Argosy (UK), January 1955 — page 55: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

THE PICTURE 53 She couldn’t bear the suspense. If in her present condition it could not be satisfied—well, how live on? Like this? Once a busy spectre begins to frequent the mind you never—she had discovered this long ago—you never know even yourself what devils it may not at length invite in. Her husband’s thinning face, those tranquil, grey-blue eyes, that had yet recently shown so many marks of weariness, what were they concealing? What could they be concealing—except thoughts, remembrances, and perhaps even gnawing regrets which she could not possibly share? How was it possible to bring him to realize what was corrod- ing away in her every vestige of her peace of mind? It was as if she had discovered a viper curled up in her work-basket. The answer to that question had stolen upon her only a day or two before. Awakened suddenly and silently in the small hours as if a cold lean hand had gently shaken her by the shoulder, the vile device seemed to have sprung up in her sleeping mind like Jonah’s gourd. This bold and too-large portrait had scarcely ever been even so much as referred to between them. Why should it have been? It portrayed, not the Harriet who six years ago had died and left him, but the Harriet of more than twenty years before that. Very — fair, yet not beautiful, at least not beautiful to most unheeding eyes. A young face, and yet a face full of the past, a face out of © some old, extravagant, romantic story, a face unaware of what just one glimpse of it might bestow, a face which if it were once beloved—no matter what might happen—could be never really unbeloved: not deep within, and never forgotten. Forgotten! Why at this moment, as if in the mere fact that it was refusing to look at her, it was an irresistible, an unendur- able reminder of her own miserable trick. Hating herself, as might a reptile engaged in devouring its own tail, she had stolen down from her bedroom in the small hours and had lit one of the candles here, on her husband’s writing-table. Not even the angel Gabriel could have persuaded him to burn electric light. Perhaps she had been not quite awake. And certainly a nightmare-mind can manage things the day-mind would retch at. However that might be, with an infinite disgust, she had at last mounted a chair and, with the utmost caution and skill, first by igniting, then by extinguishing the tiny flame, burnt through about two-thirds of the cord behind the picture—the cord by which it was suspended from the wall. comicloooks.comnn) a) ae ‘> » Mee Ow “ele bie