death.
“That was the man I loved then,” went on the widow of Mr Verloc.
“I suppose he could see it in my eyes too. Five and twenty
shillings a week, and his father threatened to kick him out of the
business if he made such a fool of himself as to marry a girl with
a crippled mother and a crazy idiot of a boy on her hands. But he
would hang about me, till one evening I found the courage to slam
the door in his face. I had to do it. I loved him dearly. Five
and twenty shillings a week! There was that other man – a good
lodger. What is a girl to do? Could I’ve gone on the streets? He
seemed kind. He wanted me, anyhow. What was I to do with mother
and that poor boy? Eh? I said yes. He seemed good-natured, he
was freehanded, he had money, he never said anything. Seven years
– seven years a good wife to him, the kind, the good, the generous,
the – And he loved me. Oh yes. He loved me till I sometimes
wished myself – Seven years. Seven years a wife to him. And do
you know what he was, that dear friend of yours? Do you know what
he was? He was a devil!”
The superhuman vehemence of that whispered statement completely
stunned Comrade Ossipon. Winnie Verloc turning about held him by
both arms, facing him under the falling mist in the darkness and
solitude of Brett Place, in which all sounds of life seemed lost as
if in a triangular well of asphalt and bricks, of blind houses and
unfeeling stones.
“No; I didn’t know,” he declared, with a sort of flabby stupidity,
whose comical aspect was lost upon a woman haunted by the fear of
the gallows, “but I do now. I – I understand,” he floundered on,
his mind speculating as to what sort of atrocities Verloc could
have practised under the sleepy, placid appearances of his married
estate. It was positively awful. “I understand,” he repeated, and
then by a sudden inspiration uttered an – “Unhappy woman!” of lofty
commiseration instead of the more familiar “Poor darling!” of his
usual practice. This was no usual case. He felt conscious of
something abnormal going on, while he never lost sight of the
greatness of the stake. “Unhappy, brave woman!”
He was glad to have discovered that variation; but he could
discover nothing else.
“Ah, but he is dead now,” was the best he could do. And he put a
remarkable amount of animosity into his guarded exclamation. Mrs
Verloc caught at his arm with a sort of frenzy.
“You guessed then he was dead,” she murmured, as if beside herself.
“You! You guessed what I had to do. Had to!”
There were suggestions of triumph, relief, gratitude in the
indefinable tone of these words. It engrossed the whole attention
of Ossipon to the detriment of mere literal sense. He wondered
what was up with her, why she had worked herself into this state of
wild excitement. He even began to wonder whether the hidden causes
of that Greenwich Park affair did not lie deep in the unhappy
circumstances of the Verlocs’ married life. He went so far as to
suspect Mr Verloc of having selected that extraordinary manner of
committing suicide. By Jove! that would account for the utter
inanity and wrong-headedness of the thing. No anarchist
manifestation was required by the circumstances. Quite the
contrary; and Verloc was as well aware of that as any other
revolutionist of his standing. What an immense joke if Verloc had
simply made fools of the whole of Europe, of the revolutionary
world, of the police, of the press, and of the cocksure Professor
as well. Indeed, thought Ossipon, in astonishment, it seemed
almost certain that he did! Poor beggar! It struck him as very
possible that of that household of two it wasn’t precisely the man
who was the devil.
Alexander Ossipon, nicknamed the Doctor, was naturally inclined to
think indulgently of his men friends. He eyed Mrs Verloc hanging
on his arm. Of his women friends he thought in a specially