The Invader: A NovelWoods, Margaret L. (Margaret Louisa)
General
The Invader: A Novel
Woods, Margaret L. (Margaret Louisa)
Multiple personality -- Fiction
Milly meantime guessed nothing of his dissatisfaction. She adored her
husband more every day, and her happiness would have been perfect had it
not been for the haunting horror of the possible "change" which might be
lurking for her round the corner of any night--that "change," which
other people might call what they liked, but which meant for her the
robbery of her life, her young happy life with Ian. He had taken her
twice to Norton-Smith before the great man went for his holiday.
Norton-Smith had pronounced it a peculiar but not unprecedented case of
collapse of memory, caused by overwork; and had spent most of the
consultation time in condemning the higher education of women. Time,
rest, and the fulfilment of woman's proper function of maternity would,
he affirmed, bring all right, since there was no sign of disease in Mrs.
Stewart, who appeared to him, on the contrary, a perfectly healthy young
woman. When Ian, alone with him, began tentatively to bring to the
doctor's notice the changes in character and intelligence that had
accompanied the losses of memory, he found his remarks set aside like
the chatter of a foolish child.
If maternity would indeed exorcise the Invader, Milly had lost no time
in beginning the exorcism. And she did believe that somehow it would;
not because the doctor said so, but because she could not believe God
would let a child's mother be changed in that way, at any rate while she
was bearing it. To do so would be to make it more motherless than any
little living thing on earth. Milly had always been quietly but deeply
religious, and she struggled hard against the feeling of peculiar
injustice in this strange affliction that had been sent to her. She
prayed earnestly to God every night to help and protect her and her
child, and the period of six or seven months, at which the "change" had
come before, passed without a sign of it. In April a little boy was
born. They called him Antonio, after a learned Italian, a friend and
teacher of Ian's.
The advent of the child did something to explain the comparative
seclusion into which Mrs. Stewart had retired, and the curious dulling
of that brilliant personality of hers. The Master of Durham was among
the few of Mrs. Stewart's admirers who declined to recognize the change
in her. He had been attracted by the girl Milly Flaxman, by her gentle,
shy manners and pretty face, combined with her reputation for
scholarship; the brilliant Invader had continued to attract him in
another way. The difference between the two, if faced, would have been
disagreeably mysterious. He preferred to say and think that there was
none; Mrs. Stewart was probably not very well.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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