Creeps by Night: Chills and Thrills

There was a long silence. He never so much as glanced at her; for he knew that a word of encouragement to a woman of her type would be fatal. If she was to confide at all, she herself must decide to do so. A trace of coaxing or sympathy would shut him out for good.

So he waited patiently, seemingly absorbed in his thoughts and his plaything.

Suddenly she spoke and, her reticence once abandoned, her words poured out in a torrent, low-pitched but quick, and almost staccato with emotion.

“I shall have to tell you about my first marriage,” she began. “After what you have said I can see there is no help for me unless I do so.”

“I think you are wise,” Channing said quietly.

She looked away from him, sitting very still with her hands in her lap; but he saw how her fine eyes hardened, as though what she saw was disgusting. Then she told him her story, clearly and precisely, choosing her words with care, and only now and again betraying in her look or tone the effect it produced upon her.

“My first husband was a vile man, Doctor Channing. I was only a girl when I married him, but even I had heard stories of him which, though I understood only a part of them, had made him a sort of legend in our part of the country. But my father wished me to marry him. We were small yeoman farmers ourselves, my father was extravagant and ambitious, and the match was, materially, a brilliant one for me. So I married this rich man, and almost from the first day I regretted it.

“He was a large landowner in our part of Lancashire, and his collieries and steel-works in addition brought him in a very large income, every penny of which he used to gratify his vices. He was a libertine and a blackguard; and some of his villainies could have been possible only in so wild a district as that in which we lived. He was fifty and I was twenty, and my father on his deathbed asked my pardon for having urged me to marry him.”

She turned to Channing for a moment, and her eyes were filled with loathing.

“I am trying not to exaggerate,” she said, “but if ever the Devil took human form I believe he did so in the case of that man.”

“He ill-treated you, I suppose?” said Channing.

Mrs. Arkwright smiled grimly. “He did,” she said quietly — “once. He drank; and once when he could not move me to tears by his words, he struck me.” The knuckles glistened on her right hand. “He was a little man; and I thrashed him with a dog-whip till he was sober.”

“That was very brave of you,” said Channing impulsively. “But why did you not leave him?”

She answered him at once. “I was too proud,” she said. “We are a strange people in those parts, you know; there is a saying that we make good friends but worse enemies. But more than anything else we cannot bear to be beaten. I knew what had been said by others when I married, and I was determined not to give in. Besides, that was just what he wanted — to break my spirit. So I had every reason for staying.”

She stated the fact so quietly that it carried conviction, and the picture of these two bitter haters living under the same roof and sharing the same bed was not a pleasant one to contemplate.

Mrs. Arkwright began again: “He never laid hands on me after that first time I’ve told you about, but I knew that because of it he hated me more than ever. He was clever and I am not; and he never missed a chance when alone or with others to hurt and humiliate me. And he could do it, too, in such a way as made me seem at all times in the wrong. He had a sneering way of talking which was detestable; and he seemed to take a savage delight in pointing out the evil side in every human relation.”

A wave of crimson swept her neck and face, subsiding as suddenly as it had arisen, and leaving her paler even than before. For a second she was plainly unable to continue, and her lower lip whitened as she stilled it with her teeth. Never, thought Charming, had he seen such iron control. It was almost painful to witness in a woman.

“He was vile, too, in other ways,” she said at length; and Channing did not press her to explain herself. “That was my life for three years, Doctor Channing; and every day of that time I thanked God that we had no children. I had made my own bed and I was prepared to lie on it, but the idea of exposing a child to his beastliness was something I dared not think about. So you can imagine how I felt when, after three years of this life with him, I knew I was going to be a mother.”

Her voice shook and faltered; but her eyes remained dry and hard as ever.

“It filled me with despair,” she went on. “It was the one thing I had dreaded. I had beaten him so far, for nothing he could say or do could hurt me. My heart was like a stone. But a baby would soften it; and then he would break us both. He told me that himself.”

Channing was silent. Of all the glimpses he had had of broken lives and human shame and folly, this seemed to him the worst.