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

firm, and her reward lay in the fact that she had gathered round her an army of dependents and followers--women especially--to whom her money and her brains were indispensable. There on the table lay the plans for a new Women's College, on the broadest and most modern lines, to which she was soon to devote a large sum of money. The walls should have been up by now but for a quarrel with her secretary, who had become much too independent, and had had to be peremptorily dismissed at a moment's notice. But the plan was a noble one, approved by the highest authorities; and Daphne, looking to posterity, anticipated the recognition that she herself might never live to see. For the rest she had given herself--with reservations--to the Feminist movement. It was not in her nature to give herself wholly to anything; and she was instinctively critical of people who professed to be her leaders, and programmes to which she was expected to subscribe. Wholehearted devotion, which, as she rightly said, meant blind devotion, had never been her line; and she had been on one or two occasions offensively outspoken on the subject of certain leading persons in the movement. She was not, therefore, popular with her party, and did not care to be; her pride of money held her apart from the rank and file, the college girls, and typists, and journalists who filled the Feminist meetings, and often made themselves, in her eyes, supremely ridiculous, because of what she considered their silly provinciality and lack of knowledge of the world.

Yet, of course, she was a "Feminist"--and particularly associated with those persons in the suffrage camp who stood for broad views on marriage and divorce. She knew very well that many other persons in the same camp held different opinions; and in public or official gatherings was always nervously--most people thought arrogantly--on the look-out for affronts. Meanwhile, everywhere, or almost everywhere, her money gave her power, and her knowledge of it was always sweet to her. There was nothing in the world--no cause, no faith--that she could have accepted "as a little child." But everywhere, in her own opinion, she stood for Justice; justice for women as against the old primaeval tyranny of men; justice, of course, to the workman, and justice to the rich. No foolish Socialism, and no encroaching Trusts! A lucid common sense, so it seemed to her, had been her cradle-gift.

And with regard to Art, how much she had been able to do! She had generously helped the public collections, and her own small gallery, at the house in Newport, was famous throughout England and America. That in the course of the preceding year she had found among the signatures, extracted from visitors by the custodian in charge, the name of Chloe Fairmile, had given her a peculiar satisfaction.

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