.

Marion could have mitigated that feeling in a great part, not by explaining, for that was impossible, but by simply showing that she had suffered, for Susan was a kind woman. Instead she did everything she could to encourage it. She told no lies, although by now her efforts to win over the neighbourhood, so that she could get a servant easily and be able to give her whole time to the children, had made her coldly sly in her dealings with humanity. She liked Susan too much for that. Merely she made no attempt to disguise her personality. After the children had gone to bed she sat by the hearth and held her head high under the other's ruminant stare, knowing that because of the times she had been subject to love and to l.u.s.t her beauty was lip-marked as a well-read book is thumb-marked, and that that would seem a mark of abomination to this woman in the salty climate of whose character pa.s.sion could not bloom. She knew, too, that to Susan, who every Sunday since her babyhood had gone to church and prayed very hard, with her thick fair brows brought close together, to be helped to be good, the pride of her bearing would seem terribly wicked to a sinner who had broken one of the Ten Commandments.

Marion kept down her eyes so that the other should not see that the eyeb.a.l.l.s were strained with agony, and should think that she was a loose and conscienceless woman. She hated doing this. She liked Susan so much, and she was terribly lonely. She would like to have thrown her arms round Susan's neck and cried and cried, and told her how terribly difficult she found life, and how she hated people being nasty to her, and asked her if sometimes she did not long for a man to look after her.

But instead she sat there rigidly alienating her. For she had seen that because Susan disliked her she was precipitating herself much more impulsively than she would otherwise have done into affection for the child whom she suspected was being maltreated by this queer woman in this queer house. In any case she would have admitted Roger to her heart, for it was plainly very empty since the loss of her son, whom she had loved so dearly that she did not speak of him to Marion, but being slow of movement she might have taken her time over it; and it was necessary that these two should love each other at once. At any moment Roger might understand his mummie hated him, and that would break his poor little heart, which she knew was golden, unless he had some other love to which to run. She was so glad when she found herself seeing them off at Paddington, although it was a horrible scene. Susan had primly, and with an air of refusing to partic.i.p.ate in the spoils of vice, declined to let Marion buy her a firstcla.s.s ticket, so the parting had to take place in a crowded thirdcla.s.s compartment. Roger shrieked and kicked at leaving her, and leaned howling from the window, while Marion said over and over again, "Mummy's so sorry ... it's only that just now she isn't well enough to look after you both ... and Richard's the eldest, so he must stay ... and you'll be back ever so soon.... And there's such lovely sands at Dawlish...."

All the people in the corner-seats had looked with distaste at this plain, ill-behaved child and had cast commending glances on Richard, who stood by her side on the platform, absorbedly watching the porters wheeling their trucks along, but always keeping on the alert so that he never got in anyone's way. She couldn't bear that. She wanted to scream out: "How dare you look like that at this poor little soul who has been sinned against from the moment of his begetting? Think of it, his mother hates him!"

She looked wildly at Susan for some comfort, but found her pink with grave anger. Well, it was better for Roger that Susan should feel thus about her. So she went on with these murmurs, which she felt the child might detect as insincere at any moment, until the green flag waved. She watched the diminis.h.i.+ng train with a criminally light heart. Richard began to jump up and down. "Mummie! Won't it be lovely--just us two!"

It was lovely. It was iniquitously lovely. In the morning Richard ran into her room and flung himself, all dewy after the night's long sleep, into her bed and nuzzled into her and gave her endless love which did not have to be interrupted because the other child was standing at the head of the bed, its pale eyes asking for its share of kisses. When he went to school, she stood at the door and watched him run along the garden to the gate, flinging out his arms and legs quite straight as a foal does, and was exultingly proud of being a mother as she had not been when there ran behind him Roger on weak, ambling limbs. When he returned, they had their meal together to the tune of happy laughter, for there was now no third to spill its food or say it was feeling sick suddenly or babble silly things. In the afternoon she had to drive him out to go and play games with the other boys. Much rather would he have stayed with her, and when she called him back for a last hug he did not struggle in her arms but gave her back kiss for kiss. She always changed her dress for tea, and arranged her hair loosely like a woman in a picture, and went out into the garden to gather burning leaves and put them in vases about the room, and when it fell dark she set lighted candles on the table because they were kinder than the lamp to her pain-flawed handsomeness and because they left corners of dusk in which these leaves glowed like fire with the kind of beauty that she and Richard liked. She would arrange all this long before he came in, and sit waiting in a drowse of happiness, thinking that really she had lost nothing by being cut off from the love of man, for this was much better than anything she could have had from Harry. When Richard came in he would hold his breath because it was so nice and forget to tell her about the game from which he was still flushed; and after tea they would settle down to a lovely warm, close evening by the fire, when they would tell each other all the animal stories that Roger had not liked.

On Sat.u.r.day afternoons they always went down to the marshes together, and they were glad that now was the ebbing of the year, for both found the beauty of bad weather somehow truer than the beauty of the suns.h.i.+ne.

They loved to walk under high-backed clouds that the wind carried horizonwards in pursuance of some feud of the skies. They liked to see Roothing Castle standing up behind a salt mist, pale and flat as if it were cut out of paper. They liked to sit, too, at the point where there met together the three creeks that divided Roothing Marsh, the Saltings, and Kerith Island. That was good when the tide was out, and the sea-walls rose black from a silver plain of mud, valleyed with channels thin and dark as veins. They would wait until the winter sunset kindled and they had to return home quickly, looking over their shoulders at its flames.

Lovely it was to find that he liked all the things she did: loneliness and the sting of rain on the face and the cry of the redshanks; and lovely it was to find in watching his liking what a glorious being it was that she had borne. The eyes of his soul glowed like the eyes of his body. She had loved Harry's love for her because it made him quick and unhesitant and unmuddied by half-thought thoughts and half-felt feelings as ordinary people are, but this child was like that all the time. Pride ruled his life, so that she never had to feel anxious about his behaviour, knowing that he would pull himself up into uncriticisable conduct just as he always held his head high, and all the forces of his spirit were poured out into his pa.s.sion for her. She had always known these things, and now the knowledge of them was not balanced by the knowledge that her faith held weight for weight of infamy and glory. For now that Roger was not here there was nothing to remind her that the man to whom she had given her virginity had not come to her help when she was going to have his child and had left her to be trodden into the mud by the fat man Peacey. Now she only knew that she was the beloved mother of this splendid son. What had happened to the man with whom, according to the indecent and ridiculous dispensation of nature, she had had to be enmeshed in a net of hot excitements and undignified physical impulses in order to obtain this child, mattered nothing at all. He had been so much less splendid than his son.

She grew well with happiness. She became plumper, and there was colour on her cheeks as well as in her lips. People ceased to treat her with the hostility that the happy feel for the unhappy. Presently she knew that she would soon regain complete self-control and would be able to keep shut the trap-door of her hidden self, and that it would be quite safe for her to have Roger back at the end of three months. She began to speak of it to Richard. "Roger will be with us for Xmas," she used to say. "We must think out some surprises for him...." To which Richard would answer tensely, "I s'pose so." That always chilled her, and she would drop the subject, feeling that after all there was no need to speak of it just yet. But once, as the days pa.s.sed into December, she tried to have it out with him, and followed it up by saying: "You might try to be a little more pleased about it. I do want you and Roger to be nice to each other." He answered, looking curiously grown up, "Oh, Roger will always be nice to me--you needn't worry about that."

As she heard the tone, with its insolent allusion to Roger's natural slavishness, she realised why the vicar and the teachers in the village school, and many of the other people with whom he came in contact, disliked him. There was something terrifying about this cold-tempered judgment coming from a child. She had wondered, looking at the beauty of his contemptuous little face and at the extraordinary skill with which his small brown hands were whittling a block of wood into a figure, whether it was not a sound instinct on the part of the race to persecute illegitimate children. Either they were conceived more lethargically than other children, of women who yielded through feeble-wittedness or need of money to men who did not love them enough to marry them, and so were born below the average of the race, dullards that made life ugly, or parasites that had to be kept on honest people's money in prisons or workhouses. Or, like, Richard, they had been conceived more intensely than other children, of love so pa.s.sionate that it had drawn together men and women separated by social prohibitions. So they were born to rule like kings over the lawfully begotten, so that married folk raged to see that, because they had known no more than ordinary pleasure, their seed was to be penalised by servitude. Richard would always be adored by all but the elderly and the impotent.

Because vitality itself had been kneaded into his flesh by his parents'

pa.s.sion he would not die until he was an old, old man and needed rest after interminable victories; and because it played through his mind like lightning, he would always have power over men and material, and even over himself. Since he had been begotten when beauty, like a strong G.o.ddess, pressed together the bodies of his father and mother, she would disclose more of her works to him than to other sons of men with whose begetting she was not concerned. Even now, every time Marion let him take her to the turn of the road past Roothing, where he could show her the oak cut like a club on a playing-card and aflame with autumn that stood on the hill's edge, against the far grey desolation of Kerith Island and the sunless tides, he knew such joy as one would have thought beyond a child's achievement. He would get as much out of life as any man that ever lived. At the thought of the contrast between this heir to everything and the other child, that poor waif who all his life long would be sent round to the back door, tears rushed to her eyes, and she cried indignantly, "Oh, I do think you might be nice to Roger." Richard looked at her sharply. "What, do you really mind about it, mummie?" The surprise in his tone told her the worst about her forced and mechanical kindnesses to Roger. "Oh, more than anything," she almost sobbed. "Very well, I'll be nice to him," he answered shortly, adding after a minute, with a deliberate impishness, as if he hated the moment and wanted to burlesque it, "After all, mums, I never do hit him...." But for the rest of the evening the golden glow of his face was clouded with solemnity, and when she was tucking him up that night he said, in an off-hand way, "You know prob'ly Roger's got much older while he's been away, and I'll be able to play with him more when he comes back." She laughed happily.

If he was going to help her to frustrate her unnatural hatred of Roger, she would succeed.

CHAPTER VI

Then, a week later, Harry died. That might have meant grief, wrecking and inexpressible, for she discovered that she was still his. Love lay in her, indestructible as an element. It was true that pa.s.sion was gone from her for ever, but that had been merely an alloy added to it by nature when she desired to use it as currency to buy continuance, and love itself had survived. She might have lacerated herself with mourning for the fracture of their marriage and the separation of their later years had it not been for the beautiful thing that had happened the afternoon before he died. It was so beautiful that she hardly ever rehea.r.s.ed its details to herself, preferring to guard it in her heart as one guards sacred things, preserving it immaculate even from her own thoughts. It had lifted the shame from her destiny. She perceived that the next day, when Richard came in and stood stumbling with the handle of the door, instead of running to the table, though she had arranged it specially, as if this were a birthday, with four candles instead of two, and had baked him a milk loaf for a treat, and had cut the last Michaelmas daisies from the garden and set them in blanched mauve clouds about the dark edges of the room.

"Mother, the squire's dead," he said at length. That she knew already.

She had divined it early in the afternoon, when the village people began to go past the house in twos and threes, walking slowly and turning their faces towards her windows. "Yes, dear," she answered evenly.

"Mother, is it true that the squire was my father? All the other boys say so." She had antic.i.p.ated this moment for years with terror, because always before it had seemed to her that when it came she must break down and tell him how she had been shamed and abandoned and cast away to infamy, and she had dreaded that this might make him frightened of life.

But because of what had happened the day before she was able to smile, as if they were talking of happy things, and say slowly and delightedly, "Yes, you are his son." He walked slowly across the room, knitting his brows and staring at her with eyes that were at once crafty and awed, as children's are when they perceive that grown-ups are concealing some important fact from them, and harbour at once a quick, indignant resolution to find out what it is as soon as possible, and a slow, acquiescent sense that the truth must be a very sacred thing if it has to be veiled. At her knee he halted, and shot sharp glances up at her.

But the peace in her face made him feel foolish, and he said in an off-hand manner: "Mummie, Miss Lawrence says my map of the Severn is the best," and then turned to look at the tea-table. "Ooh, mums, milk-loaf!"

She could see as he continued that all was well with him. The squire had been his father: but it evidently was not anything to make a fuss about; it seemed funny that he and mother hadn't lived together, but grown-ups were always doing funny things; anyway, it seemed to be all right....

As she sat and teased him for making such an enormous meal, and rejoicing silently because he had pa.s.sed through this dangerous moment so calmly, it struck her that Roger also would partic.i.p.ate in the benefits brought by the beautiful happening of the day before. Now that her past life had been made not humiliating, but only sad, she would no longer feel angry with him because he reminded her of it. That night she wrote to Susan Rodney and asked her to bring him back during the week before Christmas.

Marion, groaning, pressed the b.u.t.ton of the electric clock that stood on the table by her bedside, and looked up at the monstrous white dial it threw on the ceiling. Half-past one. She rolled over and cried into the pillow, "Richard! Richard!" She had already been three hours in bed.

There were six more hours till morning, six more hours in which to remember things, and memory was a hot torment, a fire lit in her brainpan.

When, three days later, she received Peacey's letter saying that he would not allow the child to go back to her she felt nothing but relief.

It was disgusting, of course, to get that letter, to have to read so many lines in that loathsome, large, neat, inflated handwriting, but she took it that it meant that those toys which he had sent Roger every six months were not, as she thought, mere attempts to torture her by reminding her of his existence, but signs that he had really wanted to be a father to his son, and that now that Harry was dead he was declaring his desire freely. That made her very happy, for she knew that love from the worst man on earth would be more nouris.h.i.+ng for the boy than her insincerity. She did not tell Richard, because she could not have borne to see how pleased he would look, but she went about the house light-heartedly for winter days, bursting with song, and then penitently checking herself and planning to send Roger extravagant presents for Christmas, until Susan Rodney's letter came. She had sat with it open on her lap, feeling sick and wondering in whose care she could leave Richard while she went down to Dawlish and fetched the poor little thing away, for quite a long time, before it occurred to her that Harry had never told her the secret by which he held Peacey in subjection. Immediately she realised that Peacey knew this. Out of his cold, dilettante knowledge he had known that when she and Harry met they would not be able to speak his name for more than one minute. She wished she were the kind of woman who fainted from fear. The clock ticked, and not less steadily beat her heart, and nothing came to distract her from looking into the face of this fact that she had now no power over Peacey and he knew it.

Then she huddled forward towards the fire, which no longer seemed to heat her, and Susan's letter fell from her lap into the fender. She picked it up, crying, "Oh, my baby, how little I care for you!" and struck herself on the forehead as she reflected how many expedients would have suggested themselves to her if it had been Richard who was being maltreated down at Dawlish. She sat down and wrote a lying letter to Peacey, threatening him with the disclosure of the secret she did not know, and then, because the grandfather clock tw.a.n.ged out three and she knew the post was collected five minutes past, she ran out into the windy afternoon bareheaded. The last part of the distance, down the High Street, she ran, but she got into the grocer's shop too late and found Mr. Hemming just about to seal the bag. "Oh, Mr. Hemming!" she gasped.

The three women in the shop turned round and looked at her curiously, and she perceived that if she betrayed her agony now she would lose all the ground she had gained during the past few years by her affectation of well-being. If it leaked out, as it certainly would, unless she at once lowered the present temperature of the moment, that a few days after Harry's death she had been excitedly sending a letter to Peacey, the village people would go through her story all over again to try to find out what this could possibly mean, and would remember that it was a tragedy, and once more she would be the victim of that hostility which the happy feel for the unhappy. Yet she found herself making a queer distraught mask of her face and saying theatrically, "Oh, Mr. Hemming, _please_, please let this letter go ..." and, when he granted the favour, as she knew quite well he would have done to just half as much imploration, she went out of the shop breathing heavily and audibly.

"Why am I like this?" she asked herself. "Ah, I see! So that I can say afterwards that I did everything I could to get him back, even to the extent of turning people against me, and can settle down to being happy with Richard. Oh, Roger, I am a cold devil to you...." She was indeed.

For when she received Peacey's letter saying blandly that there was nothing in his life of which he need feel ashamed, and realised that the game was up and she was powerless, she was glad. She sat down and wrote her bluffing answer, a warning that if the child was not sent back within a week she would come down to Dawlish and fetch it, with an infamous fear lest it might be efficacious. And when Peacey wrote back, pointing out that Richard was legally his child, and that he would be taken out of her custody if she went on making this fuss about Roger, she chose immediately. She tore the letter into small pieces and dropped them into the heart of the fire, and knelt by the grate until the flame died. Though the boy was still out at school she lifted up her voice and cried out seductively, serenely, "Richard! Richard!"

What is this thing, the soul? It blows hot, it blows cold, it reels with the drunkenness of exaltation for some slight event no denser than a dream, it hoods itself with penitence for some act that the mind can hardly remember; and yet its judgments are the voice of absolute wisdom.

She did not care at all for Roger. When at nights she used to see in the blackness the little figure standing in his s.h.i.+rt, beating the dark air with his fists, as Susan told her he used to do when Peacey woke him suddenly out of his sleep to frighten him, her pity, was flavourless and abstract. That she had unwittingly sent the child to its doom caused her no earthquake of remorse but a storm of annoyance. Yet she knew every hour of the day that her soul had taken a decision to mourn the child in some way that would hurt her.

One afternoon, a month or so after their happy, lonely Christmas, when she was playing b.a.l.l.s in the garden with Richard, the postman came up and handed her another letter from Susan Rodney. Though Peacey had forbidden her to write to Susan Rodney, so that she had never been able to explain why she did not come and fetch Roger, he allowed Susan to write to her. Weekly Marion received letters cursing her cruelly in not coming, written in an honest writing that made them hurt the more. She took it and smiled in the postman's face. "Well, how is Mrs. Brown getting on with the new baby?" When he had gone she gave it to Richard and told him to go and drop it in the kitchen fire. While he was away she stood and stared down at the acid green of the winter gra.s.s, and wondered what she had missed by not reading the letter, what story of blows delivered cunningly here and there so that they did not mark, or of petting that skilfully led up to a sudden feint of terrifying temper; and suddenly she was conscious of a fret in the air, and said wonderingly, "It is far too early for the Spring. We are hardly into February yet." But the fret had been not in the air but in herself, and the change of season it had foreboded had been in her own soul.

That very night she had begun to have bad dreams. Twice before the dawn she was stoned down Roothing High Street, even as seven years before men looked at her from behind glazed, amused masks; and she had put up her hand to her head and found that a stone had drawn blood; and Mr.

Goode's kind voice said something about, "A bit of boys' fun, Mr.

Peacey," and she had stared before her at a black, broadclothed bulk. In the morning she woke sweating like an overdriven horse, and said to herself, "This is the worst night I have spent in all my life. Pray G.o.d I may never spend another like it."

But henceforward half her nights were to be like that. By day her soul walked like a peac.o.c.k on its green lawn, proudly, pompously, struttingly, because she was the mother of this gorgeous son. There was no moment of her waking life that he did not gild, for either he had not long gone out and had turned at the gate to wave good-bye with a gesture so dear that when she thought of it she dug her nails into her palms in an agony of tenderness, or he was just coming back and she must get something ready for him. Even after he had gone to school he built her a bulwark against misery which endured till the night fell, for in the few hours that remained after she had finished the work she had now undertaken on the farm she read his letters over and over again. They were queer and disturbing and delicious letters, and they hinted that there was a content in their relations.h.i.+p which had never yet been put into words, for they were full of records of his successes in cla.s.s and at games.

Now he had that complete lack of satisfaction in his own performance which superficial people think to be modesty, though it springs instead from the sword-stiff extreme of pride; when he made his century in a school match he was galled by the knowledge that he was not as good a player as Ranji, and when he was head of the science side his pleasure was mitigated to nearly nothing by his sense that still he did not know as much about these things as Lord Kelvin. That he gave her every detail of all his successes meant, she began to suspect, that he knew they were both under a ban, and that he was handing her these evidences of his superiority over the other people as an adjutant of a banished leader might hand him arrows to shoot down on the city that had exiled him.

When he was home for the holidays he said nothing that confirmed this suspicion, but she noticed that only when he was with her was his mouth limpid and confident as a boy's should be; in the presence of others he pressed his upper lip down on his lower so that it looked thin, which it was not, with an air of keeping a secret before enemies. She loved this sense of being entrenched quite alone with him in a fortress of love.

She would not have chosen another destiny, for she did not think that she would ever have liked ordinary people even if they had been nice to her.

But that was only her daylight destiny. In the night she staggered down Roothing High Street under stones, or sat in the brown suns.h.i.+ne of the dusty room and watched Peacey stroking his fat thigh and talking of his dear dead mother; or felt his weight thresh down on her like the end of the world; or took into her arms for the first time the limp body of the other child. It did not avail her if she fought her way out of sleep, for then she would continue to re-endure the scene in a frenzy of memory, and either way she knew the agony that the experience had given her with its first p.r.i.c.k, coupled with the woe that came of knowing that those things would go on and on, until in the end a little figure in a nights.h.i.+rt beat the dark with its fists.

For a time she found solace in thinking that perhaps she was expiating her involuntary sin in hating her child, and indeed it seemed to her that when she evoked that little figure she felt something in her heart which, if she and the frozen substance of her were triturated a little more by torture, might grow into that proper loving pain which she coveted more than any pleasure. But that process, if it ever had begun, was stopped when Richard was fifteen.

It happened, two days after he had come home for the summer holidays, that in the early part of the night she had again been stoned and that she had started up, crying out, "Harry! Harry!" She heard the latch of the door lift, and someone stood on her threshold breathing angrily.

Half asleep, she mumbled, "Harry, it can't be you?..." A voice answered haltingly, "No," and a match scratched, and Richard crossed the room and lit the candle by her bedside. She could not see him, for the light was too strong after the darkness, and she could not quite climb out of her dream, but she rocked her head from side to side and muttered, "Go to bed, I'm all right, all right." But he sat down on her bed and took her hand in his, and said sullenly, "You've been calling out for my father.

Why are you doing that?" She whimpered, "Nothing. I was only dreaming."

But he went on, terrifying her through her veil of sleep. "I know all about it, mother. The other boys told me about it. And Goodtart said something once." His hand tightened on hers. "You used to meet him up at that temple." For a minute he paused, and seemed to be shuddering, and then persisted, "What is it? Why do you cry almost every night? I've heard you ever so often. You've got to tell me what's the matter."

She stiffened under the fierce loving rage in his tone and stayed rigid for a moment. Through her drowsiness there was floating some idea that the salvation of her soul depended on keeping stiff and silent, but because she was still netted in the dream, and the beating of the tin cans distracted her, she could not follow it and grasp it, and soon she desired to tell him as much as she had always before feared it. In her long reticence she felt like a suspended wave forbidden to break on the sh.o.r.e by a magician's spell, and she lifted her hands imploringly to him so that he bent down and kissed her. It was as if the heat of his lips dissolved some seal upon her mouth, and she sobbed out: "It's when the boy touches me with a stick that I can't bear it!"

"What boy did that?"

"I think it was Ned Turk. When I was stoned down Roothing High Street."

"Mother, mother. Tell me about that."

She wailed out everything, while the hand that held hers gradually became wet with sweat. At the end of her telling she drew her hair across her face and looked up at him through it. "Have I lost him?" she wondered. "Harry did not like me so much after horrible things had happened to me." Then as she looked at him her heart leaped at the sight of his beauty and his young maleness, and she cried out to herself, "Well, whether I have lost him or not, I have borne him!"

But she had him always, for presently he bent forward and laid his face against her hand, and began to kiss it. Then he pulled himself up and sat hunched as if the story he had heard were a foe that might leap at him, and almost shouted in his queer voice, which was now breaking, "Mother, I would like to kill them all! Oh, you poor little mother! I love you so, I love you so...." He buried his face in the clothes for one instant and seemed about to weep, and then, conscious of her tears, slipped his arm behind her and raised her up, and covered her with kisses, and muttered little loving, comforting things. She crooned with relief, and until the sky began to lighten and she had to send him back to bed, sobbed out all the misery she had so long kept to herself. He did not want to go. That she liked also; and afterwards she slipped softly into dreamless sleep.

Yet strangely, for surely it was right that a mother should be solaced by her son? There shot through her mind just before she slept a pang of guilt as if she had done some act as sensual as bruising ripe grapes against her mouth. How can one know what to do in this life? Surely it is so natural to escape out of h.e.l.l that it cannot be unlawful; and by calling "Richard! Richard!" she could now bring her worst and longest dream to an end. Surely she had the right to make Richard love her; and she knew that by the disclosure of her present and past agonies she was binding his manhood to her as she had bound his boyhood and his childhood. Yet after every time that she had called him to save her from a bad dream she had this conviction of guilt. She could not understand what it meant. It was partly born of her uneasy sense that in these nights she was unwillingly giving Richard a false impression of her destiny which laid the blame too heavily on poor Harry; because she could not yet tell the boy of all Peacey's villainy, he was plainly concluding that what had broken her was Harry's desertion. But it was a profounder offence than this that she was in some way committing. She did not know what it was, but it robbed her torment of any expiatory quality that it might ever have had. For now, when she evoked the little figure in a nights.h.i.+rt beating the dark with its fists, she felt nothing. There was not the smallest promise of pain in her heart. As much as ever Roger was an orphan.