It seemed, indeed, as though she had stated her feelings for him correctly, as though she did really hate him with a bitter and relentless hatred. The prison life had changed her whole being, turned her from a brilliant, reckless, worldly girl, warmhearted and extravagant, but generous to a fault, into a cold, malignant, callous woman, nursing a grudge until it attained gigantic proportions, and fully resolved to exact from her husband and the world a heavy payment for the humiliating punishment she had been forced to undergo.
Herrick could never discover that she felt that punishment to be deserved. The whole world was to blame, but never she herself. It was the fault of her husband, who had kept her short of money; of the tradespeople who had pressed her, of the usurers who had got her into their clutches—the fault of everyone save Eva Herrick; and the fact that they had all, as it were, combined against her, that together they had been too much for her, embittered her outlook on life to such a degree that she was positively incapable of any reasonable analysis of her own guilt.
It was her husband against whom her resentment was chiefly directed. With all the perversity of her ill-regulated, half-formed mind, she refused to realize the fact that it had been absolutely impossible for Herrick to take her crime on to his own shoulders. She clung childishly to the notion that if he had wished he could have borne the blame and endured the consequences; and since there is no reason to doubt that to a girl in her position her life in prison was a horrible experience, her bitterness is perhaps hardly to be wondered at, after all.
Her sentence had left on soul and body traces which would never be effaced; and sometimes Herrick could hardly believe that this cold, cynical, bitter-tongued woman was indeed the gay Irish girl he had married.
But in spite of everything she was his wife. And Herrick was not the man to shirk an obligation which was so plainly marked as this. Although he shrank inwardly from her constant recriminations, he never let her see how he was wounded by her biting tongue; and to all her reproaches he presented so serene and complacent a front that she sometimes desisted from very weariness.
So the autumn days went on; and if Herrick felt sometimes that in spite of the beautiful world around him, life was no longer full of "sweet things," he never wavered in his resolve to do all in his power to make up to Eva, for the misery she had endured behind those heartless prison walls.
CHAPTER XX
"Toni, do you think it quite wise to go about so much with Mrs. Herrick?"
It was Owen who asked the question one cold morning as the two sat at breakfast; and Toni looked up with something like defiance in her bright eyes.