"The paths of love are rougher
Than thoroughfares of stones."
THOMAS HARDY.
Roger lay on his face, with his mouth on the back of his hand.
Years and years ago, twenty long years ago, he had once lain on his face
as he was doing now. He and Dick had been out shooting with the old
keeper, and Dick had shot Roger's dog by mistake. He had taken the
catastrophe with a stolid stoicism and a bitten lip. But later in the
day he had crept away, and had sobbed for hours, lying on his face under
a tree. The remembrance came back to him now. Never since then, never in
all those twenty years, had he felt again that same paroxysm of despair.
And now again Dick had inadvertently wounded him; Dick, who never meant
any harm, had pierced his heart. The wound bled, and Roger bit his hand.
Time passed.
He did not want to get up any more. If he could have died at that moment
he would have died. He did not want to have anything more to do with
this monstrous cheat called life. He did not want ever to see anyone
again. He felt broken. The thought that he should presently get to his
feet and stump home through the dusk to his empty rooms, as he had done
a hundred times, filled him with a nausea and rage unspeakable. The mere
notion of the passage and the clothes-peg and the umbrella-stand
annihilated him. He had reached a place in life where he felt he could
not go on.
Far in the distance, carried to his ear by the ground, came the muffled
thud and beat of a train passing beyond the village, on the other side
of the Rieben. He wished dully that he could have put his head on the
rails.
And the voice to which from a little lad he had never shut his ears, the
humdrum, prosaic voice which had bidden him take thought for Mary Deane
and her child, and Janey, and Betty Hesketh, and all who were "desolate
and oppressed," that same small voice, never ignored, never silenced,
spoke in Roger's aching, unimaginative heart. The train passed, and as
the sound throbbed away into silence Roger longed again with passion
that it had taken his life with it. And the still small voice said,
"That is how Annette felt a year ago."
He got up and pushed back the damp hair from his forehead. That was how
Annette had felt a year ago. Poor, unwise, cruelly treated Annette! Even
now, though he had heard her story from her own lips, he could not
believe it, could not believe that her life had ever had in it any
incident beyond tending her old aunts, and watering her flowers, and
singing in the choir. That was how he had always imagined her, with
perhaps a tame canary thrown in, which ate sugar from her lips. If he
had watched her with such a small pet he would have felt it singularly
appropriate, a sort of top-knot to his ideal of her. If he had seen her
alarmed by a squirrel, he would have felt indulgent; if fond of
children, tender; if jealous of other women, he should not have been
surprised. He had made up a little insipid picture of Annette picking
flowers by day, and wrapped in maiden slumber in a white room at night.
The picture was exactly as he wished her to be, and as her beautiful
exterior had assured him she was. For Annette's sweet face told half the
men she met that she was their ideal. In nearly every case so far that
ideal had been a masterpiece of commonplace; though if prizes had been
offered for them Roger would have won easily. Her mind, her character,
her individuality had no place in that ideal. That she should have been
pushed close up against vice; that _she_, Annette, who sang "Sun of my
soul" so beautifully, should have wandered alone in the wicked streets
of Paris in the dawn, after escaping out of a home wickeder still; that
she should have known treachery, despair; that she should have been
stared at as the chance mistress of a disreputable man! _Annette!_ It
was incredible.
And he had been so careful, at the expense of his love of truth, when
they took refuge in Mary Deane's house, that Annette should believe Mary
Deane was a married woman and her child born in wedlock. And she, whose
ears must not even hear that Mary had been Dick's mistress, she,
Annette, had been Dick's mistress too, if not in reality, at any rate in
appearance.
Roger's brain reeled. He had forgotten the will. His mind could grasp
nothing except the ghastly discrepancy between the smug picture of
Annette which he had gradually evolved, and this tragic figure, sinned
against, passionate, desperate, dragging its betrayal from one man to
another. Had she been Dick's mistress? Was it really possible that she
had not? Who could touch pitch and not be defiled? Women always denied
their shame. How hotly Mary Deane had denied hers only a few months
before the birth of her child!
Roger reddened at the thought that he was classing Annette, his
beautiful lady, with Mary. Oh! where was the real truth? Who could tell
it him? Whom could he trust?
"_Janey._"
He said the word aloud with a cry. And Janey's small brown face rose
before him as he had known it all his life, since they had been children
together, she the little adoring girl, and he the big condescending
schoolboy. Janey's crystal truthfulness, her faithfulness, her lifelong
devotion to him, became evident to him. He had always taken them for
granted, known where to put his hand on them, used them without seeing
them, like his old waterproof which he could lay hold of on its peg in
the dark. She had always been in the background of his life, like the
Rieben and the low hill behind it against the grey sky, which he did not
notice when they were there, but from which he could not long absent
himself without a sense of loss. And Janey had no past. He knew
everything about _her_. He must go to her now, at once. He did not know
exactly what he wanted to say to her. But he groped for his stick, found
it, noticed that the dew was heavy and that there would be no rain after
all, and set off down the invisible track in the direction of the
village, winking its low lights among the trees.