Mrs. Thompson: A Novel

by W. B. Maxwell

He did not care for her. He had never cared for her. It was all acting. All that she relied on was false; all that had been real was the steadfast sordid purpose sustaining him throughout his odious dissimulation.

His marriage was a brutal male prostitution, in which he had sold his favours for her gold. And shame overwhelmed her as she thought of how easily she had been trapped. While he was coldly calculating, she was endowing him with every attribute of warm-blooded generosity; when her fine protective instincts made her yearn over him, longing to give him happiness, comfort, security, he was in truth playing with her as a cat plays with a wounded mouse—no hurry, no excitement, but steel-bright eyes watching, retracted claws waiting. And she remembered his studied phrases that rang so true to the ear, till too late she discovered their miserable falsity. With what art he had prepared the way for the final disclosure of his effrontery! He could not brook the sense of dependence, his manly spirit would not allow him to pose as the pensioner of a rich wife, and so on—and then, even at the last, how he waited until she had completely betrayed her secret, and he could be certain that her pride as a woman would infallibly prevent her from drawing back. Not till then, when she had taken the world into her confidence, when escape had become impossible, did he drive his bargain.

While the honeymoon was not yet over she imagined she could understand the pain that lay before her. But in these three months she had suffered more than she had conceived to be endurable by any living creature. If pain can kill, she should be dead.

Her punishment had been like the fabled torture of the Chinese—hundreds of small lacerations, a thousand slicing cuts of the executioner's sword, and the kind death-stroke craftily withheld. But the swordsman of the East does not laugh while he mutilates. And he struck at her with a smiling face.

She thought of how in every hour of their companionship he had wounded her; with what unutterable baseness he had used his power over her—the power given to him by her love. The love stripped her of every weapon of defence; she was tied, naked, with not a guarding rag to shelter her against the blows—and the pitiless blows fell upon her from her gagged mouth to her pinioned feet.

Daily he attacked her pride, her self-respect, her bodily health and her mental equipoise; but most of all she suffered in her love—that terrible flower of passion that refuses to die. Torn up by its bleeding roots, it replants itself—and will thrive on the barren rock as well as in life's richest garden. Robbed of light, air, sustenance, it will cling to the dungeon wall, and bud and burst again for the prisoner to touch its blossoms in his darkness. Its flame-petals can be seen by the glazing eyes that have lost sight of all else, and its burning poisonous fruit is still tasted in the earth of our graves.

She thought of what he had said to her when they first came back to the house that she had decorated and made luxurious for him. A laugh, a nudge of the elbow—"This is the beginning of Chapter Two, Janey. We can't be honeymooning forever, old girl;" and then some more unforgettable words, to formulate the request that they might occupy different rooms; and so, in the home-coming hour, he had struck a deadly blow at her pride by the brutally direct implication that what she most desired was that which every woman craves for least. As if the grosser manifestations could satisfy, when all the spiritual joys are denied!

But he judged her nature by his own. He was common as dirt. He was savage as a beast of the forest, a creature of fierce strong appetites that believes the appeasement of any physical craving—to drink deeply, to eat greedily, to sleep heavily—is the highest pleasure open to the animal kingdom; and that man the king is no higher than the dog, his servant.

He knew only worthless women, and he supposed that all women were alike. Undoubtedly he remembered the innumerable conquests won simply by his handsome face, the ready and absolute surrender to a sensual thraldom that had made other women his abject slaves; and he dared to think that his wife was as impotent as they to resist the viler impulses of the ungoverned flesh.