CHAPTER VII

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 barque Kingsdale on 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.