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A Modern Instance

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The lawyer was too much used to the statement, direct and hypothetical, of
all sorts of cases, to be startled at this. He smiled slightly, and said,
"That would depend a good deal upon the lady."

"Oh, but generalize! From what you know of women as Woman, what should you
expect? Shouldn't you expect her to make you pay somehow for your privity
to her disgrace, to revenge her misery upon you? Isn't there a theory that
women forgive injuries, but never ignominies?"

"That's what the novelists teach, and we bachelors get most of our doctrine
about women from them." He closed his novel on the paper-cutter, and,
laying the book upon the table, clasped his hands together at the back of
his head. "We don't go to nature for our impressions; but neither do the
novelists, for that matter. Now and then, however, in the way of business,
I get a glimpse of realities that make me doubt my prophets. Who had this
experience?"

"I did."

"I'm sorry for that," said Atherton.

"Yes," returned Halleck, with whimsical melancholy; "I'm not particularly
adapted for it. But I don't know that it would be a very pleasant
experience for anybody."

He paused drearily, and Atherton said, "And how did she actually treat
you?"

"I hardly know. I hadn't been at the pains to look them up since the
thing happened, and I had been carrying their squalid secret round for a
fortnight, and suffering from it as if it were all my own."

Atherton smiled at the touch of self-characterization.

"When I met her and her husband and her baby to-day,--a family
party,--well, she made me ashamed of the melodramatic compassion I had been
feeling for her. It seemed that I had been going about unnecessarily, not
to say impertinently, haggard with the recollection of her face as I saw it
when she opened the door for her blackguard and me that morning. She looked
as if nothing unusual had happened at our last meeting. I couldn't brace up
all at once: I behaved like a sneak, in view of her serenity."

"Perhaps nothing unusual _had_ happened," suggested Atherton.

"No, that theory isn't tenable," said Halleck. "It was the one fact in the
blackguard's favor that she had evidently never seen him in that state
before, and didn't know what was the matter. She was wild at first; she
wanted to send for a doctor. I think towards the last she began to suspect.
But I don't know how she looked _then_: I couldn't look at her." He stopped
as if still in the presence of the pathetic figure, with its sidelong,
drooping head.

Atherton respected his silence a moment before he again suggested, as
lightly as before, "Perhaps she is magnanimous."

"No," said Halleck, with the effect of having also given that theory
consideration. "She's not magnanimous, poor soul. I fancy she is rather a
narrow-minded person, with strict limitations in regard to people who think
ill--or too well--of her husband."

"Then perhaps," said Atherton, with the air of having exhausted conjecture,
"she's obtuse."

"I have tried, to think that too," replied Halleck, "but I can't manage it.
No, there are only two ways out of it; the fellow has abused her innocence
and made her believe it's a common and venial affair to be brought home in
that state, or else she's playing a part. He's capable of telling her that
neither you nor I, for example, ever go to bed sober. But she isn't obtuse:
I fancy she's only too keen in all the sensibilities that women suffer
through; and I'd rather think that he had deluded her in that way, than
that she was masquerading about it, or she strikes me as an uncommonly
truthful person. I suppose you know whom I'm talking about, Atherton?" he
said, with a sudden look at his friend's face across the table.

"Yes, I know," said the lawyer. "I'm sorry it's come to this already.
Though I suppose you're not altogether surprised."

"No; something of the kind was to be expected," Halleck sighed, and rolled
his cane up and down on the arms of his chair. "I hope we know the worst."

"Perhaps we do. But I recollect a wise remark you made the first time we
talked of these people," said Atherton, replying to the mood rather than
the speech of his friend. "You suggested that we rather liked to grieve
over the pretty girls that other fellows marry, and that we never thought
of the plain ones as suffering."

"Oh, I hadn't any data for my pity in this case, then," replied Halleck.
"I'm willing to allow that a plain woman would suffer under the same
circumstances; and I think I should be capable of pitying her. But I'll
confess that the notion of a pretty woman's sorrow is more intolerable;
there's no use denying a fact so universally recognized by the male
consciousness. I take my share of shame for it. I wonder why it is? Pretty
women always seem to appeal to us as more dependent and childlike. I dare
say they're not."

"Some of them are quite able to take care of themselves," said Atherton.
"I've known striking instances of the kind. How do you know but the object
of your superfluous pity was cheerful because fate had delivered her
husband, bound forever, into her hand, through this little escapade of
his?"

"Isn't that rather a coarse suggestion?" asked Halleck.

"Very likely. I suggest it; I don't assert it. But I fancy that wives
sometimes like a permanent grievance that is always at hand, no matter what
the mere passing occasion of the particular disagreement is. It seems to
me that I have detected obscure appeals to such a weapon in domestic
interviews at which I've assisted in the way of business."

"Don't, Atherton!" cried Halleck.

"Don't how? In this particular case, or in regard to wives generally. We
can't do women a greater injustice than not to account for a vast deal
of human nature in them. You may be sure that things haven't come to the
present pass with those people without blame on both sides."

"Oh, do you defend a man for such beastliness, by that stale old plea of
blame on both sides?" demanded Halleck, indignantly.

"No; but I should like to know what she had said or done to provoke it,
before I excused her altogether."

"You would! Imagine the case reversed."

"It isn't imaginable."

"You think there is a special code of morals for women,--sins and shames
for them that are no sins and shames for us!"

"No, I don't think that! I merely suggest that you don't idealize the
victim in this instance. I dare say she hasn't suffered half as much as you
have. Remember that she's a person of commonplace traditions, and probably
took a simple view of the matter, and let it go as something that could not
be helped."

"No, that would not do, either," said Halleck.

"You're hard to please. Suppose we imagine her proud enough to face you
down on the fact, for his sake; too proud to revenge her disgrace on you--"

"Oh, you come back to your old plea of magnanimity! Atherton, it makes me
sick at heart to think of that poor creature. That look of hers haunts me!
I can't get rid of it!"

Atherton sat considering his friend with a curious smile. "Well, I'm sorry
this has happened to _you_, Halleck."

"Oh, why do you say that to me?" demanded Halleck, impatiently. "Am I a
nervous woman, that I must be kept from unpleasant sights and disagreeable
experiences? If there's anything of the man about me, you insult it! Why
not be a little sorry for _her_?"

"I'm sorry enough for her; but I suspect that, so far, you have been the
principal sufferer. She's simply accepted the fact, and survived it."

"So much the worse, so much the worse!" groaned Halleck. "She'd better have
died!"

"Well, perhaps. I dare say she thinks it will never happen again, and has
dismissed the subject; while you've had it happening ever since, whenever
you've thought of her."

Halleck struck the arms of his chair with his clinched hands. "Confound the
fellow! What business has he to come back into my way, and make me think
about his wife? Oh, very likely it's quite as you say! I dare say she's
stupidly content with him; that she's forgiven it and forgotten all about
it. Probably she's told him how I behaved, and they've laughed me over
together. But does that make it any easier to bear?"

"It ought," said Atherton. "What did the husband do when you met them?"

"Everything but tip me the wink,--everything but say, in so many words,
'You see I've made it all right with her: don't you wish you knew--how?'"
Halleck dropped his head, with a wrathful groan.

"I fancy," said Atherton, thoughtfully, "that, if we really knew how, it
would surprise us. Married life is as much a mystery to us outsiders as the
life to come, almost. The ordinary motives don't seem to count; it's the
realm of unreason. If a man only makes his wife suffer enough, she finds
out that she loves him so much she _must_ forgive him. And then there's a
great deal in their being bound. They can't live together in enmity, and
they must live together. I dare say the offence had merely worn itself out
between them."

"Oh, I dare say," Halleck assented, wearily. "That isn't my idea of
marriage, though."

"It's not mine, either," returned Atherton. "The question is whether it
isn't often the fact in regard to such people's marriages."

"Then they are so many hells," cried Halleck, "where self-respect perishes
with resentment, and the husband and wife are enslaved to each other. They
ought to be broken up!"

"I don't think so," said Atherton, soberly. "The sort of men and women that
marriage enslaves would be vastly more wretched and mischievous if they
were set free. I believe that the hell people make for themselves isn't at
all a bad place for them. It's the best place for them."

"Oh, I know your doctrine," said Halleck, rising. "It's horrible! How a man
with any kindness in his heart can harbor such a cold-blooded philosophy
_I_ don't understand. I wish you joy of it. Good night," he added,
gloomily, taking his hat from the table. "It serves me right for coming to
you with a matter that I ought to have been man enough to keep to myself."

Atherton followed him toward the door. "It won't do you any harm to
consider your perplexity in the light of my philosophy. An unhappy marriage
isn't the only hell, nor the worst."

Halleck turned. "What could be a worse hell than marriage without love?" he
demanded, fiercely.

"Love without marriage," said Atherton.

Halleck looked sharply at his friend. Then he shrugged his shoulders as he
turned again and swung out of the door. "You're too esoteric for me. It's
quite time I was gone."

The way through Clover Street was not the shortest way home; but he climbed
the hill and passed the little house. He wished to rehabilitate in its
pathetic beauty the image which his friend's conjectures had jarred,
distorted, insulted; and he lingered for a moment before the door where
this vision had claimed his pity for anguish that no after serenity could
repudiate. The silence in which the house was wrapped was like another fold
of the mystery which involved him. The night wind rose in a sudden gust,
and made the neighboring lamp flare, and his shadow wavered across the
pavement like the figure of a drunken man. This, and not that other, was
the image which he saw.




XXVII.


"Of course," said Marcia, when she and Bartley recurred to the subject of
her visit to Equity, "I have always felt as if I should like to have you
with me, so as to keep people from talking, and show that it's all right
between you and father. But if you don't wish to go, I can't ask it."

"I understand what you mean, and I should like to gratify you," said
Bartley. "Not that I care a rap what all the people in Equity think. I'll
tell you what I'll do, I'll go down there with you and hang round a day or
two; and then I'll come after you, when your time's up, and stay a day or
two there. I _couldn't_ stand three weeks in Equity."

In the end, he behaved very handsomely. He dressed Flavia out to kill, as
he said, in lace hoods and embroidered long-clothes, for which he tossed
over half the ready-made stock of the great dry-goods stores; and he made
Marcia get herself a new suit throughout, with a bonnet to match, which she
thought she could not afford, but he said he should manage it somehow.
In Equity he spared no pains to deepen the impression of his success in
Boston, and he was affable with everybody. He hailed his friends across
the street, waving his hand to them, and shouting out a jolly greeting.
He visited the hotel office and the stores to meet the loungers there; he
stepped into the printing-office, and congratulated Henry Bird on having
stopped the Free Press and devoted himself to job-work. He said, "Hello,
Marilla! Hello, Hannah!" and he stood a good while beside the latter at her
case, joking and laughing. He had no resentments. He stopped old Morrison
on the street and shook hands with him. "Well, Mr. Morrison, do you find it
as easy to get Hannah's wages advanced nowadays as you used to?"

As for his relations with Squire Gaylord, he flattened public conjecture
out like a pancake, as he told Marcia, by making the old gentleman walk
arm-and-arm with him the whole length of the village street the morning
after his arrival. "And I never saw your honored father look as if he
enjoyed a thing less," added Bartley. "Well, what's the use? He couldn't
help himself." They had arrived on Friday evening, and, after spending
Saturday in this social way, Bartley magnanimously went with Marcia to
church. He was in good spirits, and he shook hands, right and left, as he
came out of church. In the afternoon he had up the best team from the hotel
stable, and took Marcia the Long Drive, which they had taken the day
of their engagement. He could not be contented without pushing the
perambulator out after tea, and making Marcia walk beside it, to let people
see them with the baby.

He went away the next morning on an early train, after a parting which he
made very cheery, and a promise to come down again as soon as he could
manage it. Marcia watched him drive off toward the station in the hotel
barge, and then she went upstairs to their room, where she had been so long
a young girl, and where now their child lay sleeping. The little one seemed
the least part of all the change that had taken place. In this room she
used to sit and think of him; she used to fly up thither when he came
unexpectedly, and order her hair or change a ribbon of her dress, that she
might please him better; at these windows she used to sit and watch, and
long for his coming; from these she saw him go by that day when she thought
she should see him no more, and took heart of her despair to risk the wild
chance that made him hers. There was a deadly, unsympathetic stillness in
the room which seemed to leave to her all the responsibility for what she
had done.

The days began to go by in a sunny, still, midsummer monotony. She pushed
the baby out in its carriage, and saw the summer boarders walking or
driving through the streets; she returned the visits that the neighbors
paid her; indoors she helped her mother about the housework. An image of
her maiden life reinstated itself. At times it seemed almost as if she
had dreamed her marriage. When she looked at her baby in these moods, she
thought she was dreaming yet. A young wife suddenly parted for the first
time from her husband, in whose intense possession she has lost her
individual existence, and devolving upon her old separate personality, must
have strong fancies, strange sensations. Marcia's marriage had been full of
such shocks and storms as might well have left her dazed in their entire
cessation.

"She seems to be pretty well satisfied here," said her father, one evening
when she had gone upstairs with her sleeping baby in her arms.

"She seems to be pretty quiet," her mother noncommittally assented.

"M-yes," snarled the Squire, and he fell into a long revery, while Mrs.
Gaylord went on crocheting the baby a bib, and the smell of the petunia-bed
under the window came in through the mosquito netting. "M-yes," he resumed,
"I guess you're right. I guess it's only quiet. I guess she ain't any more
likely to be satisfied than the rest of us."

"I don't see why she shouldn't be," said Mrs. Gaylord, resenting the
compassion in the Squire's tone with that curious jealousy a wife feels for
her husband's indulgence of their daughter. "She's had her way."

"She's had her way, poor girl,--yes. But I don't know as it satisfies
people to have their way, always."

Doubtless Mrs. Gaylord saw that her husband wished to talk about Marcia,
and must be helped to do so by a little perverseness. "I don't know but
what most of folks would say 't she'd made out pretty well. I guess she's
got a good provider."

"She didn't need any provider," said the Squire haughtily.

"No; but so long as she would have something, it's well enough that she
should have a provider." Mrs. Gaylord felt that this was reasoning, and she
smoothed out so much of the bib as she had crocheted across her knees with
an air of self-content. "You can't have everything in a husband," she
added, "and Marcia ought to know that, by this time."

"I've no doubt she knows it," said the Squire.

"Why, what makes you think she's disappointed any?" Mrs. Gaylord came plump
to the question at last.

"Nothing she ever said," returned her husband promptly. "She'd die, first.
When I was up there I thought she talked about him too much to be feeling
just right about him. It was Bartley this and Bartley that, the whole
while. She was always wanting me to say that I thought she had done right
to marry him. I _did_ sort of say it, at last,--to please her. But I kept
thinking that, if she felt sure of it, she wouldn't want to talk it into me
so. Now, she never mentions him at all, if she can help it. She writes to
him every day, and she hears from him often enough,--postals, mostly; but
she don't talk about Bartley, Bartley!" The Squire stretched his lips back
from his teeth, and inhaled a long breath, as he rubbed his chin.

"You don't suppose anything's happened since you was up there," said Mrs.
Gaylord.

"Nothing but what's happened from the start. _He's_ happened. He keeps
happening right along, I guess."

Mrs. Gaylord found herself upon the point of experiencing a painful emotion
of sympathy, but she saved herself by saying: "Well, Mr. Gaylord, I don't
know as you've got anybody but yourself to thank for it all. You got him
here, in the first _place_." She took one of the kerosene lamps from the
table, and went upstairs, leaving him to follow at his will.

Marcia sometimes went out to the Squire's office in the morning, carrying
her baby with her, and propping her with law-books on a newspaper in the
middle of the floor, while she dusted the shelves, or sat down for one of
the desultory talks in the satisfactory silences which she had with her
father.

He usually found her there when he came up from the post-office, with the
morning mail in the top of his hat: the last evening's Events,--which
Bartley had said must pass for a letter from him when he did not
write,--and a letter or a postal card from him. She read these, and gave
her lather any news or message that Bartley sent; and then she sat down
at his table to answer them. But one morning, after she had been at home
nearly a month, she received a letter for which she postponed Bartley's
postal. "It's from Olive Halleck!" she said, with a glance at the
handwriting on the envelope; and she tore it open, and ran it through.
"Yes, and they'll come here, any time I let them know. They've been at
Niagara, and they've come down the St. Lawrence to Quebec, and they will be
at North Conway the last of next week. Now, father, I want to do something
for them!" she cried, feeling an American daughter's right to dispose of
her father, and all his possessions, for the behoof of her friends at any
time. "I want they should come to the house."

"Well, I guess there won't be any trouble about that, if you think they can
put up with our way of living.' He smiled at her over his spectacles.

"Our way of living! Put up with it! I should hope as much! They're just
the kind of people that will put up with anything, because they've had
everything. And because they're all as sweet and good as they can be. You
don't know them, father, you don't half know them! Now, just get right
away,"--she pushed him out of the chair he had taken at the table,--"and
let me write to Bartley this instant. He's got to come when they're here,
and I'll invite them to come over at once, before they get settled at North
Conway."

He gave his dry chuckle to see her so fired with pleasure, and he enjoyed
the ardor with which she drove him up out of his chair, and dashed off her
letters. This was her old way; he would have liked the prospect of the
Hallecks coming, because it made his girl so happy, if for nothing else.

"Father, I will tell you about Ben Halleck," she said, pounding her letter
to Olive with the thick of her hand to make the envelope stick. "You know
that lameness of his?"

"Yes."

"Well, it came from his being thrown down by another boy when he was at
school. He knew the boy that did it; and the boy must have known that Mr.
Halleck knew it, but he never said a word to show that he was sorry, or did
anything to make up for it He's a man now, and lives there in Boston, and
Ben Halleck often meets him. He says that if the man can stand it he can.
Don't you think that's grand? When I heard that, I made up my mind that
I wanted Flavia to belong to Ben Halleck's church,--or the church he did
belong to; he doesn't belong to any now!"

"He couldn't have got any damages for such a thing anyway," the Squire
said.

Marcia paid no heed to this legal opinion of the case. She took off her
father's hat to put the letters into it, and, replacing it on his head,
"Now don't you forget them, father," she cried.

She gathered up her baby and hurried into the house, where she began her
preparations for her guests.

The elder Miss Hallecks had announced with much love, through Olive, that
they should not be able to come to Equity, and Ben was to bring Olive
alone. Marcia decided that Ben should have the guest-chamber, and Olive
should have her room; she and Bartley could take the little room in the L
while their guests remained.

But when the Hallecks came, it appeared that Ben had engaged quarters for
himself at the hotel, and no expostulation would prevail with him to come
to Squire Gaylord's house.

"We have to humor him in such things, Mrs. Hubbard," Olive explained, to
Marcia's distress. "And most people get on very well without him."

This explanation was of course given in Halleck's presence. His sister
added, behind his back: "Ben has a perfectly morbid dread of giving trouble
in a house. He won't let us do anything to make him comfortable at home,
and the idea that you should attempt it drove him distracted. You mustn't
mind it. I don't believe he'd have come if his bachelor freedom couldn't
have been respected; and we both wanted to come Very much."

The Hallecks arrived in the forenoon, and Bartley was due in the evening.
But during the afternoon Marcia had a telegram saying that he could not
come till two days later, and asking her to postpone the picnic she had
planned. The Hallecks were only going to stay three days, and the suspicion
that Bartley had delayed in order to leave himself as little time as
possible with them rankled in her heart so that she could not keep it to
herself when they met.

"Was that what made you give me such a cool reception?" he asked, with
cynical good-nature. "Well, you're mistaken; I don't suppose I mind the
Hallecks any more than they do me. I'll tell you why I stayed. Some people
dropped down on Witherby, who were a little out of his line,--fashionable
people that he had asked to let him know if they ever came to Boston; and
when they did come and let him know, he didn't know what to do about
it, and he called on me to help him out. I've been almost boarding with
Witherby for the last three days; and I've been barouching round all over
the moral vineyard with his friends: out to Mount Auburn and the Washington
Elm, and Bunker Hill, and Brookline, and the Art Museum, and Lexington;
we've been down the harbor, and we haven't left a monumental stone
unturned. They were going north, and they came down here with me; and I got
them to stop over a day for the picnic."

"You got them to stop over for the picnic? Why, I don't want anybody but
ourselves, Bartley! This spoils everything."

"The Hallecks are not ourselves," said Bartley. "And these are jolly
people; they'll help to make it go off."

"Who are they?" asked Marcia, with provisional self-control.

"Oh, some people that Witherby met in Portland at Willett's, who used to
have the logging-camp out here."

"That Montreal woman!" cried Marcia, with fatal divination.

Bartley laughed. "Yes, Mrs. Macallister and her husband. She's a regular
case. She'll amuse you."

Marcia's passionate eyes blazed. "She shall never come to my picnic in the
world!"

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