But do not believe that it was anything either present or wanting in poor Janet that formed the motive of her husband’s cruelty.  Cruelty, like every other vice, requires no motive outside itself—­it only requires opportunity.  You do not suppose Dempster had any motive for drinking beyond the craving for drink; the presence of brandy was the only necessary condition.  And an unloving, tyrannous, brutal man needs no motive to prompt his cruelty; he needs only the perpetual presence of a woman he can call his own.  A whole park full of tame or timid-eyed animals to torment at his will would not serve him so well to glut his lust of torture; they could not feel as one woman does; they could not throw out the keen retort which whets the edge of hatred.

Janet’s bitterness would overflow in ready words; she was not to be made meek by cruelty; she would repent of nothing in the face of injustice, though she was subdued in a moment by a word or a look that recalled the old days of fondness; and in times of comparative calm would often recover her sweet woman’s habit of caressing playful affection.  But such days were become rare, and poor Janet’s soul was kept like a vexed sea, tossed by a new storm before the old waves have fallen.  Proud, angry resistance and sullen endurance were now almost the only alternations she knew.  She would bear it all proudly to the world, but proudly towards him too; her woman’s weakness might shriek a cry for pity under a heavy blow, but voluntarily she would do nothing to mollify him, unless he first relented.  What had she ever done to him but love him too well—­but believe in him too foolishly?  He had no pity on her tender flesh; he could strike the soft neck he had once asked to kiss.  Yet she would not admit her wretchedness; she had married him blindly, and she would bear it out to the terrible end, whatever that might be.  Better this misery than the blank that lay for her outside her married home.

But there was one person who heard all the plaints and all the outbursts of bitterness and despair which Janet was never tempted to pour into any other ear; and alas! in her worst moments, Janet would throw out wild reproaches against that patient listener.  For the wrong that rouses our angry passions finds only a medium in us; it passes through us like a vibration, and we inflict what we have suffered.

Mrs. Raynor saw too clearly all through the winter that things were getting worse in Orchard Street.  She had evidence enough of it in Janet’s visits to her; and, though her own visits to her daughter were so timed that she saw little of Dempster personally, she noticed many indications not only that he was drinking to greater excess, but that he was beginning to lose that physical power of supporting excess which had long been the admiration of such fine spirits as Mr. Tomlinson.  It seemed as if Dempster had some consciousness of this—­some new distrust of himself; for, before winter was over, it was observed that he had renounced his habit of driving out alone, and was never seen in his gig without a servant by his side.