ms she awoke to
something that, having had this confirmation, was now no longer fear,
but a shudder under the breath of a stooping, searching evil. She had
always known that the existence of Richard and herself and Roger was
conditional upon their maintenance of a flawless behaviour. There was
somewhere in the dark conspiring ether that wraps the world an intention
to destroy her for her presumption in being Richard's mother and him for
daring to be Richard--an intention that was vindictive against beauty
and yet was fettered by a harsh quality resembling justice. It could not
strike until they themselves became tainted with unworthiness and fit
for destruction. Now they had become tainted. She knew that Roger's
drunkenness would be obscenely without dignity; she knew that she would
side with her triumphant son and against her son who needed her pity.
They would all be unworthy and they would all be destroyed. Nothingness
would swallow up her Richard. To free herself from her fear she leaped
out of bed and ran to the window, and stared on the white creeks that
lay under the moonlight among the dark marsh islands with a brightness
that seemed like ecstasy, as if they were receiving pleasure from it.
Her thoughts ran along the hillside to the man who lay high above and
excluded from this glittering world in his marble tomb. "Oh, Harry," she
cried, "I'm not blaming you, but if you'd stuck to me it would have been
so different...."

If he had been loyal to her she would have awakened now in a great
house, with many rooms in which, breathing deeply and evenly, there
slept beautiful people who had begun their being in her womb. Harry
would not have died if he had been with her. The procreative genius of
her body would have kept him in life to give her more. Her last-born
child would still have been quite young. It was to him she would have
gone now; if she had wakened she would have found him in the end room, a
boy fair as his father, and having the same look of integrity in joy, of
immunity from sorrow or profound thinking. She would have watched his
face, infantile and pugnacious with dreams of the day's game, until she
longed too strongly to touch him and kiss him. Then she would have
turned and went back along the corridor, between the glorious young men
and women who lay restoring their might for the morrow, not one of them
threatened, not one of them doomed....

Love could have made that of her life if it had not been