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"I don't wonder if a tolerable-looking girl comes up the country that she is persecuted with proposals.... That Mrs. ---- we always called the little corpse is still at Karnal. She came and sat herself down by me, upon which Mr. K., with great presence of mind, offered me his arm, and said to George that he was taking me away from that corpse. 'You are quite right,' said George. 'It would be very dangerous sitting on the same sofa; we don't know what she died of.'"
"Sunday, 17th November.
"We left Karnal yesterday morning. Little Mrs. James was so unhappy at our going that we asked her to come and pass the day here, and brought her with us. She went from tent to tent, and chattered all day, and visited her friend Mrs. ----, who is with the camp.
I gave her a pink silk gown, and it was altogether a very happy day for her evidently. It ended in her going back to Karnal on my elephant, with E. N. by her side and Mr. James sitting behind, and she had never been on an elephant before, and thought it delightful. She is very pretty, and a good little thing, apparently, but they are very poor, and she is very young and lively, and if she falls into bad hands she would soon laugh herself into foolish scrapes. At present the husband and wife are very fond of each other, but a girl who marries at fifteen hardly knows what she likes."
[Pg 31]
V
RIVEN BONDS
Miss Eden's misgivings were warranted by the events. "Husband and wife are very fond of each other"--that was, doubtless, true, but Lola's lips would have curled had she read the passage in after years. Abandoned by the departure of the viceregal party once more to the slender social resources of Karnal, the young wife, I conjecture, fretted and moped. The glitter of the Court made the boredom of the cantonment all the more oppressive. The year after the Simla festivities Karnal had another distinguished visitor, the famous Dost Mohammed Khan, Amir of Kabul, but as during his six months' stay he was kept a close prisoner in the fort, his presence could not have sensibly relieved the monotony. Lieutenant James's subsequent readiness to divorce his wife proves that he had no very strong attachment to her, and gives some colour to her allegations against him. Of course, it is safe to conclude that both were in the wrong, or, more truthfully, had made a mistake. So long, however, as people regard marriage more as a contract than
a relation, each party will be anxious to throw the responsibility for the rupture upon the other. As the husband had the opportunity of stating his case in the law courts, it is only fair that[Pg 32] the wife should be allowed to plead hers here. Her version of the circumstances which brought about the breach is as follows:--
"She was taken to visit a Mrs. Lomer--a pretty woman, who was about thirty-three years of age, and was a great admirer of Captain [sic] James. [His bright waistcoats and bright teeth were not without their effect, we see.] Her husband was a blind fool enough; and though Captain James's little wife, Lola, was not quite a fool, it is likely enough that she did not care enough about him to keep a look-out upon what was going on between himself and Mrs. Lomer. So she used to be peacefully sleeping every morning when the Captain [read Lieutenant] and Mrs. Lomer were off for a sociable ride on horseback. In this way things went on for a long time, when one morning Captain James and Mrs. Lomer did not get back to breakfast, and so the little Mrs. James and Mr. Lomer breakfasted alone, wondering what had become of the morning riders.
"But all doubts were soon cleared up by the fact fully coming to light that they had really eloped to Neilghery Hills. Poor Lomer stormed, and raved, and tore himself to pieces, not having the courage to attack any one else. And little Lola wondered, cried a little, and laughed a good deal, especially at Lomer's rage."
The injured husband, apparently, was never pieced together again, as we do not hear that he ever instituted any proceedings against the seducer of his wife. It is true that by Lola's account they may be considered to have put themselves beyond his reach, for the Neilghery Hills lie, as the crow flies, about 1,400 miles from Karnal, and a stern chase in a palanquin over that distance is an undertaking from which even Menelaus[Pg 33] would have shrank. Nor did the peccant Lieutenant James think it worth while to resign his commission.
Whatever may have been the immediate cause, it is clear that husband and wife were on bad terms when the cantonment at Karnal
13
was broken up in the year 1841. Lola took refuge under her mother's roof at Calcutta. She admits that her reception was cold, and that Mrs. Craigie pressed her to return to Europe. On this course she finally decided, probably without great reluctance. It was given out, and not perhaps altogether untruly, that she was leaving India for the benefit of her health. Her husband came down to Calcutta, and himself saw her aboard the good ship, Larkins. Her stepfather, to whose relations in Scotland she was again to be confided, was much affected at her departure.
"Large tears rolled down his cheeks when he took her on board the vessel; and he testified his affection and his care by placing in the hands of the little grass-widow a cheque for a thousand pounds on a house in London."
Thus for the second and last time Lola saw the swampy shores of Bengal receding from her across the waves. She was never again to see India or those who bid her adieu. The merry, unaffected schoolgirl of Simla had become in one short year a disappointed, disillusioned woman. While husband and wife exchanged cold farewells, probably neither expected nor wished to see the other again. Both had made a mistake, and both knew it. Now they were placing half a world between them. Lola's heart must have lightened, as the good ship sped before the wind [Pg 34]southwards across the Indian Ocean. Accustomed to shipboard, the desagrements of the voyage were nothing to her, and she immediately began to take an interest in her companions. She speaks of a Mr. and Mrs. Sturges, Boston people, who were nominally in charge of her; and of a Mrs. Stevens, another American lady, a very gay woman, who had some influence in supporting her determination not to go to the Craigies' on reaching England. There was a Mr. Lennox on board, sometimes described as an aide-de-camp to some governor, who also may have had something to do with this resolution. It all came about as Lord Auckland's sister had feared. Lola had fallen into evil hands, and laughed herself into a bad scrape. She had been accustomed to admiration; she was young, beautiful, and passionate. Her heart was empty; she was angered against her husband. She was by no means unwilling to face the possibility of a final separation from him. Lennox remains for us the shadowiest of personalities, but his disappearance, implying abandonment of the woman he had compromised, tells against him. In this instance I think we may safely conclude that the man was to blame.
Out of affection for him, then, or a determination to lead her own life, uncontrolled and unshackled, Mrs. James, on arriving in Lon-
don, flatly refused to accompany Mr. David Craigie, "a blue Scotch Calvinist," whom she found awaiting her.
"At first he used arguments and persuasion, and finding that these failed, he tried force; and then, of course, there was an explosion, which soon settled the matter, and convinced Mr. David Craigie that he might go back to the little dull town of Perth as soon as
he pleased, without the little grass-widow. Now[Pg 35] she was left in London, sole mistress of her own fate. She had, besides the cheque given her by her stepfather, between five and six thousand dollars' worth of various kinds of jewellery, making her capital, all counted, about ten thousand dollars--a very considerable portion of which disappeared in less than one year by a sort of insensible perspiration, which is a disease very common to the purses of ladies who have never been taught the value of money."
It was in the early spring of 1842 that Lola set foot in London. Considering the rapidity for those times with which her husband became informed of her next movements, these must have been amazingly open; and it is hard to resist the conclusion that she was deliberately trying to bring about a divorce. She knew that the English law grants no relief to those who come to it both with clean hands. She knew also that so long as her husband neither starved nor beat her, she could not set the law in motion against him. English law, supposed to vindicate the sanctity of marriage, sets a premium on adultery and cruelty: these are the only avenues of escape from unhappy unions into which high-minded men and women may have been betrayed by youthful folly, by over-persuasion, by sentiments they innocently over-estimated. If Lola Gilbert at the age of eighteen had signed