She saw now what she was—her husband's victim, the tool of his enterprise. He had never really loved her. He had been attracted by her—her beauty, her gentleness, her breeding, had appealed to him. But that was not why he had married her. He had married her for her money, which he was now spending on his farm, and he had married her because he wanted children and she was the most suitable mother he could find. He had never really loved her.
And she had never really loved him. That was another of the things she saw clearly. She had married him because his strength and good looks, his ardent wooing, had turned her head, because she had been weak and he had been masterful. But she had never loved him.
She had been a fool, and now she was paying the price of folly, which is always so much heavier than the price of sin. Here she was at twenty-five, prematurely old, exhausted, sick of life, and utterly alone. There was no one to turn to in her wretchedness. Her neighbours were incapable of giving her real help or sympathy, Mrs. Backfield invariably took Reuben's part and resented the slightest criticism of him, old Gasson was hard and selfish, and not particularly interested in his daughter.
She wished, with all the wormwood that lies in useless regrets, that she had never married. Then, paradoxically, she would not have been so utterly alone. She would have had at least the help of sweet memories undefiled. She could have taken refuge in them from her sorrow, built them perhaps at last into hope. Now she had to thrust them from her, for they were one and all soiled by her unfaithfulness.
For the first time she began definitely to reproach herself for her treatment of Harry. Though she could never have married him, she could at least have been faithful to him.
"O why, because sickness hath wasted my body,
Should you do me to death with your dark treacherie?
O why, because brothers and friends all have left me,
Should you leave me too, O my faithless ladie!"
Moreover, she still sometimes had a vague feeling that at the start Harry had not been quite so mad as people thought, that he might perhaps have recovered if she had made him understand that she was true to him, still hoping. No doubt that was all nonsense, but she could not quite smother the idea that she had betrayed Harry. Perhaps it was partly because even before his accident she had cast longing eyes at Reuben. Once again she called up memories of him cutting down willows on his new land, and she acknowledged miserably to herself that in that hour she had already been unfaithful to Harry in her heart, and that all that came afterwards was but the following up of that initial act of treachery. A strong arm, a broad back, a blue shirt in the January twilight ... and Naomi had set out on a road every step of which was now over rough stones and broken shards.