"The Chains of Bondage."

Wairarapa Age, Volume XXXII, Issue 10039, 13 July 1910, Page 2

"The Chains of Bondage."

1 BY EMILY B. HETHERINGTON. 5 ] v Author o£—"His Colleg3 Chum," " "Worthington's $ v' Pledge," "A. liouenSant Foe." etc. 9 I I SLs £****3 «»»■ c®t o«-o> *-*» rsu t!fc

CHAPJ.ER I. IN THE DEPTHS

"Ob, to break free of tins bondage! If I could only cut myself adrift from it, utterly and forever!"

Jt was the bondage of (he ring that this woman meant, in the passionate outburst that broke fiercely from her; that bondage to which the plain gold ring that she had suddenly snatched from off her finger, as though the touch of its encircling band seared the white flesh, bound her irrevocably. For a moment it seemed as though in her passionate mood she would have flung it away from her out into the rain-swept darkness beyond the open window by which she sat, staring out with her smouldeiing eyes tragic in their intensity of feeling. A strikingly beautiful woman, looking younger than her twenty-five years. With the dark eyes that were almost as black as the masses of hair that shadowed them, and the rich colouring of this p.ear olive skin, she might almost''have been akiri in race and blood to the Romany folk in their vana out there on the hill on i the' wide, storm-beaten downs, where to-morrow's great race would be run. It was the eve of the Derby.

"Oh, if I' could only make an end of it, this life of degradation to which my marriage has dragged me down !" she whispered, this woman with the passionate eyes, across whose cheek ran a red, angry mark which the blow of her husband's clenched hand had left there. it was not the first time he had struck her. Of late when the luck had been £bad, or even when the money.'had rolled in;plentifully from a credulous racecourse crowd, to be frittered away as it had been earned, she had come to expect such treatment, or at least the taunts that were as hard to bear as blows. And she had asked herself bitterly again and again how she could have been such' a fool as to let him marry her, only to drag her down, deeper and deeper, step by step, through every year of those five married years she looked back on, and perhaps in the years before them to'sink to lower depths still. Judith Hardress clerched her hand fiercely. The inward tumult of passions was reflected in the eyes as she stared out at the storm; the wind and the rain, and the recurring peals of ihunder rolling away in dying echoes over the great downp, all seemed to harmonise with the stress of her own mood.

She glanced round the wretched, barely furnished upper room where she: was sitting alone, lighted Dy a solitary candle that wavered and guttered in the draught of the open win- ! dow —this environment so alien from the dainty refinements of life that she had once known.' The very atmosphere of her sordid surroundings seemed tainted with evil; there was evil in the rowdy, noisy voices that reached her from below, of her husband and hia associates, drinking and igambling, quarrelling over the cards, occasionally alternated by a woman's loose laugh; evil in the atmosphere of drink and stale tobacco fumes that seemed to pervade the whole oi this low lodginghouse at Epsom, where they were staying during the four days' racing of Derby week. And presently she would hear a stumbling step on the crazy stairs, and :he would come to their room quarrelsome, drunuen, quick with an ;>ath or a blow if she crossed him-— t husband, to whom she iiad linked her destiny five years ago.

"Oh, what a fool I was—what a fool!" She had snatched the ring off her finger. Her hand was raised, as if to fling it far from her, for the storm to beat upon and the datkness to hide. ''But for my child "

But for her child, whom she loved so deeply as she had learned to hate the child's father, she would not have hesitated. Just as she could have flung away that ring, so she would have followed it into the darkness, with a laugh to feel herself free at la&t; would hav£ left him, never to retiirn, but for that one thins; Her child's tiny fingers kspt the doors of her prison fast-barred upon her. She could not leave her child. With a little bitter laugh at the impotent impulse, she slipped the ring back on her finger. Only a m:racle could free her from the life she loathed-—this moving about from race meeting to race meeting, picking up a disreputable livins, the association of her husband's friends. Asid the day of miracles* was past. Jwdiih Eardress had come to hate the very name of racing. Had Bhe not cause? It was the turf and cards, j gambling in one ohape or another, that, through no fault of her own, had brought her to this. "First my father, and then my husband! 1 ' The embittered hardness of her > voice.us she spoke the words could not disguise its natural uweetness air] ciitum. In the depths as she was, there still clung about this \ woman the refinement that wus her

inalienable inheritance of birth and breeding, even as those years that had left her face hardened had add ed no coarsening touches to mar its beauty. Judith suddenly yose, an on an impulse, from her attitude of brooding thought by the window. Sue held up the candle, and gazed intently at her leflection in the dingy glass. It threw back the str!'ong, uncommon face shadowed v. uh the dark hair, the wonderful eyes, the mouth—so hard now, that was naturally so tenderly moulded, made for laughter and joy ; all that the glass revealed—and the red mark where Gilbert Hardress had struck her, in his hasty, half-drunken impatience, before he went downstairs to rejoin hia friends, the shady camp followers of race meetings, like himself—"wrong uns" all.

There was a shadow of bitterness in Judith's tace as she looked into the mirror. It might have been a magic mirror revealing the future to her, for in it she seemed to see youth and beauty passing, her best years slipping by in this sordid life into a future as hopeless Was this' all that her beauty was to bring her 9 Only that afternoon on the course she had looked, with intense envy, at ; the fashionable women-women living the untroubled life of pleasure, who walked in the paddock, or watched the races from the four-in-hands — divided from her by the width of the social world. Judith had felt, aa she watched them, that she had been robbed. These women, daintily dressed, were not more beautiful than she in her cheap, tawdy garb: and the place they occupied was her rightful place, too, only she had been made sm outcast from it through the sin of another. From girlhood onward her life had, been tainted and embittered by the faults of others, she had been forced to drain the bitter cup of humiliation; she was expiating the sin of her father, and her own folly in marrying the man who had dragged her down. And soon her youth and baauty would pass, and sue would have tasted none of the joys of life—ths ' admiration and homage that was the due of her beauty from men of that other world in which she had once moved. Now, if ever, she ought to take her fate into her uwn hands, and cut herself free —now! Only there was her child. She could not snatch at a freedom that would leave the child behind.

Judith gave a little shiver as she turned away from the glass She was a prisoner, and there was no way out that her weary eyes could see. An intense restlessness of mood filled hef; she paced up and down the She could hear the sound of noisy voices below, raised in some wrangle over the cards, amung them ! her husband's voice. The whole impure atmosphere of the place seemed suddenly insupportable. Hurriedly she pinned on her hat, threw a cloak over her shoulders, and stole quietly down the uncarpeted staircase. In the narrow hall a man had just entered the house; he glanced up to see the descending figure. As she caught sight of hira. Judith had instinctively paused, drawing back in the bend of the stairs; then, realising that Vernham had seen her, she came slowly down. The tall man at the foot of the stairs took off his hat with a sweeping flourish—a tnan of forty, in whose face, coarsened by dissipated habits, were yet hints that at one tiire ha had corn?. of a very different, class from the mujotitj? Gilbert Hardress' friends. it w/SS a face with an expansive, genial smile, that was a very valuable stock in trade to one of the most unscrupulous rogues that ever got a questionable living by his wits, "Not a very tempting night to venture out, Mrs Hardress." Vernham said, with his elaborate air of politeness that Judith hated. Still, I believe that between the showers all the fun of the fair is in progress on the Hill. May I offer myssif as an escort? Charmed, I'm sure,, And Gilbert woa't be jealous, although he's) £>ot ill & very amiable , mood to-night." . He seemed to be looking meaningly at the mark on her cheek; and Juaith winced, and a hot flush of colour swept into her face. It was an added humiliation to think that her husband's treatment of her was known to his friends. She passed by without a word. ___