Charlotte, who had turned very white, sat nerveless and trembling like a leaf. All her pride was in arms that John Kingsnorth, degraded scion of a decent family, should be giving advice to her; and then she saw, with sudden horror, what a tremendous distance she had drifted with the current before John Kingsnorth’s words could be true.
For they were true! She had married Martin Collingwood, blaming herself for the weakness that made human affection and the freedom from the responsibility of self-support loom larger than all the traditions of birth and breeding. She had wanted her romance as every other woman in the world does; and romance, as it comes to most women, had been denied her. She might have gone out and found one, as many a woman does, and might, in time, have taken her flirtations lightly. But she had been too timid and too proud to flirt. The doubt came to her that it would have been better to play lightly at romance than to purchase it at the sacrifice of the second essential factor that makes a true marriage. Then came another throb of terror. She saw herself bent wilfully again on her own way, doubling, twisting, as Kingsnorth phrased it, trying to escape her conscience by saying that she despised herself: but the fact stared her in the face that she was turning on all the principles that had justified romance. She had married Collingwood against her reason, justifying herself for being swayed by human feeling by reiterating the finality of the action. For better, for worse, she had said—but now that it was for worse, its finality had somehow disappeared. Where was her mind—her will—her conscience?
She sat for a long time in bitter silence, but roused herself as Kingsnorth, who had been furtively watching her, drew out his tobacco pouch and extracted from its depths a little ball of tissue paper. He unfolded it, and there appeared to her startled eyes a single pearl of unusual size and luster.
“What a beauty!” she cried, bending forward to look at it.
“Yes, it’s beautiful enough,” said Kingsnorth. “I’ve carried it about with me for three years. Even Collingwood has never seen it.”
“I wish you had not—” she stopped, flushing.
“I didn’t show it to you to tempt you. It’s my moral slough. There are times when I’ve felt that its hell luster was my soul, and that I had nothing but the blackened shell in my body. It stood for the dearest emotions a man can have—for love and vengeance.”
“You are horrible,” she cried, shrinking from him.
“I am better than I used to be,” replied Kingsnorth. “I found this bauble three years ago, before Martin and I went into business. I never intended to sell it. Do you know what I wanted it for? To buy her back, and to blacken the face of the man who stole her from me. Yes, shrink! God help me, I love that woman still with a love gone awry. Other women, yes, and better women, though they had not her grace and training, have loved me; but, in my heart of hearts, I have held them all cheap. It was she, the woman who jilted me before all the world, that I wanted. It was he, whose heart I wanted to wring. Poor cheap human nature! Twelve years I’ve roughed it in shacks and junks, a flannel shirt to my back, and pork and beans or rice and fish in my stomach; while he has sat beneath the oaks we played under in our childhood, and has slept in the panelled rooms of our home, and has held the woman he stole from me in his arms! Talk of family affection! There isn’t such a thing. What am I to the mother who bore me? A derelict son, adrift in the South Seas, who is not to come home without some money. What am I to the sisters who played with me and fought with me over our nursery tea? A scape-grace brother, who, it is hoped, will keep out of the way, but who ought to make some money and leave it to their children. Money! I’ve toiled like a negro slave for money, but not for them—not for them! It was for her. I wanted to go back rich. She sold herself once; why not again? The pearl was not enough in itself to tempt. It was the bauble, the outward sign.”
“You hoped—that?” She could not help glancing at his seamed, degenerate countenance.