So Evil My Love

— 1 —There was very little for her to see as Mrs. Sacret closed the mean door on her empty home. There was no one in the street of small, ugly houses, the sky was a fleckless and pallid blue, the highroad that closed the vista showed cheap shops that were shuttered against the bleak Sunday, wisps of straw and paper lay in the gutter. Mrs. Sacret paused and contemplated her surroundings with resentment that was the more acute as she realized that she was not more attractive than her neighborhood. A slight woman, thirty years of age, with ordinary features, hazel-colored hair and eyes and a subdued bearing, her graceful figure and feet were hidden under the shabby bombazine of a widow’s mourning. Wrinkled cotton gloves concealed her hands; a black straw bonnet was tied by black ribbons under her chin and a crape veil concealed her face; she wore a silver brooch from which hung a cross twisted with a spray of ivy. Her pretty feet were deformed by trodden-over boots, their elastic sides were revealed as she bunched up her long skirts, awkwardly full in the gathers, under her mantle; her clothes had been made in meek and resigned imitation of the fashions worn by gentlewomen. Mrs. Sacret had passed a dull day in considering her future, a subject that she could not hope anyone was interested in, besides herself. The widow of a missionary whose life and death were obscure, who had bequeathed her but a few hundred pounds and the little house before which she now hesitated, she had, since her return to England three months ago, been seeking a livelihood with daily increasing eagerness. At first she had felt sure that some mission or society concerned with the spreading of the gospel message or the lot of the industrious poor would have secured her services as secretary or manageress, as matron or sister, and she was familiar with many who were ably directing the labors of those hard-working men and women employed in converting heathens abroad, or rescuing paupers at home. Mrs. Sacret had not only failed to obtain any such post; she had been made to realize the social disadvantages attaching to Dissent. In Jamaica these had not been obvious; if the Sacrets’ humble mission was ignored by the Church of England chaplains, it was also respected by the Nonconformists among the sugar planters, and looked up to with awe by the n*****s who transformed all brands of Christianity into melody and color. In London Mrs. Sacret found the dividing line had become a wall—“only a Dissenter” was a usual term that dismissed as beneath notice the followers of a movement that had once overturned the country. Thus forced back on the organizations run by sects of her late husband’s beliefs, or near them, she had found them poor, largely run by volunteers, and indifferent to her plight. Frederick Sacret had not been in any way distinguished from his fellows save by certain good looks and attractions discernible only by his wife, and by her forgotten long before his death from yellow fever in a Kingstown hospital. Nor was she, the daughter of a medical man and an Anglican, without a stiff gentility that made her slightly ungracious even when asking for a favor, and posts such as she wanted were, as she soon discovered, largely given as favors. Still pausing in the empty street, her situation confronted her once more in the inner chamber of her mind where her alarmed wits sat in council. Her parents had died when she, an only child, was a girl. Such relatives as she had were remote strangers; she was sure they would repudiate her and her misfortunes. An attempt to approach them on her marriage had led to rebuffs. Her father, who had never been more than the least popular doctor at Ball’s Pond, Islington, was supposed by his family to have lowered his class, that of small Kent squires, by marrying the daughter of a local haberdasher, and Olivia, his child, had certainly descended again, by choosing a Dissenter and a missionary for her husband. The friends she had made at the Clapham School where she had been educated through the exertions and privations of her parents were scattered. She was never noticed either by mistresses or scholars and she had been at the select establishment only a year, for when her father died it was no longer possible to pay the fees. One girl had been kind, generous, even a little loving to the austere, plain and poor Olivia Gladwin, the pretty creature who had been Susan Freeman, then Susan Dasent, and who was now Susan Rue. Mrs. Sacret thought of Susan as she walked slowly along Minton Street toward drab High Street. She had last seen her former schoolfellow three years ago, when she, the amiable Susan, had been herself a widow, the wealthy Mrs. Dasent; then Olivia Sacret had sought her out and the two women had been very friendly. The episode stood out clearly in Mrs. Sacret’s memory, as an exciting space of time, filled with a variety of interesting events, a short interlude in a monotonous life, for the Sacrets had gone to Jamaica a few months after the revival of the schoolgirl intimacy. Their correspondence, at first expansive, had soon ceased, for Susan Dasent could not write more than a scrawl, as Mrs. Sacret, who had so often done her lessons for her at the Clapham School, well knew, and was too lazy to continue even to send scrawls to the woman, who, in every sense of the word, had left her world. A printed card with a penciled greeting had informed Mrs. Sacret of Susan’s second marriage, a year ago. The address was that of a hired home at Clapham. She had not replied and when she had returned to London she had not known where Susan lived; they had no common friend nor acquaintance, the circles in which they moved did not touch anywhere. Though by birth at least equal, for Susan’s father was a city tea merchant, and Dr. Gladwin would have considered him his inferior, the delicate intricacies of London society, as finely balanced as a precise work of art, sharply divided the dissenting missionary’s widow from the wife of the prosperous and well-placed banker, Martin Rue. Mrs. Sacret, however, on this dull Sunday afternoon, was resolved to attempt the renewal of the lost friendship. She used that word, firmly, in her mind; yes, she affirmed, it had been friendship between herself and Susan, who had been so lucky with her inherited fortune and her two opulent marriages. Susan who had always been so indulged and flattered, not only because of her wealth, but because she was pretty, easy and soft, good-natured, with charming flattering manners. Even if Susan Rue had been in the place of Olivia Sacret, she would have done much better for herself than the missionary’s widow could do. She was so gentle, affectionate and helpless that someone would have been sure to rescue her from any distress, while no one ever felt much compassion for Olivia Sacret, with her independent air and the hint of irony in her intelligent glance. The lonely woman turned into High Street, then proceeded along it to the right; she had some way to walk; the omnibuses were infrequent and she avoided them whenever possible, as an affront to her gentility. She felt some satisfaction in her health. She had always been strong, the climate of Jamaica had not affected her native vigor, and she was well able to undertake the two miles or so to her destination, which was the Old Priory, Tintern Road, Clapham. Yesterday she had seen this address in the Morning Post that she had purchased in order to read the column headed SITUATIONS VACANT. Nothing had been on offer that she did not shrink from applying for, and it had been with a listless sigh that she had turned over the journal and stared absently at COURT AND SOCIETY. There she had seen the announcement of the return of Mr. and Mrs. Martin Rue from Florence to their new house in Clapham. So Susan, after hotels and hired homes, had now “a place of her own.” At first Mrs. Sacret, lonely in her tiny parlor, had smiled sarcastically. Susan was being ostentatious, she did not come of a class that considered its movements of public interest, nor was her present position, solid as it was, comparable to the least of those remotely connected with the court. She had wasted her guineas to pay for this insertion at the bottom of a gazette to which her husband’s wealth just permitted her an entrance. Then another thought had entered the keen brain of Mrs. Sacret and she had stared at the print as if something extremely useful had been put into her hand, a purse of gold, a weapon of defense and assault, or a rope with which to haul herself from the misfortunes that threatened to suck her down from her precarious comfort and respectability. Here was the address of a friend, she emphasized the word, who would, in many ways, help her, despite the difference in their positions and the length of time since they had met. She was proud with the pride that is the only possible defense against the humiliations inflicted on genteel poverty, with the pride nourished jealously by the woman, chaste as maid, wife and widow, in a society where this virtue is no passport to ease or pleasure, with the pride of the Christian missionary who has been in spiritual domination over the heathen, and proud with the aggressive pride of a Dissenter, secretly ashamed of having left the ranks of a church that the Nonconformists might consider in serious, even damnable, error, but that English society held in unshakeable esteem. Moreover, she believed in God, she knew herself for a righteous, self-sacrificing woman who desired nothing from life save a decent position where she could maintain her genteel pretensions and expend her energies in good works. The little house in Minton Street, and a daily maidservant, some place of consideration among her fellows and she believed she would be contented. The poverty of her childhood, her humble marriage, a dread of sinking to menial labor, unavowed fears of loneliness and the passive scorn or apathy of strangers who glanced at her once and never again, all made her cautious, unambitious, anxious for security. Three months ago she had not wanted to know Susan’s address; she had even hoped that chance would not bring them together, their characters and fortunes were so ill-adjusted. Mrs. Sacret knew that she herself was intelligent, well informed, industrious and resolute, while Susan was stupid, ignorant, idle and weak. Even their names jarred on their circumstances; the ambitious haberdasher’s daughter who had married above her class had christened her child the romantic Olivia, from the heroines of an old play and an old novel, while the wealthy, prosaic parents of Susan had chosen the unpretentious name of an equally wealthy aunt who had been godmother to their heiress. Mrs. Sacret had persuaded herself that she no longer wished to have any concern in the frivolous useless existence of Susan Rue. She had nearly destroyed the packet of foolish letters her friend had written to her during that brief return of their school days’ intimacy, three years ago, when Susan had been so excited over her own affairs and so eager to confide in Olivia, who had been her stay and comfort at Miss Mitchell’s Establishment for the Daughters of Gentlemen. But now, the withering of her hopes, the pressure of her loneliness, the curiosity and envy engendered by solitary brooding, overcame her pride, compounded of such varying emotions, and she walked steadily toward the Old Priory, Clapham. She was not sure that she wished to meet Susan, to risk finding her among smart, fashionable friends, but to look at the Rues’ house, to learn the measure of their affluence—she considered that worth while. At the least it made a point to the empty Sunday afternoon, it would be an excuse for not attending the chapel in Gervase Square for the evening service.—“I went to see an old friend”—No one would miss her at that comfortable gathering, for she always kept herself apart, obviously superior to her company. As she steadily walked along High Street, between the shuttered shops, she thought of the gray chapel with distaste; if the Dissenters did not soon find work for her, she would return to the Church. An Evangelical clergyman would accept her without much demur. She had been brought up in those orthodox tenets, therefore it had been very easy to visit the Ball’s Pond Chapel now and then when the preacher was of a particular repute, and there she had met Frederick Sacret. She liked his name, one letter altered and it would be “Secret”; life was only tolerable because of secrets hidden within her mind, guarded, seldom considered, never revealed.