Scotland -- Social life and customs -- 19th century -- Fiction
Her body was full of health and she was very beautiful. Richard, who was
beginning to take notice, took great pleasure in her. He used to point
his fingers at her great lustrous eyes as he did at flowers, and he
would roll his face against the smooth skin of her neck and shoulders;
and when he was naked after his bath he liked her to let down her hair
so that it hung round him like a dark, scented tent. But as she bent
forward, watching his little red gums shine in his laughing mouth, guilt
constricted her heart. For she knew that no woman who was going to have
a child had any right to be as well as she was. She knew that it meant
that she was giving nothing to the child, that the blood was bright in
her cheeks because she was denying every drop she could to the child,
that her flesh was nice for Richard to kiss because she was electric
with the force she should have spent in making nerves for the child. She
knew that she was trying to kill the thing to which she had been ordered
to give life; that the murder was being committed by a part of her which
was beyond the control of her will did not exonerate her. In these
matters, as she had learned in the moment when she had discovered that
her baby had conceived without the consent of her soul, the soul cannot
with honour disown the doings of the body. The plain fact was that she
was going to have a child, and that she was trying to kill it. Remorse
dragged behind her like a brake on the swift movements of her happy
motherhood; and at night she lay wide-eyed and whispered to some judge
to judge her and bring this matter to an end.
It was no wonder that even when a solicitor came to see her and told her
that Harry had settled on her and Richard a sum so large that she knew
he must be deeply concerned for her, since, like many men of his type,
he had such an abundant sense of the pleasures which can be bought with
money that to part with it unnecessarily was a real sacrifice, she
thought of him with only such casual pity as she had felt when the
yard-dog howled. Well, that had all been set right, long afterwards on
that day of which she had told nobody.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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