"Come here," said Cuckoo, leading the way into the sitting-room.
"There--there's some money for you."
Mrs. Brigg pounced on it with a vulture's eagerness.
"'Owever did yer--" she began.
But Cuckoo had rushed into the bedroom. The landlady stood with the money
in her hand, and heard the key turned in the lock of the door.
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.
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