he had done than by the way in which his conscience had already become a
passive surface for the channelling of consequences. He was like a child
who had put a match to the curtains, and stands agape at the blaze.
It was horribly naughty to put the match--but beyond that the child's
responsibility did not extend. In this business of Arthur's, where all had
been wrong from the beginning--where self-defence might well find a plea
for its casuistries in the absence of a definite right to be measured
by--it had been easy, after the first slip, to drop a little lower with
each struggle. The woman--oh, the woman was--well, of the kind who prey on
such men. Arthur, out there, at his lowest ebb, had drifted into living
with her as a man drifts into drink or opium. He knew what she was--he
knew where she had come from. But he had fallen ill, and she had nursed
him--nursed him devotedly, of course. That was her chance, and she knew it.
Before he was out of the fever she had the noose around him--he came to and
found himself married. Such cases were common enough--if the man recovered
he bought off the woman and got a divorce. It was all a part of the
business--the marriage, the bribe, the divorce. Some of those women made a
big income out of it--they were married and divorced once a year. If Arthur
had only got well--but, instead, he had a relapse and died. And there was
the woman, made his widow by mischance as it were, with her child on her
arm--whose child?--and a scoundrelly black-mailing lawyer to work up her
case for her. Her claim was clear enough--the right of dower, a third of
his estate. But if he had never meant to marry her? If he had been trapped
as patently as a rustic fleeced in a gambling-hell? Arthur, in his last
hours, had confessed to the marriage, but had also acknowledged its folly.
And after his death, when Denis came to look about him and make inquiries,
he found that the witnesses, if there had been any, were dispersed and
undiscoverable. The whole question hinged on Arthur's statement to his
brother. Suppress that statement, and the claim vanished, and with it the
scandal, the humiliation, the life-long burden of the woman and child