The thing was true then! Gladys and Luke were lovers, in the most extreme sense of that word, and Dangelis was the victim of an outrageous betrayal.
Vennie had sufficient presence of mind to avoid the eyes of both the women, eyes fixed with ghoulish and lickerish interest upon her, as they watched for the effect of this revelation,—but she was uncomfortably conscious that her cheeks were flaming and her voice strained as she bade them good-bye. Comment, of any kind, upon what they had revealed to her she found absolutely impossible. She could only wish them a pleasant time at the circus if they were returning thither, and freedom from any ill effects due to their accompanying her so far.
When she was alone, and beginning to climb the ascent of Dead Man’s Lane, the full implication of what she had learnt thrust itself through her brain like a red-hot wedge. Vennie’s experience of the treacherousness of the world had, as we know, gone little deeper than her reaction from the rough discourtesy of Mr. Clavering and the evasive aloofness of Mr. Taxater. This sudden revelation into the brutishness and squalour inherent in our planetary system had the effect upon her of an access of physical nausea. She felt dizzy and sick, as she toiled up the hill, between the wet sun-pierced hedges, and under the heavy September trees.
The feeling of autumn in the air, so pleasant under normal conditions to human senses, seemed to associate itself just now with this dreadful glance she had had into the basic terrors of things. The whole atmosphere about her seemed to smell of decay, of decomposition, of festering mortality. The pull and draw of the thick Nevilton soil, its horrible demonic gravitation, had never got hold of her more tenaciously than it did then. She felt as though some vast octopus-like tentacles were dragging her earthward.
Vennie was one of those rare women for whom, even under ordinary conditions, the idea of sex is distasteful and repulsive. Presented to her as it was now, mingled with treachery and deception, it obsessed her with an almost living presence. Sensuality had always been for her the one unpardonable sin, and sensuality of this kind, turning the power of sex into a mere motive for squalid pleasure-seeking, filled her with a shuddering disgust.
So this was what men and women were like! This was the kind of thing that went on, under the “covert and convenient seeming” of affable lies!
The whole of nature seemed to have become, in one moment, foul and miasmic. Rank vapours rose from the ground at her feet, and the weeds in the hedge took odious and indecent shapes.
An immense wave of distrust swept over her for everyone that she knew. Was Mr. Clavering himself like this?
This thought,—the thought of what, for all she could tell, might exist between her priest-friend and this harlot-girl,—flushed her cheeks with a new emotion. Mixed at that moment with her virginal horror of the whole squalid business, was a pang of quite a different character, a pang that approached, if it did not reach, the sharp sting of sheer physical jealousy.
As soon as she became aware of this feeling in herself it sickened her with a deeper loathing. Was she also contaminated, like the rest? Was no living human being free from this taint?