Heaven knows Pam had sinned in a hard market, and bought her iniquity dear. Other people, worldly people of experience and sagacity, know how to obtain all their sins below par, at the expense of the widow and orphaned. Pam, knowing nothing of this moral stock-and-share market, was paying for her shares with everything that she possessed. To the last penny of her self-respect she was paying for them. Of all moral and conscientious coinage she was void and bankrupt. There was nothing left her now but the body she lived in—all its beautiful furnishment of soul had been distrained and bundled out by the bailiffs long ago. And the body was mortgaged.
For this marriage—that to the Spawer looked but a callous flaunting of her bliss before his stricken eyes, a cruel demonstration of how little she was dependent upon him for any share of her happiness in life—what was it but a foreclosure? She who had preached the gospel of true love, of the necessary unity of the body and the soul in marriage; who had proclaimed to Ginger that "there must be no chance about it, Ginger! ..." she who above all girls knew a love as free of carnality as any earthly love can be—she was selling her body now for its price.
Would she ever forget the night of horror that saw the compact made. The lonely, dusty highroad to Hunmouth, with its wide grass borders sloping down to the ditch bottoms, between the trimmed, stunted hedgerows, where the schoolmaster led her; the rising moon; the sickly, suffocating mist of harvest; the dim stars. And there, backward and forward over the powdery road, she had fought that last fateful fight for her soul's freedom—and failed.
Give her the letter back ... only give her the letter back ... and she would try to love him in earnest. She would force herself to love him. This time she should not fail. Give her the letter back. It was not his; it was not hers. Come with her himself if he doubted, and see her hand it in at Dixon's door. She swore she would give it. He did not understand. It had been all a mistake. She had not meant to take it. If he only knew the horror she had felt of herself. Oh, she promised! she promised!
But the man would have no promises. She had made him promises before and broken them. Here was the letter—here in his possession—and here it should remain, for witness against her, if need be, until the thing was settled. Let her call him what she would now; abuse him as she liked; hate him—all was one. This night she must let it be proclaimed in the family that they were plighted. As soon as Father Mostyn returned, she must plead for them both with him. Not until she had pledged herself publicly beyond all prospect of withdrawal would he give the letter up. Promises availed nothing. He was done with promises. If she would not accept him on these terms it was a plain proof that she did not mean to fulfil them, and unless she was prepared to fulfil them she must abide by the consequences.
And more tears; and more entreaties; and pitiable shows of rebellion, quickly subdued; and petty resistances; and tortured turnings to and fro over the road; and at last surrender.
At last surrender!
Death even, had death been his condition, she would have accepted sooner than this dire alternative. Only one idea possessed her now—that the Spawer should never know the presumption of her love.
But the letter! Till he got that ... he would not go at all. The longer its restitution was delayed, the longer must she endure her agony.
Strange reversal of misery. In the beginning she had suffered with the sickness of his going. Now, in the end, she suffered doubly with the sickness that he should stay. Of a truth, she was snared in her own wicked net. The sin that she had committed against him was turned into an all-sufficing punishment more than meet for the offence. And when would she be able to ease her pain in delivering the letter?