been no children—a fact which, in happier hours, she had deplored, but for which she was now profoundly grateful. There are things which it is easier to bear alone. To share with another[10]—and that other her child—the humiliation of her ill-starred association with her husband, would but have been to double the burden's weight. In her own case the period of martyrdom was well-nigh done. For his son and hers it would simply be at its beginning, tragic in its boundless possibilities of shame.

[10]

As the thought came of the motherhood thus denied her, she wondered why she had been faithful to John Vane. Once she had believed in him, and so strong had been this faith that some shreds of it yet remained, to bind her to him through all the unspeakably humiliating days of his gradual but inevitable degradation. Nor was her fidelity of the negative, meaningless kind which is strong simply because unassailed. As a woman of the world, she had, more than once, been brought into contact with men lax in their scrupulosity, but scrupulous in their laxity. She had had her temptations, her chances of escape; and the price to be paid was not exorbitant, in view of the relief to be obtained. But upon these she had resolutely turned her back, hoping against hope for the miracle which never came. Even now, her father's door stood wide to her, and every instinct of reason impelled her to a separation. But Vane had not only killed her love for him; he had destroyed her very taste for life itself, under any circumstances whatever. She clung to him now, not because she loved him, not because it was impossible to do without him, but because he[11] had sapped her youth, her faith, her craving for anything short of oblivion.

[11]

She stood for a long time, motionless, at a point where a little stream tinkled pleasantly over the stones beneath its first thin sheathing of ice. The trees, saving only the oaks, were bare, and stood stiffly, in close proximity, in the weird, white brilliance of contre-lumière; and for a few moments the barren tranquillity of the scene was indescribably restful. Then the light changed, as a slow cloud crept across the sun, and, with the coming of the resultant shadow, Helen, always exquisitely sensible to the moods of nature, returned suddenly to a consciousness of her extremity. It was not real, then, this negative beauty, this serene simplicity of nun-like, early winter; it was not real, her own unwonted calm! What was actual, material, inevitable, was the personality of the man who dominated her life like an evil spirit, using her as his chattel, abusing her 

 Prev. P 9/196 next