Black Widow

by S. Fowler Wright

  Now, seeing the fruit it had borne at last, it must be looked at in a new way. For her own peace, for the integrity of her own soul, she must ask herself, was there justification for what she had done then? Later, she would have to ask herself the same question regarding other things—worse things in the eyes of the law, and perhaps in themselves—that she had done since. But she would do all in an orderly way. She meant to explore too thoroughly to have to go over the same ground again.

  And when she asked herself that question, she saw, in a fundamentally honest mind, that only one answer was possible. There had been no justification for what she did. It was not a question of human conventions, or human laws. By her own act of marriage, she had pledged herself to Sir Daniel, in a manner which she had understood at the time, and it was a contract that she had not kept. Many contracts are broken, of many kinds. Some are broken of necessity, for which there may be no blame. But she saw that there are only two ways by which a contract may be broken without dis­honour—that of necessity or of mutual consent.

  Had there been a common understanding between them—had they agreed to separate, or that each should do after his or her own device, it would have been an utterly different matter, and the answer to the question she asked herself might have been less simple to find. But if a liability be assumed, or a contract signed, it is not enough to say, when the day of reckoning arrives: “I have changed my mind,” or “I would prefer to spend the sum in another way.” There must be payment, or honourable bankruptcy of resource, and all else is fraud.

  That she had done wrong was a fact that she had no sophistry to refute, and she attempted none to her own mind.

  But the thing having been unchangeably done, in what or where had she gone wrong at a later time? She knew that there were those who would say that she should have confessed her fault—that she should have told her husband what she had done, be the consequences what they might. But that was something, be it right or wrong, that she was unable to see. It seemed to combine weakness and folly in about equal degrees. It could have done no good. It would have done harm.

  It would have troubled Daniel, and whether or not he would have forgiven her (which it was not easy to think), it would have disturbed his life. She had wronged him when she had been unfaithful to the vows of loyalty that she had made; she would have wronged him more had she told him what she had done. A fact may increase in importance in direct proportion to the number of those to whom it is known. It may be nourished to larger life. She saw that one who has committed a secret wrong may, by the weakness of confession, augment the sin, and it is a poor and selfish pretext that it will bring relief to the sinner’s mind, even if that result be reasonable to expect.

  No, what was done was irrevocable. There could be nothing left better than to put it aside. But she faced the further fact that that was what she had failed—what she had not attempted to do. She had kept the letters, the mementoes of a past happiness, as of a past grief, that she would not willingly put aside; and every day that she had done that, she had continued to break her faith. She had sinned as continuously as though she had gone each night to her lover’s bed.

  It was strange that she had never seen this before; that she had given it no thought. It was somewhat late to regard it now, but it must be done. She got up and switched on the lights, drawing on a dressing gown, for the night was cold. She went to her jewel safe where—incredible folly—the letters still lay beside Gerard’s diary, and took them out. She went on to the further room, and was content with the light of a dying fire.

  Soon the room was alive with a wider light, as she took the letters one by one—there were seventeen in all, as she knew well, but now she did not count them, and she would have found a new cause for alarm in the fact that the number was less by one—and dropped them into the blaze, and as she did so she surprised herself with her own tears.

  Resisting after a time a mood that was alien to her own normality, she watched the dry sheets burn till she was sure of the illegibility of the last blackened ash, and went back to her bed.

  The destruction of the letters, and the eruption of feeling that the act had caused, had given her a sense of expiation which was at least a step to the peace she sought. It was an act that she might regret at tomorrow’s dawn, but it was now as irrevocable as were those other episodes of adultery and murder, of which they were fruit and cause. Their destruction was an auto-suggestion that the whole could be put away, as though she had written Finis to an ended book.

  CHAPTER XXXI.

  Adelaide Denton went back to bed, but she did not attempt to reach the haven of sleep. She had faced the fact that the first cause of the incredible incidents of the last three weeks which had made her a widow, and stained her hands with the blood of those of her own house, was a sin for which she could find no defence by her own code. Nothing could alter that. Seeing it, she had done what she could (it seemed much to her) by the destruction of the letters, to regret and condemn it as a memory she could never be able to nourish again, as she I had done till a month ago.

  Nothing could alter that. But, for her own peace, she had to face further and more sinister things.

  She would still take them in the order in which they came, trying to separate her individual responsibility from the acts of others, and the impact of surrounding circumstance.

  There was first her unintentional accusation—almost unintentional if not quite—against Redwin, which had had such incalculable consequences. That, at least, was a matter in which she could find no blame for herself. It was true that he was a man whom she had disliked to have in the house, and had distrusted utterly from the day he came. But Daniel had never, to her thinking, been very wise in the men with whom he associated. Having some ability of his own, though much less than his dignity required that those around should attribute to him, he was always disposed to the society of cleverer men who would be obsequious to himself. There was no doubt that Redwin, in his own way, was a clever man; and he had adopted just the right degree of deference at the first to establish his position on the footing for which he schemed.

  It was true that she had always been willing to expose any error of conduct or manner which might not otherwise have come to Sir Daniel’s notice, and this attitude had made it natural for the man to interpret her motive, in the incident which had led to his expulsion, in the most hostile way. But, even had that been as true as he had supposed, was it not fully justified by its result? Had she realized the full meaning of the letter which came by chance to her hands, and the extent to which the man was defrauding her husband, it was as much her duty as her obvious interest to lay his perfidy bare. On that point, she could be easily acquitted at the tribunal of her own mind.

  Next to that—it seemed a venial fault when considered beside the consequences to which it led—she had been careless about her keys. More than once. Probably many times.

  When Redwin had been ordered to leave the house, and had gone upstairs to pack, he must have entered her room, picked up the keys from her dressing table, opened the safe, taken the letters out—he had not been fool enough to touch the jewels—dropped them into his pocket, and walked out unsuspected and unobserved. It had been as simple as that.

  At that time he could afford to be bold, having little left that could be lost in that house, but there must have been an earlier day when he had done the same thing; at least, so far that he must have taken her keys and examined the contents of the safe, or how else would he have known where to go, and what he would be able to take?

  So her mind went on to the moment when he had gone with a muttered threat against herself, which she had met with a confident smile. But that confidence had fallen flatly enough when, on the next day, she had found that the letters were gone, and formed an instant guess of who held them then. So far, she could see no fault in herself, except that she had been careless about the keys.

  Then the next day there had been the letter from Redwin, which had said so much—and i
mplied so I much more. She remembered the first panic of fear, the fierce impulse of anger which had been so hard to subdue to the smiling casualness which the situation required; for she had opened the letter at the breakfast table, with Daniel at her side, and in an unusually genial mood, perhaps feeling the relief of Redwin’s dismissal.

  She had gone, when breakfast had been over, to the quietude of her own room to decide what she should do. She remembered how fiercely she had resolved that the letters should never, never come to Sir Daniel’s knowledge, let the cost be what it might. It was hard to decide whether she had been right or wrong about that, or even what her strongest motive had been. It had not been wholly selfish, she knew. It was only fair to allow that. She was not a coward. She was not physically afraid of anything that Daniel could say or do. Neither was she financially dependent upon him. But she had seen, as the prospect of exposure became near and real, that, whether they should part in consequence, or remain together, the revelation would be likely to have a more disastrous effect upon Sir Daniel’s happiness and peace than upon hers. His pride would suffer almost equally, whether he should decide to expose or conceal the wound. If they should part, it would be found by both that he had been far more dependent upon her than she on him, in a score of ways.

  And if her resolve had not been entirely selfish, as between Daniel and herself, neither had it been domi­nated by her determination, fierce and obstinate as that also had been, that Redwin should not be the means that should put her to such a shame—that he should not triumph through her.

  She had shown this when she had abased herself to attempt to pay the price which the blackmailer had asked, and had proposed to Daniel to take him back. But she had not been foolish enough to have intended that he should become an inmate of the house again with those letters in his possession, to be used as a lasting threat. She had thought to bargain with him at once on his return. Either he must hand them back then, or she would go herself to Sir Daniel and tell him all. Faced by that alternative, there would have been no doubt of what he would do. And after that he would have had to hold the position he had regained, if at all, by his own behaviour.

  Should he tell of the incident at any future crisis, she had prepared the tale that they were her sister’s letters, not hers, which she had afterwards used in half admission to Mr. Wheeler. With the letters no longer in Redwin’s possession—with the assertion, true or not, that they had been destroyed—it would have been sufficient, as she supposed, to have borne her through. And she was probably right in that, for she had a life-long habit of truthfulness, which would have been her support, and which had been her friend in the deadly perils of the enquiry of the past week, inducing that economy of falsehood which gives the best prospect of life to a lonely lie. But the letters themselves, as she knew well, would have been fatal to such a tale.

  Had she done wrong when she had asked Sir Daniel to take Redwin back? She could not see that she had. It had an aspect of cowardice which she had disliked, and which was unpleasant to think of now; but, joined as it had been to the resolution that the letters should be surrendered as its immediate price, it might have proved the best way—best for Sir Daniel, as for herself. There would have been no question of her being in the power of a man in the house who might have misused his position to betray her husband’s interests for a second time.

  But, having failed to secure his return, which was the point at which the crisis came, what should she have done differently, and to what issue, rather than to that which would, even then, had she considered the worst possibilities that might confront her, have seemed an incredible and monstrous end?

  For it was only fair to recognize that. The moment it happened—even five seconds before—it had not been meant. The thought of murder had never entered her mind.

  It was not that she had resisted temptation, or considered it and put it aside. The thought had not been there. It had not attempted intrusion, and, had it done so, it would not have been rejected with difficulty, nor considered as possible; it would have been recognized as utterly alien and absurd.

  She saw, too, that in the crossing of the thousand complicated chances that surround our lives, it was no less than an enormous improbability that circumstances would have converged to the event—perhaps a million to one—even a few days before. Perhaps a million to one against the same precedent circumstances, so far as she was responsible for them, leading to such an end, if her life should be lived again to an equal point. Or was it fated, as some will hold, so that we do no more than weave our own infinitesimal part of a pattern designed before in the mind of God?

  More confusing than that, if we would award praise or blame in a just scale, either to others or to ourselves, she went on to see that human actions, for good or evil, are not of a certain quality or a level worth. The individual will not always reach to the same circum­stances in the same way. The scale may be turned by a feather’s difference of health or mood, or of some precedent inconsequent thought or emotion, so that the occasion for noble conduct may be embraced or rejected, the temptation to baseness be accepted or put aside, with irrevocable consequences, and a future fundamentally changed by a moment’s act—and the opposite possibili­ties were latent before in the one individual, to lead—if so they do—either to heaven or hell.

  But it would lead her nowhere to speculate in such ways as these. Her mind went back capriciously to recall a moment when she had been a small child in a sunlit room in a primitive school in Wales. She had forgotten her own task to look at the weird signs of an algebraic problem which an older girl at the next desk had been set to solve. She remembered now how the bar of light that came through a half-drawn blind slanted across the desk. The signs meant nothing to her. The problem—simple enough, no doubt—was beyond any possibility of solution by her. And then, pleasant and clear in its admonition, there came the sound of Miss Milford’s voice: “Adelaide, suppose you do the sum on your own slate.”

  That was what she had to do now. There might come a time when she would know how the universe is controlled, and to what end; but, as yet, with the human brain that she had, its symbols could mean nothing to her; its problems could not be solved. She must do the sum on her own slate.

  Suppose she had gone to Redwin and bought him off? She had thought of that and rejected it with deliberation, though against the urgency of her natural fear. She had decided, deliberately, that he was not likely to fulfil his threat. She had heard, and her reason had supported the argument, that in all cases of attempted blackmail it is the first payment that is the fatal error. For the threat is impotent, if once it be executed. Redwin might send her husband the letters, but it was certain that he would not reinstate himself by such means. Only while he held them, and only if they could work on her fears, would they be useful to him.

  But there had been another factor which had been potent to turn the scale, that of revenge. Yet she could not say that she had overlooked this. She had measured it deliberately against the self-revelation which it must imply, and what effect the man might expect it to have on Sir Daniel’s mind. Redwin had been turned out of the house on the discovery of dishonesties which might still be the basis of a criminal charge. Would he risk so great a fall (she had not known, and did not guess now, how familiar his life had already been with the interiors of English gaols) as must result if Sir Daniel were stirred to a new anger toward the thief and revealer of those letters, so that he would have attacked him with every weapon the law supplied?

  To everyone who knew Sir Daniel, both in passion and pride, it was a very probable thing, and the letters need not, indeed would not, have come into the picture at all. Sir Daniel might have turned her out, or given her the harder part of living as a wife who was very generously forgiven, and very secretly shamed. But in either event, he would not have been likely to let the man go free who had discovered and exposed the unsus­pected stain on the honour of his own home. So she had decided that Redwin sought to frighten her with a threat tha
t he dare not use.

  Well, she had been wrong. But it was an error of judgment. It was no worse than that. She could not even call it a foolish error. She thought, on the same premises, she would decide again in the same way. And she might have been right this time. Who knew on what quickly regretted impulse, in what abnormal mood, the man might have dropped the packet into the post box? How quickly he might have regretted the action which he would have been powerless to undo? No, she could not blame herself, even for folly that, when her effort to get Daniel to reinstate him had failed, she had decided to do no more.

  But she had not been careless. She had watched the posts. On two occasions she had made pretexts to get the key from her husband and clear the box herself. On the second she had kept it until he had asked for it at a time when it was beside her hand, and she could make no pretext to keep it back. Twice she had met the post­man, so that he had given the letters to her. And (of course, as she told herself), there had been no occasion for alarm. She had vexed herself—had degraded herself—for no cause. Probably that might be the extent, she had thought, of Redwin’s calculated revenge. To cause her to watch the post; to live in continual dread. If he had sufficient imagination, he might see his revenge complete, even though he should toss the letters on to the fire and give them no further thought.

  And when she had thought this, and seen that she danced to the string he pulled, even while he did nothing at all, her hatred of him flamed as fiercely as when she had first thought of his reading those letters; those secret, private lines. If she had ever had murder in her heart, which she did not think, or if there were anyone that the world held she could murder now, or any circumstances in which she could contemplate such a crime, it would be Redwin whom she would have no remorse to destroy.