The Three Fates

by F. Marion Crawford

“I am very glad you have told me,” she said.

“Do you believe me?” he asked.

“I have always believed everything you have told me, and I always shall. But if you had told some one what everybody is repeating, I should not have blamed you. It would have been almost true.”

“I do not say things which are only almost true,” said George very coldly.

Constance’s face, which had regained some of its natural colour while she had been speaking with him, grew very white again, her lip trembled and there were tears in her eyes.

“Are you always going to treat me like this?” she asked, pronouncing the words with difficulty, as though a sob were very near.

If George had said one kind word at that moment, his history and hers might have been very different from that day onwards. But the wound he had received was yet too fresh, and moreover he was angry with her for showing a tendency to cry, and he hardened his heart.

“I trust,” he answered in a chilly tone, “that we shall always meet on the best of terms.”

A long silence followed, during which it was evident that Constance was struggling to maintain some appearance of outward calm. When she felt that she could command her strength, she rose and left him without another word. It was the only thing left for her to do. She could not allow herself to break down in a room full of people, before every one, and she could not stay where she was without bursting into tears. She had humbled herself to the utmost, she had been ready to offer every atonement in her power, and he had met her with a face of stone and a voice that cut her like steel.

That was the last time he saw her before the summer season. She and her sister left town suddenly the next day and George was left to his own devices and to the tender consolation that was showered upon him by Totty Trimm. But he was not easily consoled. As the days followed each other his face grew darker and his humour more gloomy. He could neither work nor read with any satisfaction and he found even less pleasure in the society of men and women than in his own. He would not have married Constance now, if she had offered herself to him, and implored him to take her. If it had been possible, he would gladly have gone abroad for a few months, in the hope of forgetting what had happened to him amidst the varied discomforts, amusements and interests of travelling. But he could not throw up certain engagements he had contracted, though at first it seemed impossible to fulfil them. He promised himself that as soon as he had accomplished his task he would start upon a journey without giving himself the trouble of defining its ultimate direction. For the present he remained sullenly in New York, sitting for hours at his table, a pen held idly between his fingers, his uneasy glance wandering from the paper before him to the wall opposite, from the wall to the window, from the window to his paper again. He was neither despondent nor hopeless. The more impossible he found it to begin his work, the more unyieldingly he forced himself to sit in his chair, the more doggedly he stuck to his determination. Writing had always seemed easy to him before, and he admitted no reason for its being hard now. With iron resolution he kept his place, revolving in his mind every situation and story of which he had ever heard and of which he believed he could make use. But though he turned, and twisted, and tormented every idea that presented itself, he could find neither plot nor scene nor characters in the aching void of his brain. Hour after hour, day after day, he did his best, growing thinner and more tired every day, feeling each afternoon more exhausted by the fruitless contest he was sustaining against the apathy of his intelligence. But when the stated time for work was past, and he pushed back the sheet of paper, sometimes as white as when he had taken it in the morning, sometimes covered with incoherent notes that were utterly worthless, when he felt that he had done his duty and could not be held responsible for the miserable result, when his head ached, his brow was furrowed, and his sight had become uncertain, then at last he gave himself up to the contemplation of his own wretchedness and to the pain of his utter desolation.