They Live at the Marsh

She returned once to find them both dead of diphtheria. Her
husband wept aloud, unaware of everybody. But the war went on,
and soon he was back at his work. A darkness had come over
Lydia's mind. She walked always in a shadow, silenced, with a
strange, deep terror having hold of her, her desire was to seek
satisfaction in dread, to enter a nunnery, to satisfy the
instincts of dread in her, through service of a dark religion.
But she could not.

Then came the flight to London. Lensky, the little, thin man,
had got all his life locked into a resistance and could not
relax again. He lived in a sort of insane irritability, touchy,
haughty to the last degree, fractious, so that as assistant
doctor in one of the hospitals he soon became impossible. They
were almost beggars. But he kept still his great ideas of
himself, he seemed to live in a complete hallucination, where he
himself figured vivid and lordly. He guarded his wife jealously
against the ignominy of her position, rushed round her like a
brandished weapon, an amazing sight to the English eye, had her
in his power, as if he hypnotized her. She was passive, dark,
always in shadow.

He was wasting away. Already when the child was born he
seemed nothing but skin and bone and fixed idea. She watched him
dying, nursed him, nursed the baby, but really took no notice of
anything. A darkness was on her, like remorse, or like a
remembering of the dark, savage, mystic ride of dread, of death,
of the shadow of revenge. When her husband died, she was
relieved. He would no longer dart about her.