Marriage a la mode by Mrs. Humphry Ward (best book club books TXT) 📖

and mine to come and give us some private informal help to-day, before you take any fresh steps--if you do take any."

"Awfully good of you both." The speaker, still wrapped in his fur coat, sat staring at the carpet, a hand on each of his knees. "Awfully good of you," he repeated vaguely.

Penrose observed the new-comer. In some ways Roger Barnes was handsomer than ever. His colour, the pink and white of his astonishing complexion, was miraculously vivid; his blue eyes were infinitely more arresting than of old; and the touch of physical weakness in his aspect, left evidently by severe illness, was not only not disfiguring, but a positive embellishment. He had been too ruddy in the old days, too hearty and splendid--a too obvious and supreme king of men--for our fastidious modern eyes. The grief and misfortune which had shorn some of his radiance had given a more human spell to what remained. At the same time the signs of change were by no means, all of them, easy to read, or reassuring to a friend's eye. Were they no more than physical and transient?

Penrose was just beginning on the questions which seemed to him important, when there was another ring at the front door. French got up nervously, with an anxious look at Barnes.

"Roger! I don't know whether you will allow it, but I met an American acquaintance of yours to-day, and, subject to your permission, I asked him to join our conference."

Roger raised his head--it might have been thought, angrily.

"Who on earth----?"

"Captain Boyson?"

The young man's face changed.

"I don't mind him," he said sombrely. "He's an awfully good sort. He was in Philadelphia a few months ago, when I was. He knows all about me. It was he and his sister who introduced me to--my wife."

French left the room for a moment, and returned accompanied by a fair-haired, straight-shouldered man, whom he introduced to Penrose as Captain Boyson.

Roger rose from his chair to shake hands.

"How do you do, Boyson? I've told them you know all about it." He dropped back heavily into his seat.

"I thought I might possibly put in a word," said the new-comer, glancing from Roger to his friends. "I trust I was not impertinent? But don't let me interrupt anything that was going on."

On a plea of chill, Boyson remained standing by the fire, warming his hands, looking down upon the other three. Penrose, who belonged to a military family, reminded himself, as he glanced at the American, of a recent distinguished book on Military Geography by a Captain Alfred Boyson. No doubt the same man. A capable face,--the face of the modern scientific soldier. It breathed alertness; but also some quality warmer and softer. If the general aspect had been shaped and moulded by an incessant travail of brain, the humanity of eye and mouth spoke dumbly to the humanity of others. The council gathered in the vicarage room felt itself strengthened.

Penrose resumed his questioning of Barnes, and the other two listened while the whole miserable story of the divorce, in its American aspects, unrolled. At first Roger showed a certain apathy and brevity; he might have been fulfilling a task in which he took but small interest; even the details of chicanery and corruption connected with the trial were told without heat; he said nothing bitter of his wife--avoided naming her, indeed, as much as possible.

But when the tale was done he threw back his head with sudden animation and looked at Boyson.

"Is that about the truth, Boyson? You know."

"Yes, I endorse it," said the American gravely. His face, thin and tanned, had flushed while Barnes was speaking.

"And you know what all their papers said of me--what _they_ wished people to believe--that I wasn't fit to have charge of Beatty--that I should have done her harm?"

His eyes sparkled. He looked almost threateningly at the man whom he addressed. Boyson met his gaze quietly.

"I didn't believe it."

There was a pause. Then Roger sprang suddenly to his feet, confronting the men round him.

"Look here!" he said impatiently. "I want some money at once--and a good lot of it." He brought his fist down heavily on the mantelpiece. "There's this place of my uncle's, and I'm dashed if I can get a penny out of it! I went to his solicitors this morning. They drove me mad with their red-tape nonsense. It will take some time, they say, to get a mortgage on it, and meanwhile they don't seem inclined to advance me anything, or a hundred or two, perhaps. What's that? I lost my temper, and next time I go they'll turn me out, I dare say. But there's the truth. It's _money_ I want, and if you can't help me to money it's no use talking."

"And when you get the money what'll you do with it?" asked Penrose.

"Pay half a dozen people who can be trusted to help me kidnap Beatty and smuggle her over the Canadian frontier. I bungled the thing once. I don't mean to bungle it again." The answer was given slowly, without any bravado, but whatever energy of life there was in the speaker had gone into it.

"And there is no other way?" French's voice from the back was troubled.

"Ask him?" Roger pointed to Boyson.

"Is there any legal way, Boyson, in which I can recover the custody and companionship of my child?"

Boyson turned away.

"None that I know of--and I have made every possible inquiry."

"And yet," said Barnes, with emphasis, addressing the English barrister, "by the law of England I am still Daphne's husband and that child's legal guardian?"

"Certainly."

"And if I could once get her upon ground under the English flag, she would be mine again, and no power could take her from me?"

"Except the same private violence that you yourself propose to exercise."

"I'd take care of that!" said Roger briefly.

"How do you mean to do it?" asked French, with knit brows. To be sitting there in an English vicarage plotting violence against a woman disturbed him.

"He and I'll manage it," said the quiet voice of the American officer.

The others stared.

"_You?_" said French. "An officer in active service? It might injure your career!"

"I shall risk it."

A charming smile broke on Penrose's meditative face.

"My dear French, this is much more amusing than the law. But I don't quite see where _I_ come in." He rose tentatively from his seat.

Boyson, however, did not smile. He looked from one to the other.

"My sister and I introduced Daphne Floyd to Barnes," he said steadily, "and it is my country, as I hold,--or a portion of it--that allows these villainies. Some day we shall get a great reaction in the States, and then the reforms that plenty of us are clamouring for will come about. Meanwhile, as of course you know"--he addressed French--"New Yorkers and Bostonians suffer almost as much from the abomination that Nevada and South Dakota call laws, as Barnes has suffered. Marriage in the Eastern States is as sacred as with you--South Carolina allows no divorce at all--but with this licence at our gates, no one is safe, and thousands of our women, in particular--for the women bring two-thirds of the actions--are going to the deuce, simply because they have the opportunity of going. And the children--it doesn't bear thinking of! Well--no good haranguing! I'm ashamed of my country in this matter--I have been for a long time--and I mean to help Barnes out, _coute que coute_! And as to the money, Barnes, you and I'll discuss that."

Barnes lifted a face that quivered, and he and Boyson exchanged looks.

Penrose glanced at the pair. That imaginative power, combined with the power of drudgery, which was in process of making a great lawyer out of a Balliol scholar, showed him something typical and dramatic in the two figures:--in Boyson, on the one hand, so lithe, serviceable, and resolved, a helpful, mercurial man, ashamed of his country in this one respect, because he adored her in so many others, penitent and patriot in one:--in Barnes, on the other, so heavy, inert, and bewildered, a ship-wrecked suppliant as it were, clinging to the knees of that very America which had so lightly and irresponsibly wronged him.

It was Penrose who broke the silence.

"Is there any chance of Mrs. Barnes's marrying again?" he asked.

Barnes turned to him.

"Not that I know of."

"There's no one else in the case?"

"I never heard of anyone." Roger gave a short, excited laugh. "What she's done, she's done because she was tired of me, not because she was in love with anyone else. That was her great score in the divorce case--that there was nobody."

Biting and twisting his lip, in a trick that recalled to French the beautiful Eton lad, cracking his brains in pupil-room over a bit of Latin prose, Roger glanced, frowning, from one to the other of these three men who felt for him, whose resentment of the wrong that had been done him, whose pity for his calamity showed plainly enough through their reticent speech.

His sense, indeed, of their sympathy began to move him, to break down his own self-command. No doubt, also, the fatal causes that ultimately ruined his will-power were already at work. At any rate, he broke out into sudden speech about his case. His complexion, now unhealthily delicate, like the complexion of a girl, had flushed deeply. As he spoke he looked mainly at French.

"There's lots of things you don't know," he said in a hesitating voice, as though appealing to his old friend. And rapidly he told the story of Daphne's flight from Heston. Evidently since his return home many details that were once obscure had become plain to him; and the three listeners could perceive how certain new information had goaded, and stung him afresh. He dwelt on the letters which had reached him during his first week's absence from home, after the quarrel--letters from Daphne and Miss Farmer, which were posted at intervals from Heston by their accomplice, the young architect, while the writers of them were hurrying across the Atlantic. The servants had been told that Mrs. Barnes, Miss Farmer, and the little girl were going to London for a day or two, and suspected nothing. "I wrote long letters--lots of them--to my wife. I thought I had made everything right--not that there ever had been anything wrong, you understand,--seriously. But in some ways I had behaved like a fool."

He threw himself back in his chair, pressing his hands on his eyes. The listeners sat or stood motionless.

"Well, I might have spared my pains. The letters were returned to me from the States. Daphne had arranged it all so cleverly that I was some time in tracing her. By the time I had got to Sioux Falls she was through a month of her necessary residence. My God!"--his voice dropped, became almost inaudible--"if I'd only carried Beatty off _then_!--then and there--the frontier wasn't far off--without waiting for anything more. But I wouldn't believe that Daphne could persist in such a monstrous thing, and, if she did, that any decent country would aid and abet her."

Boyson made a movement of protest, as though he could not listen any longer in silence.

"I am ashamed to remind you, Barnes,--again--that your case is no worse than that of scores of American citizens. We are the first to