Lady Cressage gave an uncertain little laugh. “You are too generous-minded—too innocent. You do not know. Me? My dear friend—I have committed the unpardonable sin! I humiliated and degraded myself to win a great prize in the world’s lottery—and I did not bring it off. That is my offense. If I had won the trick—why, they would be burning incense before me! But I lost instead—and they leave me quite by myself to digest my own disgust. I don’t talk about it—I have never said as much to any living soul as I am saying to you—I don’t know why I am telling you—”
“Is there any one else who would listen with such sympathy?” Christian heard himself interjecting.
“But it is too cruel,” continued Lady Cressage, “too shameful a story! I was not happy at home. It was nobody’s fault in particular; I don’t know that we were more evil-tempered and selfish among ourselves than most other middle-class households with four hundred a year, and three daughters to marry off. I was the youngest, and I had the sort of good looks which were in fashion at the moment, and mamma worked very hard for me—pretending to idolize me before people though we yapped at each other like fox-terriers in private—and I was lucky in making friends—and so I went swimming out on the top of the wave that season, the most envied poor fool of a girl in London. And when Cressage wanted to marry me—I was dizzy with the immensity of what seemed to be offered me. My parents were mad with pride and ecstasy. Everybody around me pretended a kind of holy joy at my triumph. I give you my word!—never so much as a whisper came to my ears of any shadow of a reason why I should hesitate—why I should think a second time! Do you see? There was not an honest person—a single woman or a man with decency enough to warn an ignorant girl of her danger—within reach of me anywhere. They all kept as silent as the grave—with that lying grin of congratulation on their mean faces—and they led me to be married to the beast!”
She had sat erect in her chair as she spoke, and now she rose to her feet, motioning him not to get up as she did so. She took a restless step or two, her shoulders trembling with excitement, and her hands clenched. “Ah-h! I will never forgive them the longest day of my life!” she called out.
Then, with a determined shake of her head, she seemed to master herself. Standing before a small mirror in the panel of a cabinet against the wall, she busied her beautiful hands in correcting the slight disorder of her hair. When she turned to him, it was with a faint, tremulous smile surmounting the signs of stress and agitation upon her face. She sank into the chair again, with a long-drawn breath of resignation.
“But it isn’t nice to abuse the dead,” she remarked, striving after an effect of judicial fairness in her voice. “I didn’t mean to speak like that. And for that matter, why should I speak at all of him? One doesn’t blame a wolf for man-eating. You execrate instead the people who deliberately throw a helpless human being to the wolf. I even say to myself that I have no quarrel with Cressage. He was as God made him—if the thought isn’t blasphemous. He was a great, overgrown, bullying, blubbering, ignorant boy, who never got beyond the morals of the stables and kennels, and the standards of taste of the servants’ hall. One could hardly call him vicious; that is to say, he did not deliberately set out to cause suffering. He did not do anything on deliberation. He acted just as his rudimentary set of barbaric impulses prompted him to act. Some of these impulses would have been regarded as virtues in a more intelligent man. For example, he was wildly, insanely jealous of me. It took the most impossible and vulgar forms, it is true, but still——”
“Oh, need we talk of him?” It was with almost a groan of supplication that Christian stopped her. “He is too unpleasant to think about. Nothing that I had heard of him before made me sorry that he was dead—but this—it is too painful. But now you are a free woman—you see your path well before you, to travel as you choose. And what will you do?”
She sighed and threw up her hands with a gesture of contemptuous indifference. “What does any English lady with six hundred a year do? Devote her energies to seeing that she gets—let me see, what is the sum?—to seeing that she gets twelve thousand shillings’ worth of respectable discomfort, and secures reasonable opportunities for making those about her uncomfortable also. Oh, I don’t in the least know what I shall do. The truth is,” she added, with a sad smile, “I have lived alone with my dislikes so long, and I have nourished and watered them so carefully, that now they fill my whole garden. They have quite choked out the flowers of existence—these thick, rank, powerful weeds. And I haven’t the energy—perhaps I haven’t even the desire—to pull them up. They seem appropriate, somehow—they belong to the desolation that has been made of my life.”
Christian bent forward, and made a movement as if to take one of the hands which lay dejectedly in her lap. He did not do this, but touched a projecting bit of lace upon one of the flounces of her gown, and twisted it absent-mindedly in his fingers instead.
“You are still unhappy!” he said reproachfully, his eyes glowing with the intensity of his tender compassion. “I do not forgive myself for my inability to be of help to you. It is incredible that there is not something I can do.”