He fell on her breast, exhausted, half unconscious swimming in a sea of satisfied lewd joy, while Fanny sobbed partly in exquisite agony, and feeling a rending pain in each groin.
Sandcross rose at last, and drew the towel, now stained with blood, between her legs, trying to wipe the ensanguined secret recess. This caused her to sit up, and she hid her tearful face on her father's breast.
Now only did he feel a little uneasy. The door was actually ajar. They might have been heard? No, all was quiet. He whispered to Fanny to move gently from the bed, and placed her on the bidet. He kissed the toilet napkin with its scarlet spots, and she smiled through her tears while he did so, and as she saw him fold it up and place it in his pocket. She was not surprised, nor disgusted at seeing her father thus standing before her, his gradually shrinking instrument shamelessly dangling before her eyes.
“Do you forgive me?” he said, one tiny ray of remorse -the first and last-illumining the depths of his soul, obscured by the black clouds of incestuous lust.
“Yes, father. I love you! I regret nothing. I only want you to love me always!”
“Hush, Fan!” he rejoined, fearful as she raised her voice in her excitement. “I swear never to fail you. You're mine, doubly so, by mutual love and right of relationship. Trust in me and your life shall be one dream of happiness.”
And so they kissed again. He put her in bed and tucked her up comfortably, whispering how he had done that when she was a tiny little baby girlie. She smiled at him, gratefully and happy as an angel, as he enquired if she was in pain.
“Down there-you know, pa-between my thighs- legs, I mean. And behind too! Oh! how you hurt me! I never knew your hands were so hard!”
“Poor girl! I'll never slap you again!”
“Oh yes, you may!”
In most childish confusion she threw her white tired arms around his neck, her lips skimming over his moustache, as she murmured: “I like it! It was that spanking which made me feel I loved you, darling pa!”
As her nervous system gradually reverted to its normal state of quietude, so the babyish look returned to her violet eyes, and her face was as full of innocence as heretofore.
“Good night, my own papa! Good night, dear love – my father- and my love!”
With a last kiss – a pure, chaste touch of her closed lips this time – she turned and slept like a child, sinking at once into hearty slumber.
Sandcross looked enraptured at her for a second, and switching off the light retired on tiptoe to his own room. Two or three times did he return in the night to kiss his loving girl, who still slept on, until he dared no longer show himself as the servants arrived through the kitchen at six o'clock.
Next day, Fanny stayed in bed, scolded tenderly for her love of theatres and suppers by her affectionate mother, although she could well understand the allurement of a coup of iced consomme and a truffle or two after the enjoyment of a new play.
The guilty couple now sailed on a calm and laughing lake of unmitigated wanton voluptuousness. Sandcross and his daughter lived through a perpetual honeymoon, and the electrician's wife was charmed to see such a perfect union, suspecting of course nothing whatever. A mother is always the last to grasp the guilt of her children. Sandcross's wife compared the life of their daughter with that of other girls in Paris; fretful, bickering, coquettish maidens, suffering from green sickness, and perpetually worrying their poor parents to get them a husband so that the wayward up-to-date damsels shall be at liberty to love – other men of their own choice.
Fanny grew exceptionally obedient and meek. Her chorus of “Yes, ma!” and “Yes, pa!” would have made the recording angel retire from business, had not the devil been there to whisper in his ear the secret of incestuous lechery that kept Fanny so outwardly calm. Indeed, when matrimony was mentioned it was she who consoled her mamma, impatient to see her daughter smothered in orange-blossoms and white faille.
“What are the men about?” she would sigh, and worry her husband to leave France, and settle in England, Saxon suitors not being so mercenary as the sons of Gaul.
In the meanwhile, Fanny and her father slipped into each other's rooms at night whenever it suited them, and that was very often.
From the point of view of simple salacity, it is perfectly certain that nothing can equal the enjoyment to be found with a young girl, really loving the man who has deflowered her. Her sensual being gradually develops in the arms of a male who is, for the time being, all in all to her-the one man in whom every thought and desire is centred. The surprises of slowly approaching womanhood, and the first thrills of ravishing, immodest pleasure and pruriency have all arisen in her under his influence. She becomes his devoted slave, thankful for a kiss, and brimming over with gratitude for the deeper insidious final caress when he chooses to bestow it upon her.
There was another and more cynical standpoint which we must not forget, which will rejoice the heart of all those who find the power of their passions weirdly increased by inflicting punishment upon the object of their affections. To be able to hurt the loved one, mingling pleasure and pain at one's sweet will, certain that the dolent martyr will eagerly kiss the hand that brandishes the birch, is not that a most enchanting dream of overpowering delight?
Fanny's first sensual spasm was due to spanking, and the desire to be flogged would thus last all her life, inseparable from other yearnings. A young woman, whipped by her first lover, nearly always falls under the spell of the enchanted twigs. It seems as if the rod, red-hot, burnt into the brain, indelibly searing the imagination of the so-called victim. Such is the invisible brand of the birch.
Papa taught her everything that a woman could possibly require to know, especially those tit-bits of refined scientific stupration which females are generally better without. What a difference to the half-veiled semi- falsehoods of her silly governesses! Here was practice and theory.
What delighted Fanny most was Sandcross's staff of life itself; the tremendous instrument from which had sprung the mysterious germ of her existence. Alone with her father, she must need free the blind bird from its cage, and at rest, or proudly standing, it was unceasingly the object of her wondering admiration. She would play with it for hours, kissing it, talking to it, purring over it, examining it as if she saw it for the first time whenever her avidious hand dived deeply down in the folds of her father's underwear. When her eager, tickling touches caused her pa's excitement to bring him close to the goal of the orgasm, she fell back on his big hairy purse, playfully handling and dandling the slumbering olives which she deliriously exclaimed were her twin idols. She had sprung from their white foam like another Venus rising from a sea of sperm, and now they gave her the sole pleasure she hungered for in this world. How could she help worshipping them?
There was not the slightest shadow of repentance or remorse to darken the dazzling path leading through their waking dream of highly refined voluptuousness, and if it were possible for either of them to have given utterance to any inward prayer whatsoever, they would have lifted up their hearts in some song of touching, joyful thanksgiving to the unknown power that had created the daughter for the father, and the father for the daughter.
Fanny, by dint of perpetually playing a part, grew in time to be a most perfect actress and a ready, able, tricky liar. She gloried in her hypocrisy, and now and then amused herself by skating on the thinnest of ice, tempting Providence, and abandoning her mouth and body to the most shameless caresses, before her mother's back was scarcely turned.
Sandcross developed a new malady which he had invented himself-a kind of intermittent insomnia. He had irregular attacks of sleeplessness, enabling him to wander about the house at nights, and thus furnishing excuses for all noises and sounds of footsteps which might be heard in the small hours. His only cure was a glass of soda- water liberally dashed with spirits about two in the morning, with a cigar-and his wily, lustful daughter of the innocent violet eyes, to keep him company. She would then read to him chapters from ultra-naughty novels in French, English, and German, printed on the sly, and soon was a walking encyclopedia of love, passion, and bawdiness. She rolled with radiant ecstasy in the slough of her shame, proud of being her own father's mistress, and always eager to learn fresh secrets of licentiousness.
In spite of all his scoldings and alarms she would never permit him those exercises known to Malthusian couples as “withdrawing', nor practise any fraudulent tricks to hinder conception. Copulation, without the final shower of soft seed, she opined was like kissing a woman or a priest, something very nice, but detestably incomplete. If she fell in the family way, she declared she would retire to Switzerland, or Belgium, and under a false name bring her dear baby into the world. She unblushingly declared to her father that she secretly longed to find herself enceinte, and would be pleased beyond measure to bear a boy, for preference, the picture she hoped of the
