WHEN Ethel and Tyrrel parted at the steamer they did not expect a long separation, but Colonel Rawdon never recovered his health, and for many excellent reasons Tyrrel could not leave the dying man. Nor did Ethel wish him to do so. Under these circumstances began the second beautiful phase of Ethel’s wooing, a sweet, daily correspondence, the best of all preparations for matrimonial oneness and understanding. Looking for Tyrrel’s letters, reading them, and answering them passed many happy hours, for to both it was an absolute necessity to assure each other constantly,
“Since I wrote thee yester eve I do love thee, Love, believe, Twelve times dearer, twelve hours longer, One dream deeper one night stronger, One sun surer—this much more Than I loved thee, dear, before.”
And for the rest, she took up her old life with a fresh enthusiasm.
Among these interests none were more urgent in their claims than Dora Stanhope; and fortified by her grandmother’s opinion, Ethel went at once to call on her. She found Basil with his wife, and his efforts to make Ethel see how much he expected from her influence, and yet at the same time not even hint a disapproval of Dora, were almost pathetic, for he was so void of sophistry that his innuendoes were flagrantly open to detection. Dora felt a contempt for them, and he had hardly left the room ere she said:
“Basil has gone to his vestry in high spirits. When I told him you were coming to see me to-day he smiled like an angel. He believes you will keep me out of mischief, and he feels a grand confidence in something which he calls ‘your influence.’”
“What do you mean by mischief?”
“Oh, I suppose going about with Fred Mostyn. I can’t help that. I must have some one to look after me. All the young men I used to know pass me now with a lifted hat or a word or two. The girls have forgotten me. I don’t suppose I shall be asked to a single dance this winter.”
“The ladies in St. Jude’s church would make a pet of you if——”
“The old cats and kittens! No, thank you, I am not going to church except on Sunday mornings—that is respectable and right; but as to being the pet of St. Jude’s ladies! No, no! How they would mew over my delinquencies, and what scratches I should get from their velvet-shod claws! If I have to be talked about, I prefer the ladies of the world to discuss my frailties.”
“But if I were you, I would give no one a reason for saying a word against me. Why should you?”
“Fred will supply them with reasons. I can’t keep the man away from me. I don’t believe I want to—he is very nice and useful.”
“You are talking nonsense, things you don’t mean, Dora. You are not such a foolish woman as to like to be seen with Fred Mostyn, that little monocular snob, after the aristocratic, handsome Basil Stanhope. The comparison is a mockery. Basil is the finest gentleman I ever saw. Socially, he is perfection, and——”
“He is only a clergyman.”
“Even as a clergyman he is of religiously royal descent. There are generations of clergymen behind him, and he is a prince in the pulpit. Every man that knows him gives him the highest respect, every woman thinks you the most fortunate of wives. No one cares for Fred Mostyn. Even in his native place he is held in contempt. He had nine hundred votes to young Rawdon’s twelve thousand.”
“I don’t mind that. I am going to the matinee to-morrow with Fred. He wanted to take me out in his auto this afternoon, but when I said I would go if you would he drew back. What is the reason? Did he make you offer of his hand? Did you refuse it?”
“He never made me an offer. I count that to myself as a great compliment. If he had done such a thing, he would certainly have been refused.”
“I can tell that he really hates you. What dirty trick did you serve him about Rawdon Court?”
“So he called the release of Squire Rawdon a ‘dirty trick’? It would have been a very dirty trick to have let Fred Mostyn get his way with Squire Rawdon.”
“Of course, Ethel, when a man lends his money as an obligation he expects to get it back again.”
“Mostyn got every farthing due him, and he wanted one of the finest manors in Eng-land in return for the obligation. He did not get it, thank God and my father!”
“He will not forget your father’s interference.”
“I hope he will remember it.”
“Do you know who furnished the money to pay Fred? He says he is sure your father did not have it.”
“Tell him to ask my father. He might even ask your father. Whether my father had the money or not was immaterial. Father could borrow any sum he wanted, I think.”
“Whom did he borrow from?”
“I am sure that Fred told you to ask that question. Is he writing to you, Dora?”
“Suppose he is?”
“I cannot suppose such a thing. It is too impossible.”
This was the beginning of a series of events all more or less qualified to bring about unspeakable misery in Basil’s home. But there is nothing in life like the marriage tie. The tugs it will bear and not break, the wrongs it will look over, the chronic misunderstandings it will forgive, make it one of the mysteries of humanity. It was not in a day or a week that Basil Stanhope’s dream of love and home was shattered. Dora had frequent and then less frequent times of return to her better self; and every such time renewed her husband’s hope that she was merely passing through a period of transition and assimilation, and that in the end she would be all his desire hoped for.
But Ethel saw what he did not see, that Mostyn was gradually inspiring her with his own opinions, perhaps even with his own passion. In this emergency, however, she was gratified to find that Dora’s mother appeared to have grasped the situation. For if Dora went to the theater with Mostyn, Mrs. Denning or Bryce was also there; and the reckless auto driving, shopping, and lunching had at least a show of respectable association. Yet when the opera season opened, the constant companionship of Mostyn and Dora became entirely too remarkable, not only in the public estimation, but in Basil’s miserable conception of his own wrong. The young husband used every art and persuasion—and failed. And his failure was too apparent to be slighted. He became feverish and nervous, and his friends read his misery in eyes heavy with unshed tears, and in the wasting pallor caused by his sleepless, sorrowful nights.
Dora also showed signs of the change so rapidly working on her. She was sullen and passionate by turns; she complained bitterly to Ethel that her youth and beauty had been wasted; that she was only nineteen, and her life was over. She wanted to go to Paris, to get away from New York anywhere and anyhow. She began to dislike even the presence of Basil. His stately beauty offended her, his low, calm voice was the very keynote of irritation.
One morning near Christmas he came to her with a smiling, radiant face. “Dora,” he said, “Dora, my love, I have something so interesting to tell you. Mrs. Colby and Mrs. Schaffler and some other ladies have a beautiful idea. They wish to give all the children of the church under eight years old the grandest Christmas tree imaginable—really rich presents and they thought you might like to have it here.”
“What do you say, Basil!”
“You were always so fond of children. You——”
“I never could endure them.”
“We all thought you might enjoy it. Indeed, I was so sure that I promised for you. It will be such a pleasure to me also, dear.”
“I will have no such childish nonsense in my house.”
“I promised it, Dora.”
“You had no right to do so. This is my house. My father bought it and gave me it, and it is my own. I——”
“It seems, then, that I intrude in your house. Is it so? Speak, Dora.”
“If you will ask questions you must take the answer. You do intrude when you come with such ridiculous proposals—in fact, you intrude very often lately.”
“Does Mr. Mostyn intrude?”
“Mr. Mostyn takes me out, gives me a little sensible pleasure. You think I can be interested in a Christmas tree. The idea!”
“Alas, alas, Dora, you are tired of me! You do not love me! You do not love me!”
“I love nobody. I am sorry I got married. It was all a mistake. I will go home and then you can get a divorce.”
At this last word the whole man changed. He was suffused, transfigured with an anger that was at once righteous and impetuous.
“How dare you use that word to me?” he demanded. “To the priest of God no such word exists. I do not know it. You are my wife, willing or unwilling. You are my wife forever, whether you dwell with me or not. You cannot sever bonds the Almighty has tied. You are mine, Dora Stanhope! Mine for time and eternity! Mine forever and ever!”
She looked at him in amazement, and saw a man after an image she had never imagined. She was terrified. She flung herself on the sofa in a whirlwind of passion. She cried aloud against his claim. She gave herself up to a vehement rage that was strongly infused with a childish dismay and panic.
“I will not be your wife forever!” she shrieked. “I will never be your wife again—never, not for one hour! Let me go! Take your hands off me!” For Basil had knelt down by the distraught woman, and clasping her in his arms said, even on her lips, “You ARE my dear wife! You are my very own dear wife! Tell me what to do. Anything that is right, reasonable I will do. We can never part.”
“I will go to my father. I will never come back to you.” And with these words she rose, threw off his embrace, and with a sobbing cry ran, like a terrified child, out of the room.
He sat down exhausted by his emotion, and sick with the thought she had evoked in that one evil word. The publicity, the disgrace, the wrong to Holy Church—ah, that was the cruelest wound! His own wrong was hard enough, but that he, who would gladly die for the Church, should put her to open shame! How could he bear it? Though it killed him, he must prevent that wrong; yes, if the right eye offended it must be plucked out. He must throw off his cassock, and turn away from the sacred aisles; he must—he could not say the word; he would wait a little. Dora would not leave him; it was impossible. He waited in a trance of aching suspense. Nothing for an hour or more broke it—no footfall, no sound of command or complaint. He was finally in hopes that Dora slept. Then he was called to lunch, and he made a pretense of eating it alone. Dora sent no excuse for her absence, and he could not trust himself to make inquiry about her. In the middle of the afternoon he heard a carriage drive to the door, and Dora, with her jewel-case in her hand, entered it and was driven away. The sight astounded him. He ran to her room, and found her maid packing her clothing. The woman answered his questions sullenly. She said “Mrs. Stanhope had gone to Mrs. Denning’s, and had left orders for her trunks to be sent there.” Beyond this she was silent and ignorant. No sympathy for either husband or wife was in her heart. Their quarrel was interfering with her own plans; she hated both of them in consequence.
In the meantime Dora had reached her home. Her mother was dismayed and hesitating, and her attitude raised again in Dora’s heart the passion which had provoked the step she had taken. She wept like a lost child. She exclaimed against the horror of being Basil’s wife forever and ever. She reproached her mother for suffering her to marry while she was only a child. She said she had been cruelly used in order to get the family into social recognition. She was in a frenzy of grief at her supposed sacrifice when her father came home. Her case was then won. With her arms round his neck, sobbing against his heart, her tears and entreaties on his lips, Ben Denning had no feeling and no care for anyone but his daughter. He took her view of things at once. “She HAD been badly used. It WAS a shame to tie a girl like Dora to sermons and such like. It was like shutting her up in a convent.” Dora’s tears and complaints fired him beyond reason. He promised her freedom whatever it cost him.
And while he sat in his private room considering the case, all the racial passions of his rough ancestry burning within him, Basil Stanhope called to see him. He permitted him to come into his presence, but he rose as he entered, and walked hastily a few steps to meet him.
“What do you want here, sir?” he asked.
“My wife.”
“My daughter. You shall not see her. I have taken her back to my own care.”
“She is my wife. No one can take her from me.”
“I will teach you a different lesson.”
“The law of God.”
“The law of the land goes here. You’ll find it more than you can defy.”
“Sir, I entreat you to let me speak to Dora.”
“I will not.”
“I will stay here until I see her.”
“I will give you five minutes. I do not wish to offer your profession an insult; if you have any respect for it you will obey me.”
“Answer me one question—what have I done wrong?”
“A man can be so intolerably right, that he becomes unbearably wrong. You have no business with a wife and a home. You are a d—— sight too good for a good little girl that wants a bit of innocent amusement. Sermons and Christmas trees! Great Scott, what sensible woman would not be sick of it all? Sir, I don’t want another minute of your company. Little wonder that my Dora is ill with it. Oblige me by leaving my house as quietly as possible.” And he walked to the door, flung it open, and stood glaring at the distracted husband. “Go,” he said. “Go at once. My lawyer will see you in the future. I have nothing further to say to you.”
Basil went, but not to his desolate home. He had a private key to the vestry in his church, and in its darkness and solitude he faced the first shock of his ruined life, for he knew well all was over. All had been. He sank to the floor at the foot of the large cross which hung on its bare white walls. Grief’s illimitable wave went over him, and like a drowning man he uttered an inarticulate cry of agony—the cry of a soul that had wronged its destiny. Love had betrayed him to ruin. All he had done must be abandoned. All he had won must be given up. Sin and shame indeed it would be if in his person a sacrament of the Church should be dragged through a divorce court. All other considerations paled before this disgrace. He must resign his curacy, strip himself of the honorable livery of heaven, obliterate his person and his name. It was a kind of death.
After awhile he rose, drank some water, lifted the shade and let the moonlight in. Then about that little room he walked with God through the long night, telling Him his sorrow and perplexity. And there is a depth in our own nature where the divine and human are one. That night Basil Stanhope found it, and henceforward knew that the bitterness of death was behind him, not before. “I made my nest too dear on earth,” he sighed, “and it has been swept bare—that is, that I may build in heaven.”
Now, the revelation of sorrow is the clearest of all revelations. Stanhope understood that hour what he must do. No doubts weakened his course. He went back to the house Dora called “hers,” took away what he valued, and while the servants were eating their breakfast and talking over his marital troubles, he passed across its threshold for the last time. He told no one where he was going; he dropped as silently and dumbly out of the life that had known him as a stone dropped into mid-ocean.
Ethel considered herself fortunate in being from home at the time this disastrous culmination of Basil Stanhope’s married life was reached. On that same morning the Judge, accompanied by Ruth and herself, had gone to Lenox to spend the holidays with some old friends, and she was quite ignorant of the matter when she returned after the New Year. Bryce was her first informant. He called specially to give her the news. He said his sister had been too ill and too busy to write. He had no word of sympathy for the unhappy pair. He spoke only of the anxiety it had caused him. “He was now engaged,” he said, “to Miss Caldwell, and she was such an extremely proper, innocent lady, and a member of St. Jude’s, it had really been a trying time for her.” Bryce also reminded Ethel that he had been against Basil Stanhope from the first. “He had always known how that marriage would end,” and so on.
Ethel declined to give any opinion. “She must hear both sides,” she said. “Dora had been so reasonable lately, she had appeared happy.”
“Oh, Dora is a little fox,” he replied; “she doubles on herself always.”
Ruth was properly regretful. She wondered “if any married woman was really happy.” She did not apparently concern herself about Basil. The Judge rather leaned to Basil’s consideration. He understood that Dora’s overt act had shattered his professional career as well as his personal happiness. He could feel for the man there. “My dears,” he said, with his dilettante air, “the goddess Calamity is delicate, and her feet are tender. She treads not upon the ground, but makes her path upon the hearts of men.” In this non-committal way he gave his comment, for he usually found a bit of classical wisdom to fit modern emergencies, and the habit had imparted an antique bon-ton to his conversation. Ethel could only wonder at the lack of real sympathy.
In the morning she went to see her grandmother. The old lady had “heard” all she wanted to hear about Dora and Basil Stanhope. If men would marry a fool because she was young and pretty, they must take the consequences. “And why should Stanhope have married at all?” she asked indignantly. “No man can serve God and a woman at the same time. He had to be a bad priest and a good husband, or a bad husband and a good priest. Basil Stanhope was honored, was doing good, and he must needs be happy also. He wanted too much, and lost everything. Serve him right.”
“All can now find some fault in poor Basil Stanhope,” said Ethel. “Bryce was bitter against him because Miss Caldwell shivers at the word ‘divorce.’”
“What has Bryce to do with Jane Caldwell?”
“He is going to marry her, he says.”
“Like enough; she’s a merry miss of two-score, and rich. Bryce’s marriage with anyone will be a well-considered affair—a marriage with all the advantages of a good bargain. I’m tired of the whole subject. If women will marry they should be as patient as Griselda, in case there ever was such a woman; if not, there’s an end of the matter.”
“There are no Griseldas in this century, grandmother.”
“Then there ought to be no marriages. Basil Stanhope was a grand man in public. What kind of a man was he in his home? Measure a man by his home conduct, and you’ll not go wrong. It’s the right place to draw your picture of him, I can tell you that.”
“He has no home now, poor fellow.”
“Whose fault was it? God only knows. Where is his wife?”
“She has gone to Paris.”
“She has gone to the right place if she wants to play the fool. But there, now, God forbid I should judge her in the dark. Women should stand by women—considering.”
“Considering?”
“What they may have to put up with. It is easy to see faults in others. I have sometimes met with people who should see faults in themselves. They are rather uncommon, though.”
“I am sure Basil Stanhope will be miserable all his life. He will break his heart, I do believe.”
“Not so. A good heart is hard to break, it grows strong in trouble. Basil Stanhope’s body will fail long before his heart does; and even so an end must come to life, and after that peace or what God wills.”
This scant sympathy Ethel found to be the usual tone among her acquaintances. St. Jude’s got a new rector and a new idol, and the Stanhope affair was relegated to the limbo of things “it was proper to forget.”
So the weeks of the long winter went by, and Ethel in the joy and hope of her own love-life naturally put out of her mind the sorrow of lives she could no longer help or influence. Indeed, as to Dora, there were frequent reports of her marvelous social success in Paris; and Ethel did not doubt Stanhope had found some everlasting gospel of holy work to comfort his desolation. And then also
“Each day brings its petty dust,
Our soon-choked souls to fill;
And we forget because we must,
And not because we will.”
One evening when May with heavy clouds and slant rains was making the city as miserable as possible, Ethel had a caller. His card bore a name quite unknown, and his appearance gave no clew to his identity.
“Mr. Edmonds?” she said interrogatively.
“Are you Miss Ethel Rawdon?” he asked.
“Yes.”
“Mr. Basil Stanhope told me to put this parcel in your hands.”
“Oh, Mr. Stanhope! I am glad to hear from him. Where is he now?”
“We buried him yesterday. He died last Sunday as the bells were ringing for church—pneumonia, miss. While reading the ser-vice over a poor young man he had nursed many weeks he took cold. The poor will miss him sorely.”
“DEAD!” She looked aghast at the speaker, and again ejaculated the pitiful, astounding word.
“Good evening, miss. I promised him to return at once to the work he left me to do.” And he quietly departed, leaving Ethel standing with the parcel in her hands. She ran upstairs and locked it away. Just then she could not bear to open it.
“And it is hardly twelve months since he was married,” she sobbed. “Oh, Ruth, Ruth, it is too cruel!”
“Dear,” answered Ruth, “there is no death to such a man as Basil Stanhope.”
“He was so young, Ruth.”
“I know. ‘His high-born brothers called him hence’ at the age of twenty-nine, but
“‘It is not growing like a tree,
In bulk, doth make men better be;
Or standing like an oak three hundred year,
To fall at last, dry, bald and sear:
A lily of a day
Is fairer far in May;
Although it fall and die that night,
It was the plant and flower of light.’”
At these words the Judge put down his Review to listen to Ethel’s story, and when she ceased speaking he had gone far further back than any antique classic for compensation and satisfaction:
“He being made perfect in a short time fulfilled a long time. For his soul pleased the Lord, therefore hasted He to take him away from among the wicked.” 2 And that evening there was little conversation. Every heart was busy with its own thoughts.
2 (return)
[ Wisdom of Solomon, IV., 13,
14.]
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