"Then—you were married all the five years we knew each other in town? Did Dereham, or any others of our set, know about it?"
"No, though I nearly blurted it out more than once, when they came to me with their doll's-house prettinesses about women. You thought you were a cynic, now and then, didn't you, Lomax, when the Ogilvie woman touched you up a bit too hard? Lord, I could have taught you a cynicism that grips your vitals! You'll never learn it now, so it's lucky you've struck into optimism—it fits you better."
"Never mind me, Roddick. Finish your story."
"Six months after I married my picturesque maid of the inn—the child died a day or two after its birth—she began to take opium for sleeplessness; she continued it as a luxury. From that she passed, with true catholicity, to wine, brandy, whisky—or, failing these, gin. She grew more beast-like every year, till now it's only the clothes and the walking on her hind legs that stamp her as a woman. Three times she has tried to kill me, and once—my cursed conscience won't let me do anything else—I have saved her from death."
"I thought you disclaimed tenderness just now," put in Griff, scarce knowing what to say. "In your place, I should have let her die."
"You wouldn't, when it came to the point," snapped Roddick. "We've most of us been murderers in theory, but it rings differently when it comes to practice. Not that tenderness has anything to do with it. I loathe her, and wish she were dead: it's my fool of a conscience, I tell you, that ought to have perished of ennui years ago. But neither will die; they're tough as nails, both the wife and the conscience. Wherever I go, I take the woman with me, like a monkey in a cage, with a nurse to look after her. When I lived in town, I planted my menagerie down in Hampstead; when I came here, I put her in a cottage as far in the heart of the moor as I could manage—she's there at this moment, unless she has given her nurse the slip again and come in search of me."
"And you see her often?"
"I have to," said Roddick, with bitter weariness; "sometimes it takes a strong pairs of arms to hold her. But her tantrums are the part of our married life I find the easiest to bear. She is not always mad, you know. She only tries to throttle me in and between whiles, by way of variety; at other times she loves me dearly, she fawns on me, she—— Never mind, Lomax; it makes me sick to talk of it."
"Poor old chap—poor old chap!" muttered Griff, vaguely. "Why the devil can't she die? A year or two of such a life would finish off any ordinary woman."
"Don't repeat that!" cried Roddick, sharply. "The next step is, what a fool I am not to kill her, and I kick ideas of that kind out of my mind before they get a chance."