FullReads

“What is it! What is it!” Cresencia would exclaim, as she held him about the neck.”It isn’t love, this feeling I have for you! What is it? What is the matter with me? It isn’t love, and yet there is something—something here—here—I don”t know! Am I losing my senses? Why is it that I have got to love you whether I will or no? It isn’t love—is it a disease? Is it a kind of insanity? Oh, what is it that has happened to me these last weeks?”

In the face of such hysteria Stayne lost his hold upon himself as well—said he did love her after all—said so while he wondered at himself—said it, half believing it was true. In the confusion of his ideas it was impossible for him to tell truth from falsehood. He became almost as incoherent as Cresencia herself. Fancy the scene, if you can—both of them excited beyond all control, talking wildly into each other’s faces, neither of them heeding what was said by the other, and all the while clasped in an embrace like that of wrestlers! There in the darkness of that drawing room, in the isolation of that country house, the two jars, floating helplessly in ungovernable currents, crashed together. That of the finest clay shivered and sank at once—the other, of coarser fibre, settled slower to its ruin.

In a month’s time Stayne was sickened unto death of Cresencia—was cloyed and satiated with her. At first he had been too honest to pretend for her an affection he did not feel, but already the fine edge of this honesty had been blunted. If he now wished to break with her it was because it fatigued and bored him beyond words to keep up appearances. Once more he fought his way brutally out of the mesh in which he had become entangled, wrote a ten-line letter to Cresencia, which he believed would be final, and for a week felt like an honest man for the first time in three months.

But the thing was not to be. Miss Hromada’s pride did not come to her aid this time even momentarily. She had been degrading far more rapidly than he. Though she rolled upon her bed, hurting herself with the nails of her hands, in unspeakable humiliation, she could not let Stayne go. And this was the same girl whose pride and self-respect had hitherto been her strongest traits. She managed to see Stayne three and four times each week. She came to his office, contrived to meet him on his way to lunch, managed to be invited to the same places—even began to take strange, perverted pleasure in forcing herself upon his company and in submitting to his brutalities.

For the thing could not fail but have its effect upon Stayne. He suddenly discovered that nothing—literally and quite truly—nothing he could do would offend Cresencia. He realized that she would take anything from him—that she would not, or rather, that she could not, resent any insult, however gross. And the knowledge made the man a brute. Remember, this was not all at once. I am talking now about things that took a year or more to evolve. After he had clearly seen that Miss Hromada would submit to anything at his hands, Stayne began toenjoy her society. By this time Stayne had developed into rather much of a villain. It became for him a pleasure—a morbid, unnatural, evil pleasure for him to hurt and humiliate her. He hurt her while he sickened at the thought of his own baseness, and she submitted to it while she loathed herself for her own degradation. They were a strange couple.

Stayne would even torture her before other women and girls—would make her play waltzes while he danced with some fancied rival—would make appointments with her and come to the place with another girl, and tell her he had made other arrangements. He would smoke while she was by, and blow the smoke in her eyes. I have even seen him put his feet into the lap of her dinner gown, she, the while, trying to carry it off as a joke.

And she took all this and would go home and lie awake all night and fancy she was killing Stayne with her nails and teeth, till she shook all over and saw red things between her and the opposite wall.

The end of this story ought to be a suicide, or at least a murder, but that was the devil of it. The two people lived—lived out the wretched farce-tragedy to which there was no end. Had they never met, Miss Hromada and young Stayne would yet have been as fine specimens of womanhood and manhood as you could wish to know. Once having met, they ruined each other. The effect of these different characters upon one another was something well-nigh impossible to reduce to language. A Shakespeare could have handled it—a Zola might have worked it out—I dare not go further with it. For all I know the horror may still be alive. Stayne’s name has long since been erased from the rolls of his club. Miss Hromada is thoroughly déclassée, and only last month figured in the law courts as the principal figure in a miserable and thoroughly disreputable scandal.

Stayne goes to see her four nights in the week.