“‘Don’t you believe me?’ he asked, appalled.
“She didn’t say yes or no. All she said was, ‘Send that brat away at once.’
“‘I can’t throw him out into the street,’ cried Davidson. ‘You don’t mean it.’
“‘I don’t care. There are charitable institutions for such children, I suppose.’
“‘That I will never do,’ said Davidson.
“‘Very well. That’s enough for me.’
“Davidson’s home after this was like a silent, frozen hell for him. A stupid woman with a sense of grievance is worse than an unchained devil. He sent the boy to the White Fathers in Malacca. This was not a very expensive sort of education, but she could not forgive him for not casting the offensive child away utterly. She worked up her sense of her wifely wrongs and of her injured purity to such a pitch that one day, when poor Davidson was pleading with her to be reasonable and not to make an impossible existence for them both, she turned on him in a chill passion and told him that his very sight was odious to her.
“Davidson, with his scrupulous delicacy of feeling, was not the man to assert his rights over a woman who could not bear the sight of him. He bowed his head; and shortly afterwards arranged for her to go back to her parents. That was exactly what she wanted in her outraged dignity. And then she had always disliked the tropics and had detested secretly the people she had to live amongst as Davidson’s wife. She took her pure, sensitive, mean little soul away to Fremantle or somewhere in that direction. And of course the little girl went away with her too. What could poor Davidson have done with a little girl on his hands, even if she had consented to leave her with him—which is unthinkable.
“This is the story that has spoiled Davidson’s smile for him—which perhaps it wouldn’t have done so thoroughly had he been less of a good fellow.”
Hollis ceased. But before we rose from the table I asked him if he knew what had become of Laughing Anne’s boy.