There came a dreadful misgiving to her. She clutched her father’s arm as they stood together on the road.
“You are sure?” she said in a low voice, with her eyes looking at him with something of fierceness in their expression. “There is no mistake—no possibility of a mistake? Remember what the man was—a trickster—unscrupulous—you are sure? Is that a letter—a paper?”
“A paper,” he said—“several papers. There can be no doubt about it. And don’t speak ill of him now, Priscilla. You will be sorry for it. He died the death of a man. However bad his life may have been, he made up for it in his death.”
“A hero?” she said, and she was smiling so that her father was angered.
“I would not have believed it of you; it is unnatural,” he said. “Have you no sense of what’s proper—what’s decent?”
“I have no sense that makes me be a hypocrite,” she said. “The man cheated me—he was within an hour or two of making me the most pitiful creature. As it was he made me the laughing-stock of the world. No one thought of my misfortune in being married to an impostor, a criminal, and having my life ruined by him. Every one took it for granted that I was a poor weak creature, on the look-out for a husband and ready to jump at the first suitor who turned up. What could I long for but his death? What chance should I have of doing anything in the world so long as he was alive and married to me? What could I long for but his death? At first it was mine that I longed for; but then I saw that to long for his was more sensible—more in keeping with the will of Heaven.”
“The will of Heaven! How can you talk like that, Priscilla?”
“If God has any idea of justice—of right and wrong—as we have been taught to regard right and wrong by those who assure us that they have been let into some of His secrets—it could not be His will that I should have my life wrecked by that man. I felt that I was born for something better, and so I hoped that he would die. Now that by the goodness of God he is dead, shall I not be grateful? Oh, what fools! standing here on the roadside discussing a delicate point in theology instead of talking over the good news!”
He looked at her for a few stern moments, and then thrust into her hand a bundle of papers.
“Read them for yourself,” he said. “I am going into the town. I don’t want to be by while you are chuckling over the death of a man—a man who died as the noblest man might be proud to die—trying to save his fellow creatures from destruction. Read those papers for yourself, and then ask God to forgive you for your dreadful words.”
“He died like a hero,” she murmured, taking the papers; and then she smiled again.
Her father was striding down the hill; the self-respecting gait of the churchwarden was his—the uncompromising stride of the man who worshipped the Conventional, and never failed to go to church for this purpose, returning to eat a one o’clock dinner of roast sirloin and Yorkshire pudding.
She watched him for some time, and the smile had never left her face. Then she looked strangely at the bundle of papers which he had flung at her—his action had suggested flinging them—in his wrath at her utterance of all that had been in his own heart for more than a year.
She glanced at the papers. They were Canadian, she saw, and they were profuse in the display of strong lettering in the headlines of the columns that met her eyes. It seemed as if the half-column of headlines was designed to exhibit the resources of the typefounders. She saw, without unfolding the papers, that they referred to a wreck that had taken place off the coast of Nova Scotia, great stress being laid on the fact that sixteen lives were lost, and that a man who had tried to carry a line ashore from the wreck had been swept away to destruction. “A Hero’s Death!” was the headline that called attention to this detail.
She folded the papers back into their creases. She felt that she could not do full justice on the open road to the matter with which they dealt. She must hurry home and read every line in the seclusion of her own room. In the same spirit she had occasionally hurried to her home with a new novel by a favourite author under her arm. Nothing must disturb her. She must be allowed to gloat over every line—to dwell lovingly upon the bold lettering of the headings, “A Hero’s Death!”
She almost ran along the road in her eagerness; and now her elation had increased so greatly that she felt it to be indecent—almost disgraceful—all that her father had suggested that it was. It was all very well for her to be conscious of a certain amount of satisfaction on learning that she was released from the dreadful bondage which compelled her to be the wife of a convict, but it was quite another matter to feel herself lilting that comic opera air, “I’ll kiss you and die like a ‘ero”; and, when she succeeded in banishing that ridiculous melody from buzzing in her ears, to be conscious of the rattle of the drum and the trumpet call of the cornet introducing Don César’s singing of “Let me like a soldier fall” in the opera of “Maritana.” But there they went on in her ears—the banjo-bosh of the one and the swashbuckler’s swagger of the other, accepting the beat of her hastening feet for theirtempo. The more she hurried, the more rapidly the horrid tuney things went on; and she had a dreadful feeling of never being able to escape from them.
She was doomed for her wickedness to be haunted by those jingles for evermore.
Of course she had no idea that she was on the verge of hysteria; but her father would have known, if he had had any experience of the range of human emotion outside the profitable working of a large farm, that hysteria must be the sequel to that unnatural calm which his daughter had shown on learning that the man to whom she had bound herself was dead.
It was not, however, until she had reached her home and had gone very slowly upstairs to her room, that the buzzing and the lilting and the tinkling of tunes in her ears rushed together in a horrible terrifying jingle, and she cried out, flinging herself upon her bed in a paroxysm of wild tears and falsetto sobs. The reaction had come, and borne her down beneath its mad rush upon her.
When she became calm once more she had a sense of having been absurdly weak in failing to keep herself well in hand. She could not understand how it was that she had let herself behave so foolishly. If the man had been her lover she could not have been more upset by the news of his death, she thought.
But the thing had happened, however, and she felt that she might rest confident that it would never happen again. So she bathed her face and brushed her hair and set herself down to her newspapers on the seat at her open window. The sky was blue above the Downs, and the rain had left in the air a clean taste. In the meadow there were countless daffodils, and the afternoon sun was glistening upon the rain drops in their bells and on the blades of the emerald grasses of the slope. From the great brown field that was being ploughed came the rich smell of moist earth and the varying notes of the ploughman’s words to his team. When he got to the end of the furrow nearest to the farmhouse she heard his words clearly; then he turned, and his voice became indistinct as he plodded slowly on in the other direction. From the clumps of larch in the paddock came the cawing of innumerable rooks, but the song of the lark fell to her ears from the blue sky itself.
She sat for a long time with the newspapers in her lap. She had not for many months felt so restful as she did now. It seemed to her that she had been in prison for more than a year. She had heard through iron bars all the sounds that were now coming from the earth and the air and the sky, but she had not been able to enjoy them; on the contrary, they had irritated her, reminding her of the liberty which had once been hers, but which (she had felt) she was never again to know.
And now...
She sat there living in the luxury of that sense of freedom which had come to her—that sense of restfulness—of exquisite peace—the peace of God that passeth understanding. It had come to her straight from God, she felt. Although she had shown but little faith in the goodness of God, still He had not forgotten her. The words of the hymn came to her memory:—
‘’God moves in a mysterious way
His wonders to perform,
He plants His footsteps in the sea
And rides upon the storm.”
Ah! yes, it was His hand that had passed through the air, and that storm had rushed down upon that ship; it was His footsteps that had stirred up the seas to engulf it and that wretch who had tried to wreck her life—ah! it was he who had been the first to suffer wreck! Poor wretch! Poor wretch! In the course of her large thoughts of the mercy and justice of God she could even feel a passing current of pity for the wretch; but it was one of very low voltage: it would not have caused more than the merest deflection of the most sensitive patho-meter. When she had sighed “Poor wretch!” it was gone. Still she knew that she was no longer the hard woman that she had been ever since she had stood by the church porch and had watched the policeman putting the handcuffs on the man whom she had just married, and had heard his saturnine jest about having put a ring on her finger and then having bracelets put on his wrists. It was that hardness which had then come into her nature that caused her to speak to her father with such bitterness when he had met her with his news on the road.
But now she was changed. She would ask her father’s forgiveness, and perhaps he would understand her, though she did not altogether understand herself.
And still the newspapers lay folded in her lap; and her memory began to review in order the incidents that had led up to that catastrophe of fourteen months ago. It was when she was visiting her aunt Emily that she had met him.
But her memory seemed determined to show itself a more complete recorder than she had meant it to be of everything connected with this matter. It carried her back to the earlier days when her hair had been hanging down her back, and her aunt had had long consultations with her mother on the subject of her education. “Befitting for a lady”—that had been her aunt’s phrase—she, Priscilla, was to be educated in such a way as was befitting for a lady. Aunt Emily was herself a lady; she had done much better than her sister, Priscilla’s mother, who had only become a farmer’s wife. To be sure Phineas Wadhurst was not to be classed among the ordinary farmers of the neighbourhood, who barely succeeded in getting a living out of the land. The Wadhursts had been on their farm for some hundreds of years, and their names were to be read on a big square tablet in the church with 1581 figuring as the first date upon it. Some of them had made the land pay, but others had spent upon it the money that these had bequeathed to them, without prospering. It was old Phineas Wadhurst that had done best out of it, and when he died he had left to his son a small fortune in addition to a well-stocked farm.
But before many years had passed young Phineas, who had the reputation of being the longest-headed man that had ever been a Wadhurst, perceived that the conditions under which agriculture was carried on with a profit had changed considerably. He saw that the day of English wheat was pretty nearly over, but that if the day of wheat was over, the day of other things was dawning, and it was because he became the pioneer of profits that people called him long-headed. While his neighbours grumbled he experimented. The result was that in the course of five years he was making money more rapidly than it had ever been made out of the wheat. “Golden grain,” it had been called long ago. Phineas Wadhurst smiled. Golden butter was what he had his eye on—golden swedes which he grew for his cattle, so that every bullock became bullion and every heifer a mint.
And then he did a foolish thing. He got married.
The woman he chose was a “lady.” The English agriculturist’s ideal lady is some one who has had nothing to do with farming all her life; just as his ideal gentleman is a retired English shopkeeper. Eleanor Glynde was one of the daughters of a hardworking doctor in general practice in the little town of Limborough.
She was an austere woman of thirty, of a pale complexion, which in the eyes of every agricultural community is the stamp of gentility in a lady. Mrs. Wadhurst took no interest in the cultivation of anything except her own pallor. She had once been known as the Lily of Limborough, and she lived in the perpetual remembrance of this tradition. She did not annoy her husband very much; and though there were a good many people who said that Phineas Wadhurst would have shown himself to be longer-headed if he had married a woman in his own station in life, who would have looked after the dairy and kept all the “hands” busy, yet the man felt secretly proud of his wife’s idleness and of her attention to her complexion. She read her novels and worked in crewels, and after five years became the mother of a girl, who grew up to be an extremely attractive creature, but a creature of whom her mother found great difficulty in making a lady.
Mrs. Wadhurst’s ideal lady did not differ greatly from the ideal of the agriculturists; only she added to their definition a rider that she was to be one who should be visited by Framsby. To be on visiting terms with Framsby represented the height of her social ambition.
But Framsby is a queer place. It has eight thousand inhabitants and three distinct “sets” of gentility. The aristocracy of the town is made up of the family of a land agent, the family of a retired physician, the family of a solicitor still in practice, the family of a clergyman’s widow, whose grandfather once “had the hounds,” as she tells you before you have quite made up your mind whether the day is quite wonderful for this time of the year, or if you mean to attend the forthcoming Sale of Work. These and the elderly wife of a retired colonial civil servant made up the ruling “set” at Framsby. They were on golfing terms with the other sets, but socially they declined to look on them as their equals. The other sets consisted of the bank managers, two of the three doctors and their families—for some reason or other the third doctor, with a foolish talkative wife and a couple of exceedingly plain daughters, hadentréeat the aristocratic gatherings—a couple of retired officers of Sappers and their families, and some officials, the county surveyor, the master of the grammar school, and the manager of the brewery, each with hisentourage.
Of course the clergymen of the Established Church and their families were,ex officio, members of all sets, but it was clearly understood by the ruling party that they were only admitted on sufferance—they must at all times recollect that they were only honorary members, without any power of voting or vetoing on any of the great questions of leaving cards on strangers, or of the membership of the Badminton Club.
And the funny part of the matter was that while the members of the best set were neither people of good family nor people who were in the least degree interesting in themselves, whereas several of the other set were both well born and educated, no one was found to dispute the fact that the one was the right set and the other the wrong set.
When a girl in the wrong set was spoken to or patronized by a frump in the other, she showed herself to be greatly pleased, and became quite cool and “distant” with her own associates; and when one of the frumps snubbed the ambitions of a girl in the wrong set, all the other girls in the wrong set became chilling in their attitude to that girl; and a knowledge of these facts may perhaps account for the impression which was very general in other parts of the county that Framsby was a queer place, and that its precious “sets” might be roughly classified as toads and toadies. It was clearly understood that Framsby was an awful place for strangers to come to. No matter how clever they were—no matter how greatly distinguished in the world outside Framsby—they were not visited, except by the tradesmen, until they had been resident for at least two years. This circumstance, however, by no means raised an insurmountable barrier between them and the people who were hunting up subscribers for some of their numerous “objects.” The newcomers were invariably called on for subscriptions by the very cream of the aristocracy of Framsby—subscriptions to the Hospital, to the Maternity Home, to the School Treats, to the Decayed Gardeners’ Fund, the Decayed Gentlewomen’s Fund, the Poor Brave Things’ Fund, the Zenana Missions Fund, the Guild of St. Michael and All Angels Fund, the Guild of Repentant Motherhood (affiliated with the Guild of St. Salome), and the Guild of Aimless Idlers. These and a score of equally excellent “objects” were without any delay brought under the notice of all newcomers; so that if the old inhabitants showed themselves to be extremely discourteous and inhospitable in regard to strangers, it must be acknowledged that they made up for their neglect of social “calls” by the frequency and the persistence of their visitations when they thought there was anything to be got out of them.
And these were the people for whose patronage Phineas Wadhurst’s wife pined all her life, and it was solely that her daughter might one day be received by some of the best set in Framsby that she agreed with her sister that Priscilla should be “finished” at a school the fees of which were notoriously exorbitant.
This was the point at which Priscilla’s review of the past began while she sat on her chair that afternoon, when for the first time for a year she had a sense of peace—a sense of her life being cleansed from some impurity that had been clinging to it. It was the sense of the rain-washed air that induced this feeling; and she smiled while she remembered how, even so long ago as the time of which she was thinking, she had been amused by the seriousness with which her pale mother and her aunt Emily discussed the likelihood there was that when the fact of her being “finished” at that expensive school should be reasonably presented to the right people at Framsby, it would prove irresistible as a claim upon their compassion, so that they would come to visit her in flocks.
Alas! she had gone to the expensive school and had learned when there a great number of things—some of them not even charged for in the long list of extras; but still she was only regarded by the great people of Framsby as a farmer’s daughter. Nay, several of the wrong set who had been on visiting terms with Mrs. Wadhurst took umbrage at the girl’s being sent to a school to which they could not afford to send their daughters; and they talked of the great evils that frequently resulted from a girl being educated “above her station”—Priscilla remembered the ridiculous phrase for many days. But whatever their ideas on proportionate education may have been, Priscilla was educated. She took good care that she had everything that her father’s money was paid for her to acquire. She did not mean to be over-exacting, but the truth was that she had a passion for learning everything that could be taught to her; and she easily took every prize that it was possible for her to take at the school.
But still the best set showed no signs of taking her up; and whatever chance she had of this form of rapture vanished on that day when, at a local bazaar, a young Austrian prince who spoke no English, was a visitor. He had been brought by Mrs. Bowlby-Sutherst, but that lady, having another engagement in the town, had asked one of the best set to lead him to some person who could speak German. But a full parade of all the members of the best set failed to yield even one person who could speak one word of that language. They were all smiling profusely, but they smiled in English, and the prince knew no English. Mrs. Bowlby-Sutherst was in despair, when suddenly Miss Caffyn, the daughter of the Rector of St. Mary’s in the Meadows, brought up, without a word of warning, Priscilla Wadhurst, offering the great lady a personal guarantee that she would have no difficulty with the prince.
Of course Mrs. Bowlby-Sutherst was delighted. She saw that Miss Wadhurst was the most presentable girl in the hall, and she made no enquiry respecting her lineage or the armorial bearings of her father, but at once presented her to the young man, and noticed with great interest that she was not in the least fluttered at the honour; she was as much at her ease with him as if she had been in the habit of meeting princes all her life. She chattered to Prince Alex in his own language quite briskly, and for an hour and a half she had him all to herself, and delivered him up at the end of that time safe and sound to Mrs. Bowlby-Sutherst, on that lady’s return.
This incident, taken in connection with its illustration in a London paper through the medium of an enterprising snap-shottist on the staff of the localGazette, in which Priscilla “came out” extremely well, ruined whatever chance she might once have had of being visited by Framsby’s best. They ignored her existence upon every occasion when they might reasonably have been expected to notice her; and the failure of her plans was too much for her mother. The lingering Lily of Limborough took to her bed—she had taken to her sofa the year before—and never held up her head afterwards.
And all the time that she was complaining of the want of appreciation of Framsby for all those accomplishments which constitute a “lady,” she was imploring her daughter to make her a promise that she would not spend her future in so uncongenial a neighbourhood. Her aunt Emily, the wife of a prosperous brewer in a minor way in one of the largest cities in the Midlands, had joined her voice with that of Mrs. Wadhurst in this imploration; and with a view of giving her a chance of forming a permanent connection far away from the detestable place, had insisted on her paying several visits of some months’ duration to her own house, and had presented to her favourable consideration more than one eligible man.
Somehow nothing came of these attentions, and Mrs. Wadhurst became gradually more feeble. Then all at once there appeared on the scene a gentleman named Blaydon, who occupied a good position in one of the great mercantile firms of the Midland city, having come there some years before from his home in Canada. He was greatly “smitten”—the expression was to be found in one of Aunt Emily’s letters—with Priscilla, and there could be no doubt as to his intentions. There was none when he proposed to her, and was rejected.
He went away, sunk into the depths of an abyss of disappointment. And then it was that Aunt Emily threw up her hands in amazement. She wished to know whom the girl expected to marry—she, the daughter of a farmer—a wealthy and well-to-do farmer, to be sure, but still nothing more than a farmer. Did she look for a peer of the realm—a duke—or maybe a baronet or a prince? And Mr. Blaydon had eight hundred a year and a good situation. Moreover he had been told that her father was a farmer, and yet he had behaved as a gentleman!
What, in the face of all this impetuosity, was Priscilla’s plaint that she had no affection for the man—that she felt she could not be happy with him—that she was not the sort of wife that such a man wanted?
Aunt Emily ridiculed her protests. They were artificial, she affirmed. They were the result of reading foolish novels in foreign languages; and in a year or two she would find out the mistake she was making—yes, when it would be too late—too late!
Priscilla fled to her home, but only to find that the story of her folly, of her flying in the face of Providence—the phrase was Aunt Emily’s—had got there before her.
Within a week she had written accepting Mr. Blaydon. Her mother—her dying mother—backed up by her father, had brought this about. She had implored Priscilla to accept the man.
“My last words to you, my child—think of that,” she had said. “The last request of a dying mother anxious for her child’s happiness. I tell you, Priscilla, that I shall die happy if I can see you safely married to a man who will take you away from this neighbourhood. If you refuse, what will be your reflections so long as you live? You will have it on your soul that you refused to listen to the last prayer of your dying mother.”
The girl made a rush for the writing-table with her heart full of anger and her eyes full of tears. But she wrote the letter, and the ardent and eligible Mr. Blaydon came down to Framsby, and they were married one February morning in Athalsdean Church, and he was arrested on a charge of embezzlement when they were in the act of leaving the sacred building. The police officers had arrived ten minutes too late.
It was the sentiment of the young and innocent wife, dwelt on so pathetically by his counsel—“Was it right that she, that guileless girl, should be made to suffer for a crime of which she was as innocent as an infant unborn?” he enquired—it was this sentiment that caused the jury to recommend him to mercy and the judge to sentence him to one year’s imprisonment only, from the date of his committal.
He went to prison, and Priscilla went home, and continued to call herself by her maiden name—was she not as a maiden entitled to it? she asked. Six weeks later her mother died; and now...
Every incident in this year of dreadful unrest passed through the mind of the girl sitting at the window, breathing of the clear air of this April afternoon, and feeling that rest had come to her at last. In the force of that review of the bitter past fresh upon her she wondered how she had ever had the courage to do all that she had done since. How had she ever been able to hold up her head walking through the streets of Framsby? How had it been possible for her, within three months of her marriage, to go about as if the only event that had made a mark upon her life was the funeral of her mother? She remembered how she had felt when, on going into Framsby for the first time in her black dress, she saw the interested expression that came over the faces of all the people whom she knew by sight. Every one gazed at her with that same look of curiosity that came to them when a celebrity chanced to visit the town. And upon that very first day she had met one of the ladies of the best set walking with her two daughters. She had seen them nudge one another and pass on a whisper, and then a little curious smile while she was still a good way off. The smile—and it was a very detestable one—lasted until she had walked past them. Another of the same set was with a stranger on the opposite side of the street, and Priscilla saw her point her out furtively to the stranger, and then over the back of her hand, explain what was the exact nature of the interest that attached to her.
A third lady—she was the wife of the retired colonial civil servant—had shown worse taste still; for although she had never spoken a word to Priscilla in all her life, yet now she stopped her and expressed her deep sympathy for her in “that sad affair,” asking her what her plans were for the future, and saying, “Of course you will leave this neighbourhood as soon as you can.”
How had she borne it all, she now asked herself. How had she the courage to face those people who seemed to think that that blow which had fallen on her had somehow brought Framsby within measurable distance of being thought disreputable by the world at large? But she had not merely borne it all, she had nerved herself to appear in public more frequently than she had ever done, and she went to help her friend Rosa Caffyn at the entertainment the wife of the Rector of St. Mary’s in the Meadows was getting up in the Rectory grounds for the new Nurses’ Home.
It was on account of her unbending attitude under the burden that she had to bear, that Rosa had talked with admiration of her confronting Fate and her splendid rebellion against what the Rector had claimed to be the heavy hand of a Power to whose mandates we should all be cheerfully resigned. Rosa was resolute in declining to accept the theories of the pulpit on the subject of cheerful resignation. How could she accept them, she asked, when her father refused to be either cheerful or resigned in such comparatively small dispensations of Providence as a cook with a heavy hand in the peppering of soups, or a parlourmaid with a passion for arranging the papers in his study?
But if Priscilla now found difficulty in understanding how she had had the resolution to face the world of Framsby as if nothing had happened, she did not fail to feel that her attitude was worthy of admiration, and she knew that it had received the admiration of Framsby in general, though the best set had felt scandalized by it. She had received many tokens of what she felt to be the true sympathy of the ordinary people of the town. A solicitor in the second set had offered to make an application to the courts of law—he was justifiably vague in their definition—to have her marriage rendered null and void, assuring her that he would do everything at his own expense. (He was well known to be an enterprising young man.) Many other and even more gracefully suggested evidences of the sympathy which was felt for her outside the jealously-guarded portals of the “right set” were given to her. In the eyes of the young men she had always been something of a heroine, and this matrimonial adventure of hers had not only established her claims to be looked on as a heroine, it had endowed her with the halo of a saint as well. And thus it was that, when she had appeared on the platform so fearlessly, and with a complete ignoring of the head-shakings and lip-pursings of the front rows, she had been received with the heartiest applause, very disconcerting to Mr. Kelton, who had never before in the whole course of his amateur experience known of an ordinary accompanist so “blanketing” a singer.
Her recollections of the various conflicting incidents and interests in her experiences of the year were quickly followed by some reflections upon her freedom and what she was to do with it. Thus she was led far into a bright if mysterious future; but presently she found her imagination becoming dazzled and dizzy, and down toppled the castle which she was building for herself after the most approved style affected by the architects of such structures in Spain—down toppled the castle, and she awoke from her vision, as one does from a dream of falling masonry, with a start.
What had she been thinking of? Was it all indeed a dream—this sense of Spring in the air—the rain-washed air—this sense of the peace of God?
She looked about her vaguely. Her hands fell on her lap, and came upon the still folded newspapers which remained there. She had forgotten all about the newspapers. (So the prisoner just released from gaol takes but the smallest amount of interest in the certificate of discharge.)
She read the account given in every one of the three of the wreck of the steel-built barqueKingsdaleon the coast of Nova Scotia, in the neighbourhood of Yarmouth. The vessel had lost her rudder and become unmanageable, and she had been driven between the low headland and a sunken rock in the darkness. Boats had been stove in on an attempt being made to launch them; and then it was that the passenger whose name was Blaydon—“an unfortunate but well connected gentleman and a friend of Captain Lyman, of the ill-fated vessel”—had nobly volunteered to carry a line ashore. He was a powerful swimmer, and it was believed for some time by the wretched mariners whom he meant to save that his heroic attempt was crowned with success. Unhappily, however, this was not to be. On hauling upon the line after a long interval it had come all too easily. There was no resistance even of the man’s body at the end. It was plain that the brave fellow, about whose shoulders it had been looped, had been dragged out of the bight and engulfed in the boiling surge, perishing in his heroic efforts on behalf of the crew. Through the night’s exposure no fewer than eleven of the crew died within half an hour of being brought ashore by a fishing smack from St. John’s. The survivors, twelve in number, included Captain Lyman, the master, and the second and third mates; also an apprentice named Jarvis, of Hull.
“From information supplied by Captain Lyman, we are able to state that the heroic man who perished in his attempt to provide the crew with the means of saving themselves, had but recently been released from an English prison, having worked out his sentence for a fraud committed by another man whom he was too high-minded to implicate. He had, it was said, a young wife in England, for whom the deepest sympathy will be felt.”
Practically the same account appeared in all the papers; one, however, went more deeply into the past history of the man, giving—evidently by reference to some back files of an English paper—the date and particulars of the trial of Marcus Blaydon; but it did not introduce these details at the cost of the expression of sympathy with the young widow—all the accounts referred to the pathetic incident of the young widow and offered her the tribute of their deep sympathy.
And there the young widow sat at the open window, conscious of no impression beyond that which she had frequently acquired from reading a novel at the same window. She felt that she had been reading an account of a wreck in a novel, in which the hero lost his life in a forlorn hope to rescue his fellow creatures, and the hero had been a black sheep; the object of the writer being to show that even the worst man may have in his nature the elements of the heroic.
The man Blaydon seemed as legendary to her as Jim Bludso in Hay’s ballad. He seemed quite as remote from her life. She took no more than a novel-reader’s interest in the story. She was harder than the newspaper men, for she could not bring herself up to a point of sympathizing with the young widow.
“Good heavens!” she cried, getting to her feet so quickly that the papers fluttered down to the carpet. “Good heavens! have I allowed myself to be made miserable for so long by a person who was no more than a character out of a novel—one of the black sheep hero novels? Oh, what a fool I was—as foolish as the girls who cry copiously when their fustian hero gets into trouble.”
Then she leant up against the side of the window and was lost in a maze of thought. Several minutes had passed before she found herself, so to speak; and she found herself with a smile on her face.
“Good heavens!” she said again. “Good heavens! After all I was not miserable, but glad. I allowed myself to be driven into marrying him when all the time I did not even like him. I had a sense of committing suicide—of annihilating myself—when I married him, and I now know that it was a relief to me when we were separated. And now the final relief has come—relief and release; and my life is once more in my own hands. Thank God for that! Thank God for that!”
And then, strange though it was, she began to recall, apparently without any connection with her previous reflections, something that she had said to Rosa when on their way to the primrose park in the forenoon—something about immorality—it was certainly a very foolish thing—some hint that if she were to set her mind—no, her heart—upon some object, she would not allow any considerations that were generally called moral considerations to interfere with her achievement of that object.
That was in substance what she had said in her foolishness, and now, thinking upon it, she felt that it was not merely a very foolish thing to say, but a very shocking thing as well. The very idea at which she had hinted was revolting to her now, so that she could not understand what was the origin of the impulse in the force of which she had talked so wildly. This was what she now felt, illustrating with some amount of emphasis how a slight change in the conditions which govern a young woman’s life may cause her to lose a sense of the right perspective in a fancy picture that she is drawing, as she believes, direct from Nature.
It was with a blushing conscience that she now remembered how for some weeks she had been thinking that if the only obstacle that prevented her living her life as she felt that her life should be lived, was what would generally be regarded as a moral one, she would not hesitate for a moment to kick that obstacle out of her way, and live her life in accordance with the dictates of the heart of a woman:—a true woman, quivering with those true instincts which make up the life of a real woman.
That had actually been the substance of her thoughts for several weeks past. She shuddered at the recollection now. She thanked God that she could look at such matters very differently now; and this meant that she thanked God for having removed temptation from her.
The young widow bathed her face and smoothed her hair and looked at herself in the glass, and was quite satisfied with the reflection. She had emerged from an ordeal by fire, and she found that not a hair of her head was singed. The three young men who had passed through the seven times heated furnace must have felt pretty well satisfied with themselves when they found that they had not suffered. Only a few hours earlier this young woman had had her gloomy moments. She was an intelligent girl, and so was perfectly well aware of the fact that a girl’s supreme chance in life comes to her by marriage, and she had thrown this chance away, and it might never return to her. It was the force of this reflection that had caused her to begin experimenting with her maimed life, with a view of making the most of it. The trick which she had played upon the bumptious tenor represented only one of her experiments. All the people around her, men as well as women, had been unable to stem the current of his insolence. They were all ready to lie down before him and allow him to achieve the triumph of the hero of a bas-relief, at their expense: they had permitted him to put his feet on their necks, as it were. She had wondered if it would not be possible for her to trip up this blatant alabaster hero when he was stalking about from neck to neck of better people than himself. Her experiment had succeeded, and she had gone home with a feeling that if she had been made a fool of by a man, she had shown herself capable of making a man look very like a fool even in his own eyes.
This was some encouragement to her; and she had thus been led to wonder if it might not be possible for her to employ her intelligence and her looks to such good purpose as should at least minimize her folly in throwing away her best chance of making a great thing out of her life. She knew that this question demanded some earnest thinking out, considering her position, but she had already attacked it, when lo! in a single moment all the conditions of the contest—it would be a contest, she knew—had changed.
Not once had she thought of the man’s death as a possible factor in the solution of the problem of her life. Death was something between man and his God only, and she had so come to feel that the All-Powerful was leagued against her, that she had never thought of His making a move in her favour. Well, she had been wrong—she had done God an injustice, and she had apologized for it on her knees. And now she felt that if Providence were really and seriously to be on her side, or at least, as the man who met the grizzly in the open prayed, not on the side of the bear, her future might be all that she could hope it would be.
Having asked the forgiveness of God, it was a simple thing now to ask her father to pardon her for the extravagant way in which she had spoken when he had brought to her the news of the man’s death. Mr. Wadhurst was one of those plain-spoken, straightforward men, who think it right and proper to be hypocritical over such matters as death and bankruptcy. He had joined solemnly in the complaints of his unprosperous neighbours over the bad times, and had shaken his head when one of them, who had been going to the wall for years, at last reached that impenetrable boundary of his incapacity; though Mr. Wadhurst did not fail to perceive that he would now be able to join the derelict farm on to his own and obtain the live stock at his own valuation—a chance for which he had been waiting for years. And he had never failed to be deeply shocked when he heard of the death of a drunken wife, or a ne’er-do-weel son, or a consumptive daughter on the eve of her marriage with a scorbutic man; and thus he hoped that God would look upon him as a man with a profound sense of decency. He certainly looked upon himself as such; and he never felt his position stronger in this respect than he did when his daughter met him in a contrite spirit for having spoken with so great a want of delicacy in regard to her rascally husband.
“I’m glad that you have come to see that—that vengeance is God’s, not man’s,” said he, with great solemnity.
She replied substantially that she was glad it was in such capable hands, though the words that she employed were of conventional acquiescence in the conventionally Divine.
“Whatever the man may have been, he died like a man,” resumed her father, repeating the phrase that he had used before. “You must respect his memory for that deed.”
She could not help feeling that she would respect his memory more on this account if he had done the deed before she had met him. But she did not express this view. She only bent her head; she was no longer a rebellious child, only a hypocritical one.
“It’s a shocking thing—an awful thing!” continued her father. “To think that within a year your mother and your husband have gone. Have you yet grasped the fact that you are a widow, Priscilla?”
She certainly had not grasped this fact. The notion of her being a widow seemed to her supremely funny. But for the sake of practice in the career of duplicity which he was marking out for her, she took out her handkerchief and averted her head.
He put a strong arm about her, saying, “My poor child—my poor motherless child! I did not forget you when I was in the town just now. I called at Grindley’s and told them to send one of their hands out here with samples, so as to save you from the ordeal of appearing in public in your ordinary dress.”
She moved away from his sheltering embrace.
“Samples—samples—of what?” she said.
“Of the cap—the—Ah! that I should live to see my child wearing widow’s weeds!”
“You were very thoughtful, father,” she murmured; “but I am not sure that I should think of myself as really a widow.”
“You are a widow,” he said, with some measure of asperity.
She shook her head in a way that suggested she felt that she was not worthy of such an honour.
“You are a widow, and I hope that you will remember that,” he repeated. “Your marriage was quite regular. There was no flaw in it.”
“I suppose, then——”
“You may not merely suppose, you may be sure of it. Do you fancy that there would be a flaw in any business, that I had to do with?”
“I do not, indeed. This was, however, a bad bit of business for me, father. However, we need say no more about it. I don’t wish ever again to hear that wretched business alluded to. It has passed out of my life altogether, thanks be to God, and now it only remains in my mind as a horrid nightmare.”
“It was a legal marriage, and marriage is a holy thing.”
He spoke with the finality of the Vicar’s churchwarden—as if he were withstanding the onslaught of a professed freethinker. His last statement was, however, too much for the patience of his daughter—to be more exact, it was too much for her mask of humility which she had put on to save the trouble of discussion with him.
She turned upon him, speaking with a definiteness and finality quite equal in force to his display of the same qualities.
“Look here, father,” she said. “We may as well understand each other at once. You know as well as I do that there was nothing sacred about that marriage of mine. You know that the—the—no, I will not give him his true name, I will call him for once a man—he behaved like a man—once—you know, I say, that he married me simply because that foolish woman, Aunt Emily, gave him to understand that you would endow me handsomely on my wedding day, and he wanted the money to pay back all that he had embezzled. You also know that I never had the least feeling of affection, or even of regard, for the man—that I only agreed to marry him because my mother forced me to do so.”
“Do not speak a word against your mother, girl.”
“I am not speaking against her. She, I am sure, was convinced that she was urging me to take a step for my own good; she had always bowed down before the superior judgment of Aunt Emily. No matter about that; I married the man caring nothing for him, but believing that he cared something for me. It was proved at the church door that he never cared a scrap for me. That is the marriage which you tell me was sacred!”
“Marriage is a sacred ordinance. You can’t get over that; and every marriage celebrated in the church——”
“Sacred ordinance! You might as well talk of any Stock Exchange transaction being sacred because it is made in what I believe they call the House. Sacred! A sacred farce! I remember feeling when I was in the church that day how dreadful was the mockery of the whole thing—how the curate talked about the mystic union between Christ and the Church being symbolized by marriage—dreadful!... Never mind, what you know as well as I know is that that marriage of mine was not made by God, but by the Power of Evil; it was the severance of that marriage that came from God, and the coming of it so quickly makes me feel such gratitude to God as I cannot express in words. That is all I have to say just now; only if you fancy that I shall be hypocrite enough to pretend that I am mourning for that man who did his best to wreck my life, you are mistaken. You know that all rightminded people will say ‘What a happy release for the poor girl!’ and they will be right. It is exactly what the poor girl herself is saying, and what the father of the poor girl is saying in his heart, however he may talk about the sacredness of marriage.”
He looked at her for some moments, and the frown upon his face became more marked every moment. He seemed more than once about to make some answer to her impetuous speech, but he made none. When she had said her last word, he looked at her as though he meant to box her ears. Then he turned suddenly round and walked straight out of the room.
So that, after all, it may be said that he had answered her accusations.
She felt a great pity for him; she knew that she had treated him badly; but with the memory of the past year fresh upon her—the sense of having escaped from a noisome prison by the grace of God—she could no longer play the part which he was encouraging her to play.
She felt that, though a girl might marry a man whom she detested, solely to please, her mother, it was too much to expect that she should become a hypocrite solely to please her father.
She was aroused from a reverie by the unfamiliar sound of the throbbing of the passionate heart of a motor up the steep lane leading to the farm. The car appeared round the side of the house when she had got upon her feet to find out who the visitor was that had dared that tyre-rending track.
The car was a very fine one, but it carried only a chauffeur and a basket of primroses. They parted company at the door. Priscilla heard the man speaking a word or two to the maid at the hall door, and the machine was backed slowly in the segment of a circle away from the house to put it into position for taking the hill properly.
“Mrs. Pearce has told him who we were, and he found the baskets in the porch,” were the words that came to her mind at that moment.
And then she gave a little start, and it was followed by a little laugh, and then a little frown.
It had suddenly occurred to her that here was a basket of flowers sent by a kindly hand as a conventional tribute of respect; only it was impossible that any such sentiment should be pinned to it, written on paper with a black border.
Still, there was the obituary notice in that newspaper on the table, and there was the basket of flowers—they could easily be worked into a wreath.
The maid brought them into the room and laid them on a chair.