Marriage a la mode

M >> Mrs. Humphry Ward >> Marriage a la mode

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He drew her hand within his arm and guided her. As he did so he saw that
she was crying; no doubt, as he rightly guessed, from shaken nerves and
wounded pride; for it did not seem to him that she had yielded at all.
But this time he felt distress and compunction.

"Forgive me!" he said, bending over her. "But think of what I have
said--I beg of you! Be kind, be merciful!"

She made various attempts to speak, and at last she said, "I bear you no
malice. But you don't understand me, you never have."

He offered no reply. They had reached the courtyard of the hotel. Daphne
withdrew her hand. When she reached the steps she preceded him without
looking back, and was soon lost to sight.

Boyson shook his head, lit a cigar, and spent some time longer pacing up
and down the veranda. When he went to his wife's room he found her
asleep, a vision of soft youth and charm. He stood a few moments looking
down upon her, wondering in himself at what he had done. Yet he knew
very well that it was the stirring and deepening of his whole being
produced by love that had impelled him to do it.

Next morning he told his wife.

"Do you suppose I produced _any_ effect?" he asked her anxiously. "If
she really thinks over what I said, she _must_ be touched! unless she's
made of flint. I said all the wrong things--but I _did_ rub it in."

"I'm sure you did," said his wife, smiling. Then she looked at him with
a critical tenderness.

"You dear optimist!" she cried, and slipped her hand into his.

"That means you think I behaved like a fool, and that my appeal won't
move her in the least?"

The face beside him saddened.

"Dear, dear optimist!" she repeated, and pressed his hand. He urged an
explanation of her epithet. But she only said, thoughtfully:

"You took a great responsibility!"

"Towards her?"

She shook her head.

"No--towards him!"

Meanwhile Daphne was watching beside a death-bed. On her return from her
walk she had been met by the news of fresh and grave symptoms in Mrs.
Verrier's case. A Boston doctor arrived the following morning. The
mortal disease which had attacked her about a year before this date had
entered, so he reported, on its last phase. He talked of a few
days--possibly hours.

The Boysons departed, having left cards of inquiry and sympathy, of
which Mrs. Floyd took no notice. Then for Daphne there followed a
nightmare of waiting and pain. She loved Madeleine Verrier, as far as
she was capable of love, and she jealously wished to be all in all to
her in these last hours. She would have liked to feel that it was she
who had carried her friend through them; who had nobly sustained her in
the dolorous past. To have been able to feel this would have been as
balm moreover to a piteously wounded self-love, to a smarting and bitter
recollection, which would not let her rest.

But in these last days Madeleine escaped her altogether. A thin-faced
priest arrived, the same who had been visiting the invalid at intervals
for a month or two. Mrs. Verrier was received into the Roman Catholic
Church; she made her first confession and communion; she saw her mother
for a short, final interview, and her little girl; and the physical
energy required for these acts exhausted her small store. Whenever
Daphne entered her room Madeleine received her tenderly; but she could
speak but little, and Daphne felt herself shut out and ignored. What she
said or thought was no longer, it seemed, of any account. She resented
and despised Madeleine's surrender to what she held to be a decaying
superstition; and her haughty manner toward the mild Oratorian whom she
met occasionally on the stairs, or in the corridor, expressed her
disapproval. But it was impossible to argue with a dying woman. She
suffered in silence.

As she sat beside the patient, in the hours of narcotic sleep, when she
relieved one of the nurses, she went often through times of great
bitterness. She could not forgive the attack Captain Boyson had made
upon her; yet she could not forget it. It had so far roused her moral
sense that it led her to a perpetual brooding over the past, a perpetual
re-statement of her own position. She was most troubled, often, by
certain episodes in the past, of which, she supposed Alfred Boyson knew
least; the corrupt use she had made of her money; the false witnesses
she had paid for; the bribes she had given. At the time it had seemed to
her all part of the campaign, in the day's work. She had found herself
in a _milieu_ that demoralized her; her mind had become like "the dyer's
hand, subdued to what it worked in." Now, she found herself thinking in
a sudden terror, "If Alfred Boyson knew so and so!" or, as she looked
down on Madeleine's dying face, "Could I even tell Madeleine that?" And
then would come the dreary thought, "I shall never tell her anything any
more. She is lost to me--even before death."

She tried to avoid thinking of Roger; but the memory of the scene with
Alfred Boyson did, in truth, bring him constantly before her. An inner
debate began, from which she could not escape. She grew white and ill
with it. If she could have rushed away from it, into the full stream of
life, have thrown herself into meetings and discussion, have resumed her
place as the admired and flattered head of a particular society, she
could easily have crushed and silenced the thoughts which tormented her.

But she was held fast. She could not desert Madeleine Verrier in death;
she could not wrench her own hand from this frail hand which clung to
it; even though Madeleine had betrayed the common cause, had yielded at
last to that moral and spiritual cowardice which--as all freethinkers
know--has spoiled and clouded so many death-beds. Daphne--the skimmer of
many books--remembered how Renan--_sain et sauf_--had sent a challenge
to his own end, and defying the possible weakness of age and sickness,
had demanded to be judged by the convictions of life, and not by the
terrors of death. She tried to fortify her own mind by the recollection.

* * * * *

The first days of June broke radiantly over the great gorge and the
woods which surround it. One morning, early, between four and five
o'clock, Daphne came in, to find Madeleine awake and comparatively at
ease. Yet the preceding twenty-four hours had been terrible, and her
nurses knew that the end could not be far off.

The invalid had just asked that her couch might be drawn as near to the
window as possible, and she lay looking towards the dawn, which rose in
fresh and windless beauty over the town opposite and the white splendour
of the Falls. The American Fall was still largely in shadow; but the
light struck on the fresh green of Goat Island and leaped in tongues of
fire along the edge of the Horseshoe, turning the rapids above it to
flame and sending shafts into the vast tower of spray that holds the
centre of the curve. Nature was all youth, glitter and delight; summer
was rushing on the gorge; the mingling of wood and water was at its
richest and noblest.

Madeleine turned her face towards the gorge, her wasted hands clasped on
her breast. She beckoned Daphne with a smile, and Daphne knelt down
beside her.

"The water!" said the whispering voice; "it was once so terrible. I am
not afraid--now."

"No, darling. Why should you be?"

"I know now, I shall see him again."

Daphne was silent.

"I hoped it, but I couldn't be certain. That was so awful. Now--I am
certain."

"Since you became a Catholic?"

She made a sign of assent.

"I couldn't be uncertain--I _couldn't_!" she added with fervour, looking
strangely at Daphne. And Daphne understood that no voice less positive
or self-confident than that of Catholicism, no religion less well
provided with tangible rites and practices, could have lifted from the
spirit the burden of that remorse which had yet killed the body.

A little later Madeleine drew her down again.

"I couldn't talk, Daphne--I was afraid; but I've written to you, just
bit by bit, as I had strength. Oh, Daphne----!"

Then voice and strength failed her. Her eyes piteously followed her
friend for a little, and then closed.

She lingered through the day; and at night when the June starlight was
on the gorge, she passed away, with the voice of the Falls in her dying
ears. A tragic beauty--"beauty born of murmuring sound--had passed into
her face;" and that great plunge of many waters, which had been to her
in life the symbol of anguish and guilt, had become in some mysterious
way the comforter of her pain, the friend of her last sleep.

A letter was found for Daphne in the little box beside her bed.

It ran thus:

DAPHNE, DARLING,--

"It was I who first taught you that we may follow our own lawless
wills, and that marriage is something we may bend or break as we
will. But, oh! it is not so. Marriage is mysterious and wonderful;
it is the supreme test of men and women. If we wrong it, and
despise it, we mutilate the divine in ourselves.

"Oh, Daphne! it is a small thing to say 'Forgive!' Yet it means the
whole world.--

"And you can still say it to the living. It has been my anguish
that I could only say it to the dead.... Daphne, good-bye! I have
fought a long, long fight, but God is master--I bless--I adore----"

Daphne sat staring at the letter through a mist of unwilling tears. All
its phrases, ideas, preconceptions, were unwelcome, unreal to her,
though she knew they had been real to Madeleine.

Yet the compulsion of the dead was upon her, and of her scene with
Boyson. What they asked of her--Madeleine and Alfred Boyson--was of
course out of the question; the mere thought of that humiliating word
"forgiveness" sent a tingle of passion through her. But was there no
third course?--something which might prove to all the world how full of
resource and generosity a woman may be?

She pondered through some sleepless hours; and at last she saw her way
plain.

Within a week she had left New York for Europe.

CHAPTER XII

The ship on which Daphne travelled had covered about half her course. On
a certain June evening Mrs. Floyd, walking up and down the promenade
deck, found her attention divided between two groups of her
fellow-travellers; one taking exercise on the same deck as herself; the
other, a family party, on the steerage deck, on which many persons in
the first class paused to look down with sympathy as they reached the
dividing rail aft.

The group on the promenade deck consisted of a lady and gentleman, and a
boy of seven. The elders walked rapidly; holding themselves stiffly
erect, and showing no sign of acquaintance with anyone on board. The
child dragged himself wearily along behind them, looking sometimes from
side to side at the various people passing by, with eyes no less furtive
than his mother's. She was a tall and handsome woman, with extravagantly
marine clothes and much false hair. Her companion, a bulky and
ill-favoured man, glanced superciliously at the ladies in the deck
chairs, bestowing always a more attentive scrutiny than usual on a very
pretty girl, who was lying reading midway down, with a white lace scarf
draped round her beautiful hair and the harmonious oval of her face.
Daphne, watching him, remembered that she had see him speaking to the
girl--who was travelling alone--on one or two occasions. For the rest,
they were a notorious couple. The woman had been twice divorced, after
misdoings which had richly furnished the newspapers; the man belonged to
a financial class with which reputable men of business associate no more
than they are obliged. The ship left them severely alone; and they
retaliated by a manner clearly meant to say that they didn't care a
brass farthing for the ship.

The group on the steerage deck was of a very different kind. It was made
up of a consumptive wife, a young husband and one or two children. The
wife's malady, recently declared, had led to their being refused
admission to the States. They had been turned back from the emigrant
station on Ellis Island, and were now sadly returning to Liverpool. But
the courage of the young and sweet-faced mother, the devotion of her
Irish husband, the charm of her dark-eyed children, had roused much
feeling in an idle ship, ready for emotion. There had been a collection
for them among the passengers; a Liverpool shipowner, in the first
class, had promised work to the young man on landing; the mother was to
be sent to a sanatorium; the children cared for during her absence. The
family made a kind of nucleus round which whatever humanity--or whatever
imitation of it--there was on board might gather and crystallize. There
were other mournful cases indeed to be studied on the steerage deck, but
none in which misfortune was so attractive.

As she walked up and down, or sat in the tea room catching fragments of
the conversation round her, Daphne was often secretly angered by the
public opinion she perceived, favourable in the one case, hostile in the
other. How ignorant and silly it was--this public opinion. As to
herself, she was soon aware that a few people on board had identified
her and communicated their knowledge to others. On the whole, she felt
herself treated with deference. Her own version of her story was clearly
accepted, at least by the majority; some showed her an unspoken but
evident sympathy, while her wealth made her generally interesting. Yet
there were two or three in whom she felt or fancied a more critical
attitude; who looked at her coolly, and seemed to avoid her. Bostonian
Pharisees, no doubt!--ignorant of all those great expansions of the
female destiny that were going forward.

The fact was--she admitted it--that she was abnormally sensitive. These
moral judgments, of different sorts, of which she was conscious,
floating as it were in the life around her, which her mind isolated and
magnified, found her smarting and sore, and would not let her be. Her
irritable pride was touched at every turn; she hardly knew why. She was
not to be judged by anybody; she was her own defender and her own judge.
If she was no longer a symbolic and sympathetic figure--like that young
mother among her children--she had her own claims. In the secrecy of the
mind she fiercely set them out.

The days passed, however, and as she neared the English shores her
resistance to a pursuing thought became fainter. It was, of course,
Boyson's astonishing appeal to her that had let loose the Avenging
Goddesses. She repelled them with scorn; yet all the same they hurtled
round her. After all, she was no monster. She had done a monstrous thing
in a sudden brutality of egotism; and a certain crude state of law and
opinion had helped her to do it, had confused the moral values and
falsified her conscience. But she was not yet brutalized. Moreover, do
what she would, she was still in a world governed by law; a world at the
heart of which broods a power austere and immutable; a power which man
did not make, which, if he clash with it, grinds him to powder. Its
manifestations in Daphne's case were slight, but enough. She was not
happy, that certainly was clear. She did not suppose she ever would be
happy again. Whatever it was--just, heroic, or the reverse--the action
by which she had violently changed her life had not been a success,
estimated by results. No other man had attracted her since she had cast
Roger off; her youth seemed to be deserting her; she saw herself in the
glass every morning with discontent, even a kind of terror; she had lost
her child. And in these suspended hours of the voyage, when life floats
between sky and sea, amid the infinity of weaves, all that she had been
doing since the divorce, her public "causes" and triumphs, the
adulations with which she had been surrounded, began to seem to her
barren and futile. No, she was not happy; what she had done had not
answered; and she knew it.

* * * * *

One night, a night of calm air and silvery sea, she hung over the ship's
side, dreaming rather miserably. The ship, aglow with lights, alive with
movement, with talk, laughter and music, glided on between the stars and
the unfathomable depths of the mid-Atlantic. Nothing, to north and
south, between her and the Poles; nothing but a few feet of iron and
timber between her and the hungry gulfs in which the highest Alp would
sink from sight. The floating palace, hung by Knowledge above Death,
just out of Death's reach, suggested to her a number of melancholy
thoughts and images. A touch of more than Arctic cold stole upon her,
even through this loveliness of a summer night; she felt desperately
unhappy and alone.

From the saloon came a sound of singing:

_"An die Lippen wollt' ich pressen
Deine kleine weisse Hand,
Und mit Thraenen sie benetzen
Deine kleine weisse Hand."_

The tears came to her eyes. She remembered that she, too, had once felt
the surrender and the tenderness of love.

Then she brushed the tears away, angry with herself and determined to
brood no more. But she looked round her in vain for a companion who
might distract her. She had made no friends on board, and though she had
brought with her a secretary and a maid, she kept them both at arm's
length, and they never offered their society without an invitation.

What was she going to do? And why was she making this journey?

Because the injustice and absurdity of English law had distorted and
besmirched her own perfectly legitimate action. They had given a handle
to such harsh critics as Alfred Boyson. But she meant somehow to put
herself right; and not only herself, but the great cause of woman's
freedom and independence. No woman, in the better future that is coming,
shall be forced either by law or opinion to continue the relations of
marriage with a man she has come to despise. Marriage is merely
proclaimed love; and if love fails, marriage has no further meaning or
_raison d'etre_; it comes, or should come, automatically to an end. This
is the first article in the woman's charter, and without it marriage
itself has neither value nor sanctity. She seemed to hear sentences of
this sort, in her own voice, echoing about windy halls, producing waves
of emotion on a sea of strained faces--women's faces, set and pale, like
that of Madeleine Verrier. She had never actually made such a speech,
but she felt she would like to have made it.

What was she going to do? No doubt Roger would resent her coming--would
probably refuse to see her, as she had once refused to see him. Well,
she must try and act with dignity and common sense; she must try and
persuade him to recognize her good faith, and to get him to listen to
what she proposed. She had her plan for Roger's reclamation, and was
already in love with it. Naturally, she had never meant permanently to
hurt or injure Roger! She had done it for his good as well as her own.
Yet even as she put this plea forward in the inner tribunal of
consciousness, she knew that it was false.

_"You have murdered a life!"_ Well, that was what prejudiced and
hide-bound persons like Alfred Boyson said, and no doubt always would
say. She could not help it; but for her own dignity's sake, that moral
dignity in which she liked to feel herself enwrapped, she would give as
little excuse for it as possible.

Then, as she stood looking eastward, a strange thought struck her. Once
on that farther shore and she would be Roger's wife again--an English
subject, and Roger's wife. How ridiculous, and how intolerable! When
shall we see some real comity of nations in these matters of
international marriage and divorce?

She had consulted her lawyers in New York before starting; on Roger's
situation first of all, but also on her own. Roger, it seemed, might
take certain legal steps, once he was aware of her being again on
English ground. But, of course, he would not take them. "It was never me
he cared for--only Beatty!" she said to herself with a bitter
perversity. Still the thought of returning within the range of the old
obligations, the old life, affected her curiously. There were hours,
especially at night, when she felt shut up with thoughts of Roger and
Beatty--her husband and her child--just as of old.

How, in the name of justice, was she to blame for Roger's illness? Her
irritable thoughts made a kind of grievance against him of the attack of
pneumonia which she was told had injured his health. He must have
neglected himself in some foolish way. The strongest men are the most
reckless of themselves. In any case, how was it her fault?

One night she woke up suddenly, in the dawn, her heart beating
tumultuously. She had been dreaming of her meeting--her possible
meeting--with Roger. Her face was flushed, her memory confused. She
could not recall the exact words or incidents of the dream, only that
Roger had been in some way terrible and terrifying.

And as she sat up in her berth, trying to compose herself, she recalled
the last time she had seen him at Philadelphia--a painful scene--and his
last broken words to her, as he turned back from the door to speak
them:--

"As to Beatty, I hold you responsible! She is my child, no less than
yours. You shall answer to me! Remember that!"

Answer to him? Beatty was dead--in spite of all that love and science
could do. Involuntarily she began to weep as she remembered the child's
last days; the little choked cry, once or twice, for "Daddy!" followed,
so long as life maintained its struggle, by a childish anger that he did
not come. And then the silencing of the cry, and the last change and
settling in the small face, so instinct already with feeling and
character, so prophetic of the woman to be.

A grief, of course, never to be got over; but for which she, Daphne,
deserved pity and tenderness, not reproaches. She hardened herself to
meet the coming trial.

* * * * *

She arrived in London in the first week of July, and her first act was
to post a letter to Herbert French, addressed to his East-End vicarage,
a letter formally expressed and merely asking him to give the writer
"twenty minutes' conversation on a subject of common interest to us
both." The letter was signed "Daphne Floyd," and a stamped envelope
addressed to "Mrs. Floyd" was enclosed. By return of post she received a
letter from a person unknown to her, the curate, apparently, in charge
of Mr. French's parish. The letter informed her that her own
communication had not been forwarded, as Mr. French had gone away for a
holiday after a threat of nervous breakdown in consequence of overwork;
and business letters and interviews were being spared him as much as
possible. "He is, however, much better, I am glad to say, and if the
subject on which you wish to speak to him is really urgent, his present
address is Prospect House, St. Damian's, Ventnor. But unless it is
urgent it would be a kindness not to trouble him with it until he
returns to town, which will not be for another fortnight."

Daphne walked restlessly up and down her hotel sitting-room. Of course
the matter was urgent. The health of an East-End clergyman--already, it
appeared, much amended--was not likely to seem of much importance to a
woman of her temperament, when it stood in the way of her plans.

But she would not write, she would go. She had good reason to suppose
that Herbert French would not welcome a visit from her; he might indeed
very easily use his health as an excuse for not seeing her. But she must
see him.

By mid-day she was already on her way to the Isle of Wight. About five
o'clock she arrived at Ventnor, where she deposited maid and luggage.
She then drove out alone to St. Damian's, a village a few miles north,
through a radiant evening. The twinkling sea was alive with craft of all
sizes, from the great liner leaving its trail of smoke along the
horizon, to the white-sailed yachts close upon the land. The woods of
the Undercliff sank softly to the blues and purple, the silver streaks
and gorgeous shadows of the sea floor. The lights were broad and rich.
After a hot day, coolness had come and the air was delightful.

But Daphne sat erect, noticing nothing but the relief of the lowered
temperature after her hot and tiresome journey. She applied herself
occasionally to natural beauty, as she applied herself to music or
literature, but it is not to women of her type that the true passion of
it--"the soul's bridegroom"--comes. And she was absorbed in thinking how
she should open her business to Herbert French.

Prospect House turned out to be a detached villa standing in a garden,
with a broad view of the Channel. Daphne sent her carriage back to the
inn and climbed the steep drive which led up to the verandaed house. The
front garden was empty, but voices--voices, it seemed, of children--came
from behind the house where there was a grove of trees.

"Is Mr. Herbert French at home?" she asked of the maid who answered her
bell.

The girl looked at her doubtfully.

"Yes, ma'am--but he doesn't see visitors yet. Shall I tell Mrs. French?
She's in the garden with the children."

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