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A Modern Instance

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Once solved, it was a very simple affair, and he had now but to carry it to
her; that was very simple, too. Or he might destroy it; this was equally
simple. Her words repeated themselves once more: "I have given up. He is
dead." Why should he break the peace she had found, and destroy her last
sad illusion? Why should he not spare her the knowledge of this final
wrong, and let the merciful injustice accomplish itself? The questions
seemed scarcely to have any personal concern for Halleck; his temptation
wore a heavenly aspect. It softly pleaded with him to forbear, like
something outside of himself. It was when he began to resist it that he
found it the breath in his nostrils, the blood in his veins. Then the mask
dropped, and the enemy of souls put forth his power against this weak
spirit, enfeebled by long strife and defeat already acknowledged.

At the end Halleck opened his door, and called, "Olive, Olive!" in a voice
that thrilled the girl with strange alarm where she sat in her own room.
She came running, and found him clinging to his doorpost, pale and
tremulous. "I want you--want you to help me," he gasped. "I want to show
you something--Look here!"

He gave her the paper, which he had kept behind him, clutched fast in his
hand as if he feared it might somehow escape him at last, and staggered
away to a chair.

His sister read the notice. "Oh, Ben!" She dropped her hands with the paper
in them before her, a gesture of helpless horror and pity, and looked at
him. "Does _she_ know it? Has she seen it?"

"No one knows it but you and I. The paper was left here for me by mistake.
I opened it before I saw that it was addressed to her."

He panted forth these sentences in an exhaustion that would have terrified
her, if she had not been too full of indignant compassion for Marcia to
know anything else. She tried to speak.

"Don't you understand, Olive? This is the notice that the law requires she
shall have to come and defend her cause, and it has been sent by the clerk
of the court, there, to the address that villain must have given in the
knowledge that it could reach her only by one chance in ten thousand."

"And it has come to you! Oh, Ben! Who sent it to _you_?" The brother and
sister looked at each other, but neither spoke the awestricken thought that
was in both their hearts. "Ben," she cried in a solemn ecstasy of love and
pride, "I would rather be you this minute than any other man in the world!"

"Don't!" pleaded Halleck. His head dropped, and then he lifted it by a
sudden impulse. "Olive!"--But the impulse failed, and he only said, "I
want you to go to Atherton with me. We mustn't lose time. Have Cyrus get a
carriage. Go down and tell them we're going out. I'll be ready as soon as
you are."

But when she called to him from below that the carriage had come and she
was waiting, he would have refused to go with her if he durst. He no longer
wished to keep back the fact, but he felt an invalid's weariness of it, a
sick man's inadequacy to the farther demands it should make upon him. He
crept slowly down the stairs, keeping a tremulous hold upon the rail; and
he sank with a sigh against the carriage cushions, answering Olive's eager
questions and fervid comments with languid monosyllables.

They found the Athertons at coffee, and Clara would have them come to the
dining-room and join them. Halleck refused the coffee, and while Olive told
what had happened he looked listlessly about the room, aware of a perverse
sympathy with Bartley, from Bartley's point of view: Bartley might never
have gone wrong if he had had all that luxury; and why should he not have
had it, as well as Atherton? What right had the untempted prosperity of
such a man to judge the guilt of such men as himself and Bartley Hubbard?

Olive produced the newspaper from her lap, where she kept both hands upon
it, and opened it to the advertisement in dramatic corroboration of what
she had been telling Atherton. He read it and passed it to Clara.

"When did this come to you?"

Olive answered for him. "This evening,--just now. Didn't I say that?"

"No," said Atherton; and he added to Halleck, gently: "I beg your pardon.
Did you notice the dates?"

"Yes," answered Halleck, with cold refusal of Atherton's tone of
reparation.

"The cause is set for hearing on the 11th," said Atherton. "This is the
8th. The time is very short."

"It's long enough," said Halleck, wearily.

"Oh, telegraph!" cried Clara. "Telegraph them instantly that she never
dreamt of leaving him! Abandonment! Oh, if they only knew how she had been
slaving her lingers off for the last two years to keep a home for him to
come back to, they'd give _her_ the divorce!"

Atherton smiled and turned to Halleck: "Do you know what their law is, now?
It was changed two years ago."

"Yes," said Halleck, replying to the question Atherton had asked and the
subtler question he had looked, "I have read up the whole subject since I
came home. The divorce is granted only upon proof, even when the defendant
fails to appear, and if this were to go against us,"--he instinctively
identified himself with Marcia's cause,--"we can have the default set
aside, and a new trial granted, for cause shown."

The women listened in awe of the legal phrases; but when Atherton rose, and
asked, "Is your carriage here?" his wife sprang to her feet.

"Why, where are you going?" she demanded, anxiously.

"Not to Indiana, immediately," answered her husband. "We're first going to
Clover Street, to see Squire Gaylord and Mrs. Hubbard. Better let me take
the paper, dear," he said, softly withdrawing it from her hands.

"Oh, it's a cruel, cruel law!" she moaned, deprived of this moral support.
"To suppose that such a notice as this is sufficient! Women couldn't have
made such a law."

"No, women only profit by such laws after they're made: they work both
ways. But it's not such a bad law, as divorce laws go. We do worse, now, in
some New England States."

They found the Squire alone in the parlor, and, with a few words of
explanation, Atherton put the paper in his hands, and he read the notice in
emotionless quiet. Then he took off his spectacles, and shut them in their
case, which he put back into his waistcoat pocket. "This is all right," he
said. He cleared his throat, and, lifting the fierce glimmer of his eyes to
Atherton's, he asked, drily, "What is the law, at present?"

Atherton briefly recapitulated the points as he had them from Halleck.

"That's good," said the old man. "We will fight this, gentlemen." He rose,
and from his gaunt height looked down on both of them, with his sinuous
lips set in a bitter smile. "Bartley must have been disappointed when he
found a divorce so hard to get in Indiana. He must have thought that the
old law was still in force there. He's not the fellow to swear to a lie if
he could help it; but I guess he expects to get this divorce by perjury."

Marcia was putting little Flavia to bed. She heard the talking below;
she thought she heard Bartley's name. She ran to the stairs, and came
hesitantly down, the old wild hope and wild terror fluttering her pulse and
taking her breath. At sight of the three men, apparently in council, she
crept toward them, holding out her hands before her like one groping his
way. "What--what is it?" She looked from Atherton's face to her father's;
the old man stopped, and tried to smile reassuringly; he tried to speak;
Atherton turned away.

It was Halleck who came forward, and took her wandering hands. He held them
quivering in his own, and said gravely and steadily, using her name for the
first time in the deep pity which cast out all fear and shame, "Marcia, we
have found your husband."

"Dead?" she made with her lips.

"He is alive," said Halleck. "There is something in this paper for you to
see,--something you _must_ see--"

"I can bear anything if he is not dead. Where--what is it? Show it to me--"
The paper shook in the hands which Halleck released; her eyes strayed
blindly over its columns; he had to put his finger on the place before she
could find it. Then her tremor ceased, and she seemed without breath or
pulse while she read it through. She fetched a long, deep sigh, and passed
her hand over her eyes, as if to clear them; staying herself unconsciously
against Halleck's breast, and laying her trembling arm along his arm till
her fingers knit themselves among his fingers, she read it a second time
and a third. Then she dropped the paper, and turned to look up at him.
"Why!" she cried, as if she had made it out at last, while an awful, joyful
light of hope flashed into her face. "_It is a mistake_! Don't you see? He
thinks that I never came back! He thinks that I meant to abandon him. That
I--that I--But you _know_ that I came back,--you came back _with_ me! Why,
I wasn't gone an hour,--a _half_-hour, hardly. Oh, Bartley, poor Bartley!
He thought I could leave him, and take his child from him; that I could
be so wicked, so heartless--Oh, no, no, no! Why, I only stayed away that
little time because I was _afraid_ to go back! Don't you remember how I
told you I was afraid, and wanted you to come in with me?" Her exaltation
broke in a laugh. "But we can explain it now, and it will be all right. He
will see--he will understand--I will tell him just how it was--Oh, Flavia,
Flavia, we've found papa, we've found papa! Quick!"

She whirled away toward the stairs, but her father caught her by the arm.
"Marcia!" he shouted, in his old raucous voice, "You've got to understand!
This"--he hesitated, as if running over all terms of opprobrium in his
mind, and he resumed as if he had found them each too feeble--"_Bartley_
hasn't acted under any mistake."

He set the facts before her with merciless clearness, and she listened with
an audible catching of the breath at times, while she softly smoothed her
forehead with her left hand. "I don't believe it," she said when he had
ended. "Write to him, tell him what I say, and you will see."

The old man uttered something between a groan and a curse. "Oh, you poor,
crazy child! Can nothing make you understand that Bartley wants to get rid
of you, and that he's just as ready for one lie as another? He thinks
he can make out a case of abandonment with the least trouble, and so he
accuses you of that, but he'd just as soon accuse you of anything else.
_Write_ to him? You've got to _go_ to him! You've got to go out there and
fight him in open court, with facts and witnesses. Do you suppose Bartley
Hubbard wants any explanation from you? Do you think he's been waiting
these two years to hear that you didn't really abandon him, but came back
to this house an hour after you left it, and that you've waited for him
here ever since? When he knows that, will he withdraw this suit of his and
come home? He'll want the proof, and the way to do is to go out there and
let him have it. If I had him on the stand for five minutes," said the
old man between his set teeth,--"_just five minutes_,--I'd undertake to
convince him from his own lips that he was wrong about you! But I am afraid
he wouldn't mind a letter! You think I say so because I hate him; and you
don't believe me. Well, ask either of these gentlemen here whether I'm
telling you the truth."

She did not speak, but, with a glance at their averted faces, she sank into
a chair, and passed one hand over the other, while she drew her breath in
long, shuddering respirations, and stared at the floor with knit brows and
starting eyes, like one stifling a deadly pang. She made several attempts
to speak before she could utter any sound; then she lifted her eyes to her
father's: "Let us--let us--go--home! Oh, let us go home! I will give
him up. I _had_ given him up already; I told you," she said, turning to
Halleck, and speaking in a slow, gentle tone, "only an hour ago, that he
was dead. And this--this that's happened, it makes no difference. Why did
you bring the paper to me when you knew that I thought he was dead?"

"God knows I wished to keep it from you."

"Well, no matter now. Let him go free if he wants to. I can't help it."

"You _can_ help it," interrupted her father. "You've got the facts on your
side, and you've got the witnesses!"

"Would you go out with me, and tell him that I never meant to leave him?"
she asked simply, turning to Halleck. "You--and Olive?"

"We would do anything for you, Marcia!"

She sat musing, and drawing her hands one over the other again, while her
quivering breath came and went on the silence. She let her hands fall
nervelessly on her lap. "I can't go; I'm too weak; I couldn't bear the
journey. No!" She shook her head. "I can't go!"

"Marcia," began her father, "it's your _duty_ to go!"

"Does it say in the law that I have to go, if I don't choose?" she asked of
Halleck.

"No, you certainly need not go, if you don't choose!"

"Then I will stay. Do you think it's my duty to go?" she asked, referring
her question first to Halleck and then to Atherton. She turned from the
silence by which they tried to leave her free. "I don't care for my duty,
any more. I don't want to keep him, if it's so that he--left me--and--and
meant it--and he doesn't--care for me any--more."

"Care for you? He never cared for you, Marcia! And you may be sure he
doesn't care for you now."

"Then let him go, and let us go home."

"Very well!" said the old man. "We will go home, then, and before the
week's out Bartley Hubbard will be a perjured bigamist."

"Bigamist?" Marcia leaped to her feet.

"Yes, bigamist! Don't you suppose he had his eye on some other woman out
there before he began this suit?"

The languor was gone from Marcia's limbs. As she confronted her father, the
wonderful likeness in the outline of their faces appeared. His was dark and
wrinkled with age, and hers was gray with the anger that drove the blood
back to her heart, but one impulse animated those fierce profiles, and
the hoarded hate in the old man's soul seemed to speak in Marcia's thick
whisper, "I will go."




XXXVIII.


The Athertons sat late over their breakfast in the luxurious dining-room
where the April sun came in at the windows overlooking the Back Bay, and
commanding at that stage of the tide a long stretch of shallow with a
flight of white gulls settled upon it.

They had let Clara's house on the hill, and she had bought another on the
new land; she insisted upon the change, not only because everybody was
leaving the hill, but also because, as she said, it would seem too much
like taking Mr. Atherton to board, if they went to housekeeping where she
had always lived; she wished to give him the effect before the world of
having brought her to a house of his own. She had even furnished it anew
for the most part, and had banished as far as possible the things that
reminded her of the time when she was not his wife. He humored her in this
fantastic self-indulgence, and philosophized her wish to give him the
appearance of having the money, as something orderly in its origin, and not
to be deprecated on other grounds, since probably it deceived nobody. They
lived a very tranquil life, and Clara had no grief of her own unless it was
that there seemed to be no great things she could do for him. One day when
she whimsically complained of this, he said: "I'm very glad of that. Let's
try to be equal to the little sacrifices we must make for each other;
they will be quite enough. Many a woman who would be ready to die for her
husband makes him wretched because she won't live for him. Don't despise
the day of small things."

"Yes, but when every day seems the day of small things!" she pouted.

"Every day _is_ the day of small things," said Atherton, "with people
who are happy. We're never so prosperous as when we can't remember what
happened last Monday."

"Oh, but I can't bear to be always living in the present."

"It's not so spacious, I know, as either the past or the future, but it's
all we have."

"There!" cried Clara. "That's _fatalism_! It's _worse_ than fatalism!"

"And is fatalism so very bad?" asked her husband.

"It's Mahometanism!"

"Well, it isn't necessarily a plurality of wives," returned Atherton, in
subtle anticipation of her next point. "And it's really only another name
for resignation, which is certainly a good thing."

"Resignation? Oh, I don't know about that!"

Atherton laughed, and put his arm round her waist: an argument that no
woman can answer in a man she loves; it seems to deprive her of her
reasoning faculties. In the atmosphere of affection which she breathed, she
sometimes feared that her mental powers were really weakening. As a girl
she had lived a life full of purposes, which, if somewhat vague, were
unquestionably large. She had then had great interests,--art, music,
literature,--the symphony concerts, Mr. Hunt's classes, the novels of
George Eliot, and Mr Fiske's lectures on the cosmic philosophy; and she had
always felt that they expanded and elevated existence. In her moments of
question as to the shape which her life had taken since, she tried to think
whether the happiness which seemed so little dependent on these things was
not beneath the demands of a spirit which was probably immortal and was
certainly cultivated. They all continued to be part of her life, but only
a very small part; and she would have liked to ask her husband whether his
influence upon her had been wholly beneficial. She was not sure that
it had; but neither was she sure that it had not. She had never fully
consented to the distinctness with which he classified all her emotions and
ideas as those of a woman: in her heart she doubted whether a great many of
them might not be those of a man, though she had never found any of them
exactly like his. She could not complain that he did not treat her as an
equal; he deferred to her, and depended upon her good sense to an extent
that sometimes alarmed her, for she secretly knew that she had a very large
streak of silliness in her nature. He seemed to tell her everything, and to
be greatly ruled by her advice, especially in matters of business; but she
could not help observing that he often kept matters involving certain moral
questions from her till the moment for deciding them was past. When she
accused him of this, he confessed that it was so; but defended himself
by saying that he was afraid her conscience might sway him against his
judgment.

Clara now recurred to these words of his as she sat looking at him through
her tears across the breakfast table. "Was that the reason you never told
me about poor Ben before?"

"Yes, and I expect you to justify me. What good would it have done to tell
you?"

"I could have told you, at least, that, if Ben had any such feeling as
that, it wasn't _his_ fault altogether."

"But you wouldn't have believed that, Clara," said Atherton. "You know
that, whatever that poor creature's faults are, coquetry isn't one of
them."

Clara only admitted the fact passively. "How did he excuse himself for
coming back?" she asked.

"He didn't excuse himself; he defied himself. We had a stormy talk, and he
ended by denying that he had any social duty in the matter."

"And I think he was quite right!" Clara flashed out. "It was his own
affair."

"He said he had a concrete purpose, and wouldn't listen to abstractions.
Yes, he talked like a woman. But you know he wasn't right, Clara, though
_you_ talk like a woman, too. There are a great many things that are not
wrong except as they wrong others. I've no doubt that, as compared with the
highest love her husband ever felt for her, Ben's passion was as light to
darkness. But if he could only hope for its return through the perversion
of her soul,--through teaching her to think of escape from her marriage by
a divorce,--then it was a crime against her and against society."

"Ben couldn't do such a thing!"

"No, he could only dream of doing it. When it came to the attempt,
everything that was good in him revolted against it and conspired to make
him help her in the efforts that would defeat his hopes if they succeeded.
It was a ghastly ordeal, but it was sublime; and when the climax
came,--that paper, which he had only to conceal for a few days or
weeks,--he was equal to the demand upon him. But suppose a man of his pure
training and traditions had yielded to temptation,--suppose he had so far
depraved himself that he could have set about persuading her that she owed
no allegiance to her husband, and might rightfully get a divorce and marry
him,--what a ruinous blow it would have been to all who knew of it! It
would have disheartened those who abhorred it, and encouraged those who
wanted to profit by such an example. It doesn't matter much, socially, what
undisciplined people like Bartley and Marcia Hubbard do; but if a man
like Ben Halleck goes astray, it's calamitous; it 'confounds the human
conscience,' as Victor Hugo says. All that careful nurture in the right
since he could speak, all that life-long decency of thought and act, that
noble ideal of unselfishness and responsibility to others, trampled under
foot and spit upon,--it's horrible!"

"Yes," answered Clara, deeply moved, even as a woman may be in a pretty
breakfast-room, "and such a good soul as Ben always was naturally. Will you
have some more tea?"

"Yes, I will take another cup. But as for natural goodness--"

"Wait! I will ring for some hot water."

When the maid had appeared, disappeared, reappeared, and finally vanished,
Atherton resumed. "The natural goodness doesn't count. The natural man is a
wild beast, and his natural goodness is the amiability of a beast basking
in the sun when his stomach is full. The Hubbards were full of natural
goodness, I dare say, when they didn't happen to cross each other's wishes.
No, it's the implanted goodness that saves,--the seed of righteousness
treasured from generation to generation, and carefully watched and tended
by disciplined fathers and mothers in the hearts where they have dropped
it. The flower of this implanted goodness is what we call civilization,
the condition of general uprightness that Halleck declared he owed no
allegiance to. But he was better than his word."

Atherton lifted, with his slim, delicate hand, the cup of translucent
china, and drained off the fragrant Souchong, sweetened, and tempered with
Jersey cream to perfection. Something in the sight went like a pang to his
wife's heart. "Ah!" she said, "it is easy enough for us to condemn. _We_
have everything we want!"

"I don't forget that, Clara," said Atherton, gravely. "Sometimes when
I think of it, I am ready to renounce all judgment of others. The
consciousness of our comfort, our luxury, almost paralyzes me at those
times, and I am ashamed and afraid even of our happiness."

"Yes, what right," pursued Clara, rebelliously, "have we to be happy and
united, and these wretched creatures so--"

"No right,--none in the world! But somehow the effects follow their causes.
In some sort they chose misery for themselves,--we make our own hell in
this life and the next,--or it was chosen for them by undisciplined wills
that they inherited. In the long run their fate must be a just one."

"Ah, but I have to look at things in the _short_ run, and I can't see any
justice in Marcia's husband using her so!" cried Clara. "Why shouldn't
you use me badly? I don't believe that any woman ever meant better by her
husband than she did."

"Oh, the meaning doesn't count! It's our deeds that judge us. He is a
thoroughly bad fellow, but you may be sure she has been to blame. Though I
don't blame the Hubbards, either of them, so much as I blame Halleck. He
not only had everything he wished, but the training to know what he ought
to wish."

"I don't know about his having everything. I think Ben must have been
disappointed, some time," said Clara, evasively.

"Oh, that's nothing," replied Atherton, with the contented husband's
indifference to sentimental grievances.

Clara did not speak for some moments, and then she summed up a turmoil of
thoughts in a profound sigh. "Well, I don't like it! I thought it was bad
enough having a man, even on the outskirts of my acquaintance, abandon his
wife; but now Ben Halleck, who has been like a brother to me, to have him
mixed up in such an affair in the way he is, it's intolerable!"

"I agree with you," said Atherton, playing with his spoon. "You know how I
hate anything that sins against order, and this whole thing is disorderly.
It's intolerable, as you say. But we must bear our share of it. We're all
bound together. No one sins or suffers to himself in a civilized state,--or
religious state; it's the same thing. Every link in the chain feels the
effect of the violence, more or less intimately. We rise or fall together
in Christian society. It's strange that it should be so hard to realize
a thing that every experience of life teaches. We keep on thinking of
offences against the common good as if they were abstractions!"

"Well, _one_ thing," said Clara, "I shall always think unnecessarily
shocking and disgraceful about it. And that is Ben's going out with her on
this journey. I don't see how you could allow that, Eustace."

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