Читать книгу So Evil My Love: Based on a True Crime Story - Bowen Marjorie - Страница 4

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The missionary’s widow found her little house mean and even bleak after the luxury and comfort of the Old Priory. It was easy to smile at Susan’s ignorance and poor taste, but the interior of her pretentious dwelling was, Olivia Sacret considered, desirable. She had not before noticed how agreeable money could make life. When she had last seen Susan she had herself been absorbed in her own affairs, her marriage and her work; both had then seemed exciting, now, in retrospect, dull. She noticed the drafts under the ill-fitting doors, the rubbed drugget, the sagging chairs. She had never tried to make her home pleasant, believing vaguely, that to do so would be frivolous, even wrong. She sat long beside her scanty fire, in the light of the oil lamp with the opal globe, thinking of Susan, and then, with a start, of God. She should pray for Susan, so worldly and so selfish, and she was surprised that she had forgotten to advise her friend to pray, to question her on her religious duties that she had never faithfully fulfilled. Mrs. Sacret could not understand how it happened that she had so lost, not only her professional manner but her professional attitude of mind, when with Susan. Usually she was suavely ready to offer spiritual consolation to the distressed. She supposed it had really been astonishment that had so shaken her out of her mental routine. Astonishment at Susan’s confusion, her confession of an unsatisfactory marriage, her dismay over the letters, and her extraordinary offer to Olivia—an offer beyond even Susan’s reckless generous nature to make.

“She was frightened.” The three words almost formed themselves on Mrs. Sacret’s pretty lips; a stir of impatience made her rise and, taking the lamp, go into the basement kitchen. She prepared herself a tidy supper of cold ham and cocoa, while she pondered: Frightened of what?—and ate it, sitting at the scrubbed table and staring at the cold black-leaded grate.

The letters. So she thought of them now, as if they were the only letters in the world. Susan had wildly hoped that they were “safe,” had asked that they might be destroyed, but Olivia Sacret remembered them as harmless, ill-written chatter, silly accounts of her flirtations with Sir John Curle, and her regrets as to his hopeless marriage. Mr. Sacret had not liked Susan’s behavior, he had said she was being “talked about,” though she was always prudently chaperoned by relatives or paid companions, and had wished his wife to discountenance the lovely widow. But Mrs. Sacret had continued to receive the confidence of her friend and to allow her to visit the house in Minton Street, not only out of sympathy with one who was so gentle and kind, but because, secretly, she liked the romance—there was no other word—that Susan’s unfortunate love affair provided. Neither could she see anything wrong in the situation. Susan had behaved very well; her tone had been, from the first, one of renunciation. She had visited Lady Curle in her sad retreat, tried to make friends with her, and had, together with Olivia, prayed for her recovery to normal health. Nor was Sir John less noble; his attachment to Susan, though sudden and violent, had never, she had promised Olivia, been more than whispered. And soon after the Sacrets had gone to Jamaica, he had left England. Nothing could have been more proper, though Olivia had considered the second marriage regrettable. Susan should have remained a widow, but she was so weak!

Susan was so weak. Mrs. Sacret shivered. The kitchen was cold. It was stupid to be wasting the fire in the parlor; she left her soiled dishes on the table, took up her lamp again and ascended the short steep flight of mean stairs; in the narrow passage she paused. The letters were in her bedroom, in the bottom of a hair trunk; she wanted to read them again for she had forgotten all of them save their general trend. She had never even read them carefully, as she had never listened carefully to Susan’s gushing talk. But it would be mean to read the letters with a curious, prying eye. They must be burned, as Susan wished, and burned unread, that would be the honorable action.

Olivia sat again between the lamp and the fire that she mended with a frugal hand. Thoughts had been aroused in her that were not easily dispelled. Surmises and questions raised not lightly parried or answered.

She again forgot God and the prayers she should have put up for Susan, so unhappy and bewildered.

The missionary’s widow drooped in her hard chair, her graceful body taking on lines of unconscious elegance. She considered the sharp difference between her fate and that of Susan’s. For her, next to nothing, and soon, nothing at all, but the position of an upper servant, scarcely higher than that of the gross, servile men she had seen today behind the fat horses, lazing away the barren Sunday afternoon. For Susan, everything that most women desired. But Susan was not happy. An intense curiosity stirred in Olivia Sacret. She tried to puzzle out the reason for the other woman’s trouble. Susan had always been gay and careless, her only grief had been her hopeless affection for Sir John Curie, but surely that had never been very deep, or she would not so soon have married Martin Rue? Olivia had expected to find Susan, in her usual shallow way, cheerfully content and the center of admiring friends. But she had been alone. And unhappy. I should like to see Martin Rue, reflected Olivia, but checked herself with a false piety, horn of long habit. But I must not be prying, I must be very sorry for Susan and try to help her. Tonight I shall pray for her, and tomorrow I shall burn the letters and write to Susan to tell her that I have done so.

She began to compose the sentences, wise, kind and well turned, that she would send her friend. She would offer her excellent advice about “turning to God,” and she would conclude by suggesting that they had better not meet again, as their lives were so different. The room darkened about her; she startled to find the lamp going out with a nasty smell of paraffin oil. She had forgotten to fill it. She had neglected her house in order to undertake that useless walk to Clapham. Olivia Sacret had been trained to feel guilty on the least excuse and “to take the blame” in the part of permanent scapegoat for any daily misadventure. She had always considered that this attitude gave her an air of becoming meekness, until her husband, in the irritable tones of an invalid, had once told her that her ready assumption of guilt covered a secret and unshaken self-satisfaction. Then she had lost her zest for this form of abnegation, but the habit remained. Now she began to think of her afternoon’s adventure as not only senseless but sinful.

She turned out the lamp, lit a candle and went upstairs to her chilly bedroom, with the white dimity curtains, white honeycomb quilt on the narrow bed, the framed texts on the cheaply papered walls, the yellow varnished furniture. She looked at once toward the trunk that contained all her intimate possessions; tomorrow she would burn the letters unread. Again she dwelt on the lines that would renounce this unsuitable, perhaps dangerous, friendship. Yes, perhaps dangerous, for it might arouse in her feelings of envy, of regret, a sense of power.

“Our lives are so different,” she had resolved to write to Susan, but as she put out her candle and shuddered into the cold bed, her thought was—but Susan offered to share her life with me, and that thought remained with her throughout a sleepless night.