Illegitimate children -- Fiction; Married women -- Fiction; Mothers and sons -- Fiction
They went abroad at once, to France, to the forest of Fontainebleau. How
she hated ever after the sound of the lovely syllables, hated the memory
of the rocks and woods, the green shadows and the golden lights where
she had walked with him and known horror and despair deepening in her
heart with every day. She judged herself, not him, in looking back; even
then it had been herself she had judged. Though unwilling, she had been
as much tempted by herself as by him; he had had to break down barriers,
but though they were the barriers of her very soul, her longing heart
had pressed, had beaten against them, crying out for deliverance. She
did not judge him, but, alone with him in the forest, alone with him in
the bland, sunny hotel, alone with him through the long nights when she
lay awake and wondered, in a stupor of despair, she saw that he was
different. So different; there was the horror. She was the sinner; not
he. He belonged to the bright, ardent life, the life without social bond
or scruple, the life of sunny, tolerant hotels and pagan forests; but
she did not belong to it. The things that had seemed external things,
barriers and shackles, were the realest things, were in fact the inner
things, were her very self. In yielding to her heart she had destroyed
herself, there was no life to be lived henceforth with this man, for
there was no self left to live it with. She saw that she had cut herself
off from her future as well as from her past. The sacred past judged her
and the future was dead. Years of experience concentrated themselves
into that lawless week. She saw that laws were not outside things; that
they were one's very self at its wisest. She saw that if laws were to be
broken it could only be by a self wiser than the self that had made the
law. And the self that had fled with Paul Quentin was only a passionate,
blinded fragment, a heart without a brain, a fragment judged and
rejected by the whole.
To both lovers the week was one of bitter disillusion, though for
Quentin no such despair was possible. For him it was an attempt at joy
and beauty that had failed. This dulled, drugged looking girl was not
the radiant woman he had hoped to find. Vain and sensitive as he was, he
felt, almost immediately, that he had lost his charm for her; that she
had ceased to love him. That was the ugly, the humiliating side of the
truth, the side that so filled Amabel Channice's soul with sickness as
she looked back at it. She had ceased to love him, almost at once.
And it was not guilt only, and fear, that had risen between them and
separated them; there were other, smaller, subtler reasons, little
snakes that hissed in her memory. He was different from her in other
ways.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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