The Devil

Perhaps this was the real reason why she had remained childless. She represented completed womanhood in this respect at least, that she desired to be a mother. The possession of children was the one thing that made her envious of other women. The idea of having a child of her own made her almost faint with longing--a baby to nurse, a little burden to wheel about in a perambulator, a companion to prattle to her all day while Will was busy down-stairs. If the hope of such joy had been taken from her by Mr. Barradine, oh, how immeasureably great was her cause for hatred!

She sat staring at the distant point where he and his horse had just now vanished, and for a little while her thoughts were like curses. Any attributes of grandeur were transitory illusions; he was wholly mean and base: he was the embodied principle of evil that had spoiled the past and that still threatened the future. She wished that he might eventually suffer as much as he had made her suffer. She wished that he might be racked with rheumatism, burned up with gout, tortured with every conceivable painful disease. She wished him dead and crumbling to dust in his coffin.

After tea she came back to the window and stayed there till nightfall.

Little by little the street became dim and vague. Two or three futile oil lamps were lighted, and the shop fronts shone brightly, but all the rest grew dark, like a river or a canal instead of a street. One heard voices, and then people showed themselves momentarily as they passed through the lamplight.

While she watched them passing, her thoughts drifted into generalized sadness.

The shutters went up at the saddler's, and she saw Mr. Allen for a moment--a long, thin man, looking too tall for the frame of the lamplit doorway. Mr. Allen used to have a fine business but he was spoiling it by his folly. It had been his custom to go to neighboring meets of hounds and ask the young gentlemen if the saddles he had made for them were satisfactory, insinuate his fingers between saddle-tree and hunter's withers to see if there was plenty of room, and generally render himself obsequiously agreeable. That was good for trade. But then the hunting gradually fascinated him, and he followed on foot throughout the season, halloaing hounds to wrong foxes, standing on banks and frightening horses, being a nuisance to the gentlemen, and coming home to boast that although he was fifty he had walked twenty-seven miles in the day. And his trade was all going or gone, and he not seeming to care. His wife let lodgings to make up a bit. Very sad.