CHAPTER VII

A MEETING OF STARVATION AND EXCESS

Now an awful loneliness, like the loneliness of the grave, fell round Cuckoo.  Like Judas, she could have gone out and hanged herself, but for one thing, the love in her heart that seemed so useless.  In her muddled, illogical way, and to stifle gnawing thoughts of the betrayed Jessie, she dwelt upon this love of hers for Julian.  What had it ever brought her?  What had it brought him?  To her it had given many sorrows, humiliations.  She remembered them one by one, and they looked at her like ghosts.  Her dawning recognition of her own degradation never yet come to surmise; her tearing jealousy when Julian went out to do as other men did, preceded by and linked with the knowledge of that dreary incident in which she played the part of accomplice, that incident which she always believed had started him on his journey to destruction; her acquaintance with Valentine and the arrows planted in her heart by him; her despair when she learned from him her own impotence; not yet counterbalanced by full trust in herself or in her power for good, despite the faith of the doctor; her vision of the constantly falling Julian, of the stone going down in the deep sea; her desperate adherence to the doctor’s request to prove her will, rewarded now by an apparently useless starvation, and by this treacherous sale of Jessie, her truest, trustiest friend.  Cuckoo reviewed these ghosts, and no longer prayed, but cursed.  So long as she had Jessie—­she knew it now—­she had never been really quite hopeless, often as she had thought herself hopeless.  She had never even been utterly without self-respect, because Jessie had always deeply respected her and had thus given her little moments of clean and cheering confidence.  And she had never been absolutely alone.  Now she was alone, and felt like Judas, a betrayer.  By turns she thought of Julian lost and of Jessie sold to strange hands, strange hearts, in a cruel and a bitter world.  But even now she did not think much or often of herself, for Cuckoo was no egotist.  Her very lack of egotism must have been the despair of any good woman trying to rescue her.  She sat at home and starved and betrayed now, not because her egoism shrank from the touch of the men of the street, not because she had any idea of the great duty a woman owes to herself—­to keep herself pure—­but simply moved by the dogged determination to do something for Julian.  Were Julian dead Cuckoo would have gone out into Piccadilly again as of old, and earned the rent for Mrs. Brigg, and food for herself, and a sovereign or two to buy back Jessie.  The circumstances of her life had stuffed cotton wool into the ears of her soul and rendered it deaf to the voices that govern good women.  Cuckoo was pathetically incomprehensible to most people, because she was pathetically twisted in mind.  But her heart grew straight and surely towards heaven.