BLACK SHEEP!

BY THE AUTHOR OF "LAND AT LAST," "KISSING THE ROD,"
                      &c. &c.

                  BOOK III.
CHAPTER XIII. "CRUEL AS THE GRAVE."

"I DO not know what he is doing," Harriet
had repeated to herself in sore distress; " I do
not know what he is doing. I am in the dark,
and the tide is rising."

The jealous agony she had suffered at Homburg
was harder to bear than the uncertainty
which had been her lot since her return. The
intense passion of jealousy sprang up within
her was a revelation to this woman of the
violence of her own nature, over which a stern
restraint had been kept so long, that quiet and
calm had grown habitual to her while nothing
troubled or disputed her love; but they
deserted her at the first rude touch laid upon
the sole treasure, the joy, the punishment, the
occupation, mainspring, and meaning of her
life. Under all the quiet of her manner, under
all the smoothness of her speech, Harriet Routh
knew well there was a savage element in the
desperation of her love for Routh, since he had
committed the crime which sets a man apart
from his fellows, marked with the brand of
blood. She had loved him in spite of the
principles of her education, in defiance of the
stings of her conscience, dead now, but which
had died hard; but now she loved him in spite
of the promptings of her instincts, in spite of
the revulsion of her womanly feelings, in
defiance of the revolt of her senses and her nerves.
The more utterly lost he was, the more she
clung to him, not indeed in appearance, for her
manner had lost its old softness, and her voice
the tone which had been a caress; but in her
torn and tortured heart. With desperate and
mad obstinacy she loved him, defied fate, and
hated the world which had been hard to him,
for his sake.

With the first pang of jealousy, awoke the
fierceness of this love, awoke the proud and
defiant assertion of her love and her ownership
in her breast. Never would Harriet have
pleaded her true, if perverted, love, her
unwavering, if wicked, fidelity, to the man who
was drifting away from her; the woman's lost
soul was too generous for that; but he was
hers, her own;—purchased;—God, in whom she
did not believe, and the devil, whom she did not
fear, alone knew at what a price;—and he should
not be taken from her by another, by one who
had done nothing for him, suffered nothing for
him, lost nothing for him. Her combativeness
and her craft had been called into instant
action by the first discovery of the unexpected
peril in which her sole treasure was placed.
She understood her position perfectly. No
woman could have known more distinctly than
Harriet how complete is the helplessness of a
wife when her husband's love is straying from
her, beckoned towards another—helplessness
which every point of contrast between her and
her rival increases. She was quite incapable of
the futile strife, the vulgar railing, which are
the ordinary weapons of ordinary women in the
unequal combat; she would have disdained
their employment; but fate had furnished her
with weapons of other form and far different
effectiveness, and these she would use. Routh
had strong common sense, intense selfishness,
and shrewd judgment. An appeal to these, she
thought, could not fail. Nevertheless, they had
failed, and Harriet was bewildered by their
failure. When she made her first appeal to
Routh, she was wholly unprepared for his
refusal. The danger was so tremendous, the
unforeseen discovery of the murdered man's
identity had introduced into their position
a complication so momentous, so insurmountable,
that she had never dreamed for a moment
of Routh's being insensible to its weight
and emergency. But he rejected her appeal
—rudely, brutally almost, and her astonishment
was hardly inferior to her anguish. He must
indeed be infatuated by this strange and beautiful
woman (Harriet fully admitted the American's
beauty—there was an element of candour
and judgment in her which made the littleness
of depreciating a rival impossible) when he could
overlook or under-estimate the importance, the
danger, of this newly arisen complication.

This was a new phase in her husband's
character; this was an aspect under which she
had never seen him, and she was bewildered
by it, for a little. It had occurred to her,
once, on the day when she last saw George
Dallas—parting with him at the gate of his
mother's house—to think whether, had she
had any other resource but her husband, had
the whole world outside of him not been a