Marriage a la mode
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Mrs. Humphry Ward >> Marriage a la mode
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She walked proudly across the room, her head thrown back, every nerve
tense. Let the ignorant and stupid blame her if they chose. She stood
absolved. Memory reminded her, moreover, of a great number of kind and
generous things--private things--that she had done with her money. If
men like Herbert French, or Alfred Boyson, denounced her, there were
many persons who felt warmly towards her--and had cause. As she thought
of them the tears rose in her eyes. Of course she could never make such
things public.
Outside the fog seemed to be lifting a little. There was a silvery light
in the southeast, a gleam and radiance over the gorge. If the moon
struggled through, it would be worth while slipping out after dinner to
watch its play upon the great spectacle. She was careful to cherish in
herself an openness to noble impressions and to the high poetry of
nature and life. And she must not allow herself to be led by the casual
neighbourhood of the Boysons into weak or unprofitable thought.
* * * * *
The Boysons dined at a table, gay with lights and flowers, that should
have commanded the Falls but for the curtain of fog. Niagara, however,
might flout them if it pleased; they could do without Niagara. They were
delighted that the hotel, apparently, contained no one they knew. All
they wanted was to be together, and alone. But the bride was tired by a
long day in the train; her smiles began presently to flag, and by nine
o'clock her husband had insisted on sending her to rest.
After escorting her upstairs Captain Boyson returned to the veranda,
which was brightly lit up, in order to read some letters that were still
unopened in his pocket. But before he began upon them he was seized once
more by the wizardry of the scene. Was that indistinct glimmer in the
far distance--that intenser white on white--the eternal cloud of spray
that hangs over the Canadian Fall? If so, the fog was indeed yielding,
and the full moon behind it would triumph before long. On the other
hand, he could no longer see the lights of the bridge at all; the
rolling vapour choked the gorge, and the waiter who brought him his
coffee drily prophesied that there would not be much change under
twenty-four hours.
He fell back upon his letters, well pleased to see that one among them
came from Herbert French, with whom the American officer had maintained
a warm friendship since the day of a certain consultation in French's
East-End library. The letter was primarily one of congratulation,
written with all French's charm and sympathy; but over the last pages of
it Boyson's face darkened, for they contained a deplorable account of
the man whom he and French had tried to save.
The concluding passage of the letter ran as follows:
"You will scarcely wonder after all this that we see him very
seldom, and that he no longer gives us his confidence. Yet both
Elsie and I feel that he cares for us as much as ever. And, indeed,
poor fellow, he himself remains strangely lovable, in spite of what
one must--alas!--believe as to his ways of life and the people with
whom he associates. There is in him, always, something of what
Meyers called 'the imperishable child.' That a man who might have
been so easily led to good has been so fatally thrust into evil is
one of the abiding sorrows of my life. How can I reproach him for
his behaviour? As the law stands, he can never marry; he can never
have legitimate children. Under the wrong he has suffered, and, no
doubt, in consequence of that illness in New York, when he was
badly nursed and cared for--from which, in fact, he has never
wholly recovered--his will-power and nerve, which were never very
strong, have given way; he broods upon the past perpetually, and on
the loss of his child. Our poor Apollo, Boyson, will soon have lost
himself wholly, and there is no one to help.
"Do you ever see or hear anything of that woman? Do you know what
has become of her? I see you are to have a Conference on your
Divorce Laws--that opinion and indignation are rising. For Heaven's
sake, do something! I gather some appalling facts from a recent
Washington report. One in twelve of all your marriages dissolved! A
man or a woman divorced in one state, and still bound in another!
The most trivial causes for the break-up of marriage, accepted and
acted upon by corrupt courts, and reform blocked by a phalanx of
corrupt interests! Is it all true? An American correspondent of
mine--a lady--repeats to me what you once said, that it is the
women who bring the majority of the actions. She impresses upon me
also the remarkable fact that it is apparently only in a minority
of cases that a woman, when she has got rid of her husband, marries
someone else. It is not passion, therefore, that dictates many of
these actions; no serious cause or feeling, indeed, of any kind;
but rather an ever-spreading restlessness and levity, a readiness
to tamper with the very foundations of society, for a whim, a
nothing!--in the interests, of ten, of what women call their
'individuality'! No foolish talk here of being 'members one of
another'! We have outgrown all that. The facilities are always
there, and the temptation of them. 'The women--especially--who do
these things,' she writes me, 'are moral anarchists. One can appeal
to nothing; they acknowledge nothing. Transformations infinitely
far-reaching and profound are going on among us."
"'_Appeal to nothing!_' And this said of women, by a woman! It was
of _men_ that a Voice said long ago: 'Moses, because of the
hardness of your hearts, suffered you to put away your wives'--on
just such grounds apparently--trivial and cruel pretexts--as your
American courts admit. 'But _I_ say unto you!--_I say unto
you!_'...
"Well, I am a Christian priest, incapable, of course, of an
unbiassed opinion. My correspondent tries to explain the situation
a little by pointing out that your women in America claim to be the
superiors of your men, to be more intellectual, better-mannered,
more refined. Marriage disappoints or disgusts them, and they
impatiently put it aside. They break it up, and seem to pay no
penalty. But you and I believe that they will pay it!--that there
are divine avenging forces in the very law they tamper with--and
that, as a nation, you must either retrace some of the steps taken,
or sink in the scale of life.
"How I run on! And all because my heart is hot within me for the
suffering of one man, and the hardness of one woman!"
Boyson raised his eyes. As he did so he saw dimly through the mist the
figure of a lady, veiled, and wrapped in a fur cloak, crossing the
farther end of the veranda. He half rose from his seat, with an
exclamation. She ran down the steps leading to the road and disappeared
in the fog.
Boyson stood looking after her, his mind in a whirl.
The manager of the hotel came hurriedly out of the same door by which
Daphne Floyd had emerged, and spoke to a waiter on the veranda, pointing
in the direction she had taken.
Boyson heard what was said, and came up. A short conversation passed
between him and the manager. There was a moment's pause on Boyson's
part; he still held French's letter in his hand. At last, thrusting it
into his pocket, he hurried to the steps whereby Daphne had left the
hotel, and pursued her into the cloud outside.
The fog was now rolling back from the gorge, upon the Falls, blotting
out the transient gleams which had seemed to promise a lifting of the
veil, leaving nothing around or beneath but the white and thunderous
abyss.
CHAPTER XI
Daphne's purpose in quitting the hotel had been to find her way up the
river by the road which runs along the gorge on the Canadian side, from
the hotel to the Canadian Fall. Thick as the fog still was in the gorge
she hoped to find some clearer air beyond it. She felt oppressed and
stifled; and though she had told Madeleine that she was going out in
search of effects and spectacle, it was in truth the neighbourhood of
Alfred Boyson which had made her restless.
The road was lit at intervals by electric lamps, but after a time she
found the passage of it not particularly easy. Some repairs to the
tramway lines were going on higher up, and she narrowly escaped various
pitfalls in the shape of trenches and holes in the roadway, very
insufficiently marked by feeble lamps. But the stir in her blood drove
her on; so did the strangeness of this white darkness, suffused with
moonlight, yet in this immediate neighbourhood of the Falls,
impenetrable. She was impatient to get through it; to breathe an
unembarrassed air.
The roar at her left hand grew wilder. She had reached a point some
distance from the hotel, close to the jutting corner, once open, now
walled and protected, where the traveller approaches nearest to the edge
of the Canadian Fall. She knew the spot well, and groping for the wall,
she stood breathless and spray-beaten beside the gulf.
Only a few yards from her the vast sheet of water descended. She could
see nothing of it, but the wind of its mighty plunge blew back her hair,
and her mackintosh cloak was soon dripping with the spray. Once, far
away, above the Falls, she seemed to perceive a few dim lights along the
bend of the river; perhaps from one of the great power-houses that tame
to man's service the spirits of the water. Otherwise--nothing! She was
alone with the perpetual challenge and fascination of the Falls.
As she stood there she was seized by a tragic recollection. It was from
this spot, so she believed, that Leopold Verrier had thrown himself
over. The body had been carried down through the rapids, and recovered,
terribly injured, in the deep eddying pool which the river makes below
them. He had left no letter or message of any sort behind him. But the
reasons for his suicide were clearly understood by a large public, whose
main verdict upon it was the quiet "What else could he do?"
Here, then, on this very spot, he had stood before his leap. Daphne had
heard him described by various spectators of the marriage. He had been,
it seemed, a man of sensitive temperament, who should have been an
artist and was a man of business; a considerable musician, and something
of a poet; proud of his race and faith and himself irreproachable, yet
perpetually wounded through his family, which bore a name of ill-repute
in the New York business world; passionately grateful to his wife for
having married him, delighting in her beauty and charm, and foolishly,
abjectly eager to heap upon her and their child everything that wealth
could buy.
"It was Madeleine's mother who made it hopeless," thought Daphne. "But
for Mrs. Fanshaw--it might have lasted."
And memory called up Mrs. Fanshaw, the beautifully dressed woman of
fifty, with her pride of wealth and family, belonging to the strictest
sect of New York's social _elite_, with her hard, fastidious face, her
formidable elegance and self-possession. How she had loathed the
marriage! And with what a harpy-like eagerness had she seized on the
first signs of Madeleine's discontent and _ennui_; persuaded her to come
home; prepared the divorce; poisoned public opinion. It was from a last
interview with Mrs. Fanshaw that Leopold Verrier had gone straight to
his death. What was it that she had said to him?
Daphne lingered on the question; haunted, too, by other stray
recollections of the dismal story--the doctor driving by in the early
morning who had seen the fall; the discovery of the poor broken body;
Madeleine's blanched stoicism, under the fierce coercion of her mother;
and that strong, silent, slow-setting tide of public condemnation, which
in this instance, at least, had avenged a cruel act.
But at this point Daphne ceased to think about her friend. She found
herself suddenly engaged in a heated self-defence. What comparison could
there be between her case and Madeleine's?
Fiercely she found herself going through the list of Roger's crimes; his
idleness, treachery and deceit; his lack of any high ideals; his bad
influence on the child; his luxurious self-indulgent habits, the lies he
had told, the insults he had offered her. By now the story had grown to
a lurid whole in her imagination, based on a few distorted facts, yet
radically and monstrously untrue. Generally, however, when she dwelt
upon it, it had power to soothe any smart of conscience, to harden any
yearning of the heart, supposing she felt any. And by now she had almost
ceased to feel any.
But to-night she was mysteriously shaken and agitated. As she clung to
the wall, which alone separated her from the echoing gulf beyond, she
could not prevent herself from thinking of Roger, Roger as he was when
Alfred Boyson introduced him to her, when they first married, and she
had been blissfully happy; happy in the possession of such a god-like
creature, in the envy of other women, in the belief that he was growing
more and more truly attached to her.
Her thoughts broke abruptly. "He married me for money!" cried the inward
voice. Then she felt her cheeks tingling as she remembered her
conversation with Madeleine on that very subject--how she had justified
what she was now judging--how plainly she had understood and condoned
it.
"That was my inexperience! Besides, I knew nothing then of Chloe
Fairmile. If I had--I should never have done it."
She turned, startled. Steps seemed to be approaching her, of someone as
yet invisible. Her nerves were all on edge, and she felt suddenly
frightened. Strangers of all kinds visit and hang about Niagara; she was
quite alone, known to be the rich Mrs. Floyd; if she were attacked--set
upon----
The outline of a man's form emerged; she heard her name, or rather the
name she had renounced.
"I saw you come in this direction, Mrs. Barnes. I knew the road was up
in some places, and I thought in this fog you would allow me to warn you
that walking was not very safe."
The voice was Captain Boyson's; and they were now plain to each other as
they stood a couple of yards apart. The fog, however, was at last
slightly breaking. There was a gleam over the nearer water; not merely
the lights, but the span of the bridge had begun to appear.
Daphne composed herself with an effort.
"I am greatly obliged to you," she said in her most freezing manner.
"But I found no difficulty at all in getting through, and the fog is
lifting."
With a stiff inclination she turned in the direction of the hotel, but
Captain Boyson stood in her way. She saw a face embarrassed yet
resolved.
"Mrs. Barnes, may I speak to you a few minutes?"
Daphne gave a slight laugh.
"I don't see how I can prevent it. So you didn't follow me, Captain
Boyson, out of mere regard for my personal safety?"
"If I hadn't come myself I should have sent someone," he replied
quietly. "The hotel people were anxious. But I wished to come myself. I
confess I had a very strong desire to speak to you."
"There seems to be nothing and no one to interfere with it," said
Daphne, in a tone of sarcasm. "I should be glad, however, with your
permission, to turn homeward. I see Mrs. Boyson is here. You are, I
suppose, on your wedding journey?"
He moved out of her path, said a few conventional words, and they walked
on. A light wind had risen and the fog was now breaking rapidly. As it
gave way, the moonlight poured into the breaches that the wind made; the
vast black-and-silver spectacle, the Falls, the gorge, the town
opposite, the bridge, the clouds, began to appear in fragments,
grandiose and fantastical.
Daphne, presently, seeing that Boyson was slow to speak, raised her
eyebrows and attempted a remark on the scene. Boyson interrupted her
hurriedly.
"I imagine, Mrs. Barnes, that what I wish to say will seem to you a
piece of insolence. All the same, for the sake of our former friendship,
I would ask you to bear with me."
"By all means!"
"I had no idea that you were in the hotel. About half an hour ago, on
the veranda, I opened an English letter which arrived this evening. The
news in it gave me great concern. Then I saw you appear, to my
astonishment, in the distance. I asked the hotel manager if it were
really you. He was about to send someone after you. An idea occurred to
me. I saw my opportunity--and I pursued you."
"And here I am, at your mercy!" said Daphne, with sudden sharpness. "You
have left me no choice. However, I am quite willing."
The voice was familiar yet strange. There was in it the indefinable
hardening and ageing which seemed to Boyson to have affected the whole
personality. What had happened to her? As he looked at her in the dim
light there rushed upon them both the memory of those three weeks by the
seaside years before, when he had fallen in love with her, and she had
first trifled with, and then repulsed him.
"I wished to ask you a question, in the name of our old friendship; and
because I have also become a friend--as you know--of your husband."
He felt, rather than saw, the start of anger in the woman beside him.
"Captain Boyson! I cannot defend myself, but I would ask you to
recognize ordinary courtesies. I have now no husband."
"Of your husband," he repeated, without hesitation, yet gently. "By the
law of England at least, which you accepted, and under which you became
a British subject, you are still the wife of Roger Barnes, and he has
done nothing whatever to forfeit his right to your wifely care. It is
indeed of him and of his present state that I beg to be allowed to speak
to you."
He heard a little laugh beside him--unsteady and hysterical.
"You beg for what you have already taken. I repeat, I am at your mercy.
An American subject, Captain Boyson, knows nothing of the law of
England. I have recovered my American citizenship, and the law of my
country has freed me from a degrading and disastrous marriage!"
"While Roger remains bound? Incapable, at the age of thirty, of marrying
again, unless he renounces his country--permanently debarred from home
and children!"
His pulse ran quick. It was a strange adventure, this, to which he had
committed himself!
"I have nothing to do with English law, nothing whatever! It is unjust,
monstrous. But that was no reason why I, too, should suffer!"
"No reason for patience? No reason for pity?" said the man's voice,
betraying emotion at last. "Mrs. Barnes, what do you know of Roger's
present state?"
"I have no need to know anything."
"It matters nothing to you? Nothing to you that he has lost health, and
character, and happiness, his child, his home, everything, owing to your
action?"
"Captain Boyson!" she cried, her composure giving way, "this is
intolerable, outrageous! It is humiliating that you should even expect
me to argue with you. Yet," she bit her lip, angry with the agitation
that would assail her, "for the sake of our friendship to which you
appeal, I would rather not be angry. What you say is monstrous!" her
voice shook. "In the first place, I freed myself from a man who married
me for money."
"One moment! Do you forget that from the day you left him Roger has
never touched a farthing of your money? That he returned everything to
you?"
"I had nothing to do with that; it was his own folly."
"Yes, but it throws light upon his character. Would a mere
fortune-hunter have done it? No, Mrs. Barnes!--that view of Roger does
not really convince you, you do not really believe it."
She smiled bitterly.
"As it happens, in his letters to me after I left him, he amply
confessed it."
"Because his wish was to make peace, to throw himself at your feet. He
accused himself, more than was just. But you do not really think him
mercenary and greedy, you _know_ that he was neither! Mrs. Barnes, Roger
is ill and lonely."
"His mode of life accounts for it."
"You mean that he has begun to drink, has fallen into bad company. That
may be true. I cannot deny it. But consider. A man from whom everything
is torn at one blow; a man of not very strong character, not accustomed
to endure hardness.--Does it never occur to you that you took a
frightful responsibility?"
"I protected myself--and my child."
He breathed deep.
"Or rather--did you murder a life--that God had given you in trust?"
He paused, and she paused also, as though held by the power of his will.
They were passing along the public garden that borders the road; scents
of lilac and fresh leaf floated over the damp grass; the moonlight was
growing in strength, and the majesty of the gorge, the roar of the
leaping water all seemed to enter into the moral and human scene, to
accent and deepen it.
Daphne suddenly clung to a seat beside the path, dropped into it.
"Captain Boyson! I--I cannot bear this any longer."
"I will not reproach you any more," he said, quietly. "I beg your
pardon. The past is irrevocable, but the present is here. The man who
loved you, the father of your child, is alone, ill, poor, in danger of
moral ruin, because of what you have done. I ask you to go to his aid.
But first let me tell you exactly what I have just heard from England."
He repeated the greater part of French's letter, so far as it concerned
Roger.
"He has his mother," said Daphne, when he paused, speaking with evident
physical difficulty.
"Lady Barnes I hear had a paralytic stroke two months ago. She is
incapable of giving advice or help."
"Of course, I am sorry. But Herbert French----"
"No one but a wife could save him--no one!" he repeated with emphasis.
"I am _not_ his wife!" she insisted faintly. "I released myself by
American law. He is nothing to me." As she spoke she leant back against
the seat and closed her eyes. Boyson saw clearly that excitement and
anger had struck down her nervous power, that she might faint or go into
hysterics. Yet a man of remarkable courtesy and pitifulness towards
women was not thereby moved from his purpose. He had his chance; he
could not relinquish it. Only there was something now in her attitude
which recalled the young Daphne of years ago; which touched his heart.
He sat down beside her.
"Bear with me, Mrs. Barnes, for a few moments, while I put it as it
appears to another mind. You became first jealous of Roger, for very
small reason, then tired of him. Your marriage no longer satisfied
you--you resolved to be quit of it; so you appealed to laws of which, as
a nation, we are ashamed, which all that is best among us will, before
long, rebel against and change. Our State system permits them--America
suffers. In this case--forgive me if I put it once more as it appears to
me--they have been used to strike at an Englishman who had absolutely no
defence, no redress. And now you are free; he remains bound--so long, at
least, as you form no other tie. Again I ask you, have you ever let
yourself face what it means to a man of thirty to be cut off from lawful
marriage and legitimate children? Mrs. Barnes! you know what a man is,
his strength and his weakness. Are you really willing that Roger should
sink into degradation in order that you may punish him for some offence
to your pride or your feeling? It may be too late! He may, as French
fears, have fallen into some fatal entanglement; it may not be possible
to restore his health. He may not be able"--he hesitated, then brought
the words out firmly--"to forgive you. Or again, French's anxieties
about him may be unfounded. But for God's sake go to him! Once on
English ground you are his wife again as though nothing had happened.
For God's sake put every thing aside but the thought of the vow you once
made to him! Go back! I implore you, go back! I promise you that no
happiness you have ever felt will be equal to the happiness that step
would bring you, if only you are permitted to save him."
Daphne was by now shaking from head to foot. The force of feeling which
impelled him so mastered her that when he gravely took her hand she did
not withdraw it. She had a strange sense of having at last discovered
the true self of the quiet, efficient, unpretending man she had known
for so long and cast so easily aside. There was shock and excitement in
it, as there is in all trials of strength between a man and a woman. She
tried to hate and despise him, but she could not achieve it. She longed
to answer and crush him, but her mind was a blank, her tongue refused
its office. Surprise, resentment, wounded feeling made a tumult and
darkness through which she could not find her way.
She rose at last painfully from her seat.
"This conversation must end," she said brokenly. "Captain Boyson, I
appeal to you as a gentleman, let me go on alone."
He looked at her sadly and stood aside. But as he saw her move
uncertainly toward a portion of the road where various trenches and pits
made walking difficult, he darted after her.
"Please!" he said peremptorily, "this bit is unsafe."
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