ere animal yearning for her offspring,
while he had taken over the toil and duty, and even the devotion, of
parentage himself. But then she remembered also how he had fascinated
her--a simple schoolgirl--by his sheer domineering strength, and how the
objections of her parents to this coarse and common man had forced her
into a clandestine intimacy that ended in her complete subjection to
him. She remembered the birth of an infant whose concealment from her
parents and friends was compassed by his low cunning; she remembered the
late atonement of marriage preferred by the man she had already begun
to loathe and fear, and who she now believed was eager only for her
inheritance. She remembered her abject compliance through the greater
fear of the world, the stormy scenes that followed their ill-omened
union, her final abandonment of her husband, and the efforts of her
friends and family who had rescued the last of her property from him.
She was glad she remembered it; she dwelt upon it, upon his cruelty, his
coarseness and vulgarity, until she saw, as she honestly believed, the
hidden springs of his affection for their child. It was HIS child in
nature, however it might have favored her in looks; it was HIS own
brutal SELF he was worshiping in his brutal progeny. How else could it
have ignored HER--its own mother? She never doubted the truth of what
he had told her--she had seen it in his own triumphant eyes. And yet she
would have made a kind mother; she remembered with a smile and a slight
rising of color the affection of Barker's baby for her; she remembered
with a deepening of that color the thrill of satisfaction she had felt
in her husband's fulmination against Mrs. Barker, and, more than all,
she felt in his blind and foolish hatred of Barker himself a delicious
condonation of the strange feeling that had sprung up in her heart for
Barker's simple, straightforward nature. How could HE understand,
how could THEY understand (by the plural she meant Mrs. Barker and
Horncastle), a character so innately noble. In her strange attraction
towards him she had felt a charming sense of what she believed was a
superior and even matronly protection; in the utter isolation of her
life now--and with her husband's foolish abuse of him ringing in her
ears--it seemed a sacred duty. She had lost a son. Providence had sent
her an ideal friend to replace him. And this was quite consistent, too,
with a faint smile that began to play about