Mrs. Thompson: A Novel

by W. B. Maxwell

He dared to think it.—But was he wrong? And she recalled the episodic renewal of their embraces during these last months. Once after high words; once after he had found her weeping; once for no reason at all that she knew of—except a carelessly systematic desire on his part to keep her in good temper—or perhaps merely because he had the prostitute's point of honour. A bargain is a bargain. He had been paid his price without haggling, and he intended to fulfil the conditions of the contract—so far as certain limits fixed by himself.

Horrible scenes to look back at—when the cruelly bright light of reason flashes upon the decorously obscured past and shows the ignominious secrets of a life: blind instincts moving us, all that is high beaten down by all that is low, the soul held in fetters by the flesh.

Much of her slow agony had come from the stinging pricks of jealousy. He was unfaithful—he was notoriously unfaithful. Already, after three months, everyone in the shop knew that he frequently broke the marriage vow. She would have known it anyhow—even if one of his vulgar friends, turning to a more vulgar enemy, had not troubled to tell her in an ill-spelt series of anonymous letters. She remembered how he once used to look at her, and she saw how in her presence he now looked at other women. Each look was an insult to her. Each word was an outrage. "There's a pert little minx;" and he would smile as he watched some passer-by. "Young hussy! Dressed up to the nines—wasn't she?" And he swelled out his chest, and swaggered more arrogantly by the side of his wife, unconscious of the swift completeness with which she could interpret the thoughts behind his bold eyes and his lazily lascivious smile.

And she thought of how he harped upon the over-tightened string of youth, making every fibre of her tired brain vibrate to the discord of the jarring note. It was melody to him. Youth was his own paramount merit, and he praised it as the only merit that he could admit of in others. He had forgotten half the lies of his courtship. Age was contemptible—the thing one should hide, or excuse, or ransom. "Only one life! Remember, I'm young—I am not old." But her friends, the people she trusted, were shamefully old, even a few years older than herself. Old Prentice, Old Yates, Old Mears; and he never spoke of them without the scornful epithet.

But the jingling coin that she had put in his pockets would procure him the solace to be derived from youthful companions. With the money she had paid for all the love that he could give, he bought from loose women all the love that he cared for. Of course when he stayed in London he was carrying on his promiscuous amours.... Perhaps, too, here in Mallingbridge.

Yet when he came back to her, she had failed to resist him. She knew the reflective air with which he considered her face when he proposed to exercise his sway. She trembled when he lightly slapped her on the shoulder, or took her chin in his hand, and spoke with caressing tones. He was beginning to act the lover. He had made up his mind to wipe out the past, to subjugate her afresh, to assure himself that his poor slave was not slipping away.

"Janey—dear old Janey.... I leave you alone, don't I?" And with an arm round her waist, he would pull her to him, and hold her closer and closer. "Have you missed me? Eh? Have you missed your Dickybird?"

And she could not resist him. There was the abominable basis of the tragedy—worse, infinitely worse than the imagined horrors that had troubled her before the marriage. Love dies so slowly.

But the night spent in the same room with him was like a fatal abandonment to some degrading habit—as if in despair she had taken a heavy dose of laudanum,—knowing that the drug is deadly, yet seeking once more to stupefy herself, impelled at all hazards to pass again through the gates of delirium into the vast blank halls of unconsciousness. Next day she felt sick, broken, shattered—like the drug-taker after his debauch. Each relapse seemed now an immeasurably lower fall. Each awakening brought with it a sharper pang of despair: as when a wrecked man on a raft, who in his madness of thirst has drunk at the salt spray, wakes from frenzied dreams to see the wide immensity of ocean mocking him with space great enough to hold all things except one—hope.