Milly took a ticket for Paddington and hurried to the train, which was
waiting at the platform, choosing an empty compartment. Action had
temporarily dulled the passion of her misery, her rage, her shuddering
horror at herself. But alone in the train, it all returned upon her,
only with a complete realization of circumstance which made it worse.
It had been her impulse to rush to her home, to her husband, as for
refuge. Now she perceived that there was no refuge for her, no comfort
in her despair, but rather another ordeal to be faced. She would have to
tell her husband the truth, so far as she knew it. Good God! Why could
she not shake off from her soul the degradation, the burning shame of
this fair flesh of hers, and return to him with some other body, however
homely, which should be hers and hers alone? She remembered that the man
she loathed had said that Ian would not be back in England until
to-morrow. She supposed the Evil Thing had counted on stealing home in
time to meet him, and would have met him with an innocently smiling
face.
A moment Milly triumphed in the thought that it was she herself who
would meet Ian and reveal to him the treachery of the creature who had
supplanted her in his heart. Then with a shudder she hid her face,
remembering that it was, after all, her own dishonor and his which she
must reveal. He would of course take her back, and if that could be the
end, they might live down the thing together. But it would not be the
end. "I am the stronger," that Evil Thing had said, and it was the
stronger. At first step by step, now with swift advancing strides, it
was robbing her of the months, the years, till soon, very soon, while in
the world's eyes she seemed to live and thrive, she would be dead; dead,
without a monument, without a tear, her very soul not free and in God's
hands, but held somewhere in abeyance. And Ian? Through what
degradation, to what public shame would he, the most refined and
sensitive of men, be dragged! His child--her child and Ian's--would grow
up like that poor wretched George Goring, breathing corruption, lies,
dishonor, from his earliest years. And she, the wife, the mother, would
seem to be guilty of all that, while she was really bound,
helpless--dead.
The passion of her anger and despair stormed through her veins again
with yet greater violence, but this time George Goring was forgotten and
all its waves broke impotently against that adversary whose diabolical
power she was so impotent to resist, who might return to-morrow, to-day
for aught she knew.
She had been moving restlessly about the compartment, making vehement
gestures in her desperation, but now a sudden, terrible, yet calming
idea struck her to absolute quietness. There was a way, just one, to
thwart this adversary; she could destroy the body into which it thought
to return. At the same moment there arose in her soul two opposing waves
of emotion--one of passionate self-pity to think that she, so weak and
timid, should be driven to destroy herself; the other of triumph over
her mortal foe delivered into her hands. She felt a kind of triumph too
in the instantaneousness with which she was able to make up her mind
that this was the only thing to be done--she, usually so full of mental
and moral hesitation. Let it be done quickly--now, while the spur of
excitement pricked her on. The Thing seemed to have a knowledge of her
experiences which was not reciprocal. How it would laugh if it
recollected in its uncanny way, that she had wanted to kill herself and
it with her, that she had had it at her mercy and then had been too weak
and cowardly to strike! Should she buy some poison when she reached
Paddington? She knew nothing about poisons and their effects, except
that carbolic caused terrible agony, and laudanum was not to be trusted
unless you knew the dose. The train was slowing up and the lonely river
gleamed silverly below. It beckoned to her, the river, upon whose stream
she had spent so many young, happy days.
She got out at the little station and walked away from it with a quick,
light step, as though hastening to keep some pleasurable appointment.
After all the years of weak, bewildered subjection, of defeat and
humiliation, her turn had come; she had found the answer to the Sphinx's
riddle, the way to victory.
She knew the place where she found herself, for she had several times
made one of a party rowing down from Oxford to London. But it was not
one of the frequented parts of the river, being a quiet reach among
solitary meadows. She remembered that there was a shabby little house
standing by itself on the bank where boats could be hired, for they had
put in there once to replace an oar, having lost one down a weir in the
neighborhood. The weir had not been on the main stream, but they had
come upon it in exploring a backwater. It could not be far off.
She walked quickly along the bank, turning over and over in her mind the
same thoughts; the cruel wrong which now for so many years she had
suffered, the final disgrace brought upon her and her husband, and she
braced her courage to strike the blow that should revenge all. The act
to which this fair-haired, once gentle woman was hurrying along the
lonely river-bank, was not in its essence suicide; it was revenge, it
was murder.
When she came to the shabby little house where the boats lay under an
unlovely zinc-roofed shed, she wondered whether she might ask for ink
and paper and write to some one. She longed to send one little word to
Ian; but then what could she say? She could not have seen him and
concealed the truth from him, but it was one of the advantages of her
disappearance that he need never know the dishonor done him. And she
knew he considered suicide a cowardly act. He was quite wrong there. It
was an act of heroic courage to go out like this to meet death. It was
so lonely; even lonelier than death must always be. She had the
conviction that she was not doing wrong, but right. Hers was no common
case. And for the first time she saw that there might be a reason for
this doom which had befallen her. Men regard one sort of weakness as a
sin to be struggled against, another as something harmless, even
amiable, to be acquiesced in. But perhaps all weakness acquiesced in was
a sin in the eyes of Eternal Wisdom, was at any rate to be left to the
mercy of its own consequences. She looked back upon her life and saw
herself never exerting her own judgment, always following in some one
else's tracks, never fighting against her physical, mental, moral
timidity. It was no doubt this weakness of hers that had laid her open
to the mysterious curse which she was now, by a supreme effort of
independent judgment and physical courage, resolved to throw off.
A stupid-looking man in a dirty cotton shirt got out the small boat she
chose; stared a minute in surprise to see the style in which she, an
Oxford girl born and bred, handled the sculls, and then went in again to
continue sleeping off a pint of beer.
She pulled on mechanically, with a long, regular stroke, and one by one
scenes, happy river-scenes out of past years, came back to her with
wonderful vividness. Looking about her she saw an osier-bed dividing
the stream, and beside it the opening into the willow-shaded backwater
which she remembered. She turned the boat's head into it. Heavy clouds
had rolled up and covered the sky, and there was a kind of twilight
between the dark water and the netted boughs overhead. Very soon she
heard the noise of a weir. Once such a sound had been pleasant in her
ears; but now it turned her cold with fear. On one side the backwater
flowed sluggishly on around the osier-bed; on the other it hurried
smoothly, silently away, to broaden suddenly before it swept in white
foam over an open weir into a deep pool below. She trembled violently
and the oars moved feebly in her hands, chill for all the warmth of the
afternoon. Her boat was in the stream which led to the weir, but not yet
fully caught by the current. A few more strokes and the thing would be
done, she would be carried quickly on and over that dancing, sparkling
edge into the deep pool below. Her courage failed, could not be screwed
to the sticking-point; she hung on the oars, and the boat, as if
answering to her thought, stopped, swung half around. As she held the
boat with the oars and closed her eyes in an anguish of hesitation and
terror, a strange convulsion shook her, such as she had felt once
before, and a low cry, not her own, broke from her lips.
"No--no!" they uttered, hoarsely.
The Thing was there then, awake to its danger, and in another moment
might snatch her from herself, return laughing at her cowardice, to that
house by the river. She pressed her lips hard together, and silently,
with all the strength of her hate and of her love, bent to the oars. The
little boat shot forward into mid-stream, the current seized it and
swept it rapidly on towards the dancing edge of water. She dropped the
sculls and a hoarse shriek broke from her lips; but it was not she who
shrieked, for in her heart was no fear, but triumph--triumph as of one
who is at length avenged of her mortal enemy.
* * * * *
In the darkened drawing-room, the room so full of traces of all that had
been exquisite in Mildred Stewart, Ian mourned alone. Presently the door
opened a little, and a tall, slender, childish figure in a white smock,
slipped in and closed it gently behind him. Tony stole up to his father
and stood between his knees. He looked at Ian, silent, pale, large-eyed.
That a grown-up person and a man should shed tears was strange, even
portentous, to him.
"Won't Mummy come back, not ever?" asked the child at last, piteously,
in a half whisper.
"No, never, Tony; Mummy won't ever come back. She's gone--gone for
always."
The child looked in his father's eyes strangely, penetratingly.
"Which Mummy?" he asked.
THE END
* * * * *