The wages of sin still is death, according to Miss West's portrayal, but it is not called sin. It is merely behaviourism interpreted in the light of the New Psychology.
“Every mother is a judge who sentences the children for the sins of the father” is her thesis. As a work of art “The Judge” has elicited much praise. As a human document, a mirror held up to actual life, a statement of the accepted facts of heredity and of behaviour, and of the dominancy and display of passion, lust, jealousy, anger, revenge, I doubt that it merits unqualified approbation.
Marion Yaverland, daughter of a Kentish father and a French mother, had yielded without compunction to the wooing of the local squire and had borne a child, Richard, around whose development, personality, and loving the story is built.
“Vitality itself had been kneaded into his flesh by his parents' passion. He had been begotten when beauty, like a strong goddess, pressed together the bodies of his father and mother, hence beauty would disclose more of her works to him than to other sons of men with whose begetting she was not concerned.”
But the goddess did not give him straight genesic endowment, so he was not able to keep filial love and carnal love in their proper channels. And from this flowed all the tragedy. His mother realised his infirmity, though she didn't look upon it as an infirmity, from the earliest days; and, unfortunately, she did not attempt to eradicate it—if it is ever eradicable.
Squire Harry behaved badly to Marion, save financially, and public opinion backed up by a stoning in the streets (a real Old Testament touch) by a moron and his more youthful companions, made her accept an offer of marriage from the squire's butler, a loathsome creature called Peacey. In proposing marriage and promising immunity to its obligations he said:
“Marion, I hope you understand what I'm asking you to do. I'm asking you to marry me. But not to be my wife. I never would bother you for that. I'm getting on in life, you see, so that I can make the promise with some chance of keeping it.”
But Peacey deceived no one save Marion. Miss West's description of the one visit of violence which he made to his wife, and which was followed in due time by Roger, whom Richard hated from birth, is a bit of realism that in verisimilitude has rarely been excelled. Roger was a pasty, snivelling, rhachitic child who developed into a high-grade imbecile of the hobo type, and finally managed to filter through the Salvation Army owing to some filter paper furnished by his mother that bore the legend “For the Govt and Compa of the Bank of England.”
From earliest childhood Richard and his mother both realised that their intimacy was unnatural and unpromising for happiness. When he was two years old
“He used to point his fingers at her great lustrous eyes as he did at flowers, and he would roll his face against the smooth skin of her neck and shoulders; and when he was naked after his bath he liked her to let down her hair so that it hung round him like a dark, scented tent.”