Notwithstanding

<h2><span>CHAPTER XXXVI</span></h2> <div class="block"> <div class="poem"><div class="stanza"> <div>"The paths of love are rougher</div> <div class="i1">Than thoroughfares of stones."</div> <div class="right"><span class="smcap">Thomas Hardy.</span></div> </div></div> </div> <p>Roger lay on his face, with his mouth on the back of his hand.</p> <p>Years and years ago, twenty long years ago, he had once lain on his face as he was doing now. He and Dick had been out shooting with the old keeper, and Dick had shot Roger's dog by mistake. He had taken the catastrophe with a stolid stoicism and a bitten lip. But later in the day he had crept away, and had sobbed for hours, lying on his face under a tree. The remembrance came back to him now. Never since then, never in all those twenty years, had he felt again that same paroxysm of despair. And now again Dick had inadvertently wounded him; Dick, who never meant any harm, had pierced his heart. The wound bled, and Roger bit his hand. Time passed.</p> <p>He did not want to get up any more. If he could have died at that moment he would have died. He did not want to have anything more to do with this monstrous cheat called life. He did not want ever to see anyone again. He<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_319" id="Page_319">[Pg 319]</SPAN></span> felt broken. The thought that he should presently get to his feet and stump home through the dusk to his empty rooms, as he had done a hundred times, filled him with a nausea and rage unspeakable. The mere notion of the passage and the clothes-peg and the umbrella-stand annihilated him. He had reached a place in life where he felt he could not go on.</p> <p>Far in the distance, carried to his ear by the ground, came the muffled thud and beat of a train passing beyond the village, on the other side of the Rieben. He wished dully that he could have put his head on the rails.</p> <p class="tbrk">&nbsp;</p> <p>And the voice to which from a little lad he had never shut his ears, the humdrum, prosaic voice which had bidden him take thought for Mary Deane and her child, and Janey, and Betty Hesketh, and all who were "desolate and oppressed," that same small voice, never ignored, never silenced, spoke in Roger's aching, unimaginative heart. The train passed, and as the sound throbbed away into silence Roger longed again with passion that it had taken his life with it. And the still small voice said, "That is how Annette felt a year ago."</p> <p class="tbrk">&nbsp;</p> <p>He got up and pushed back the damp hair from his forehead. That was how Annette had felt a year ago. Poor, unwise, cruelly treated Annette! Even now, though he had heard her<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_320" id="Page_320">[Pg 320]</SPAN></span> story from her own lips, he could not believe it, could not believe that her life had ever had in it any incident beyond tending her old aunts, and watering her flowers, and singing in the choir. That was how he had always imagined her, with perhaps a tame canary thrown in, which ate sugar from her lips. If he had watched her with such a small pet he would have felt it singularly appropriate, a sort of top-knot to his ideal of her. If he had seen her alarmed by a squirrel, he would have felt indulgent; if fond of children, tender; if jealous of other women, he should not have been surprised. He had made up a little insipid picture of Annette picking flowers by day, and wrapped in maiden slumber in a white room at night. The picture was exactly as he wished her to be, and as her beautiful exterior had assured him she was. For Annette's sweet face told half the men she met that she was their ideal. In nearly every case so far that ideal had been a masterpiece of commonplace; though if prizes had been offered for them Roger would have won easily. Her mind, her character, her individuality had no place in that ideal. That she should have been pushed close up against vice; that <i>she</i>, Annette, who sang "Sun of my soul" so beautifully, should have wandered alone in the wicked streets of Paris in the dawn, after escaping out of a home wickeder still; that she should have known treachery, despair; that she should have been<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_321" id="Page_321">[Pg 321]</SPAN></span> stared at as the chance mistress of a disreputable man! <i>Annette!</i> It was incredible.</p> <p>And he had been so careful, at the expense of his love of truth, when they took refuge in Mary Deane's house, that Annette should believe Mary Deane was a married woman and her child born in wedlock. And she, whose ears must not even hear that Mary had been Dick's mistress, she, Annette, had been Dick's mistress too, if not in reality, at any rate in appearance.</p> <p>Roger's brain reeled. He had forgotten the will. His mind could grasp nothing except the ghastly discrepancy between the smug picture of Annette which he had gradually evolved, and this tragic figure, sinned against, passionate, desperate, dragging its betrayal from one man to another. Had she been Dick's mistress? Was it really possible that she had not? Who could touch pitch and not be defiled? Women always denied their shame. How hotly Mary Deane had denied hers only a few months before the birth of her child!</p> <p>Roger reddened at the thought that he was classing Annette, his beautiful lady, with Mary. Oh! where was the real truth? Who could tell it him? Whom could he trust?</p> <p>"<i>Janey.</i>"</p> <p>He said the word aloud with a cry. And Janey's small brown face rose before him as he had known it all his life, since they had been children together, she the little adoring girl, and he the big condescending schoolboy. Janey's<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_322" id="Page_322">[Pg 322]</SPAN></span> crystal truthfulness, her faithfulness, her lifelong devotion to him, became evident to him. He had always taken them for granted, known where to put his hand on them, used them without seeing them, like his old waterproof which he could lay hold of on its peg in the dark. She had always been in the background of his life, like the Rieben and the low hill behind it against the grey sky, which he did not notice when they were there, but from which he could not long absent himself without a sense of loss. And Janey had no past. He knew everything about <i>her</i>. He must go to her now, at once. He did not know exactly what he wanted to say to her. But he groped for his stick, found it, noticed that the dew was heavy and that there would be no rain after all, and set off down the invisible track in the direction of the village, winking its low lights among the trees.</p> <hr /> <p><span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_323" id="Page_323">[Pg 323]</SPAN></span></p> <div style="break-after:column;"></div><br />