He went to prison, and Priscilla went home, and continued to call herself by her maiden name—was she not as a maiden entitled to it? she asked. Six weeks later her mother died; and now …
CHAPTER VII
Every incident in this year of dreadful unrest passed through the mind of the girl sitting at the window, breathing of the clear air of this April afternoon, and feeling that rest had come to her at last. In the force of that review of the bitter past fresh upon her she wondered how she had ever had the courage to do all that she had done since. How had she ever been able to hold up her head walking through the streets of Framsby? How had it been possible for her, within three months of her marriage, to go about as if the only event that had made a mark upon her life was the funeral of her mother? She remembered how she had felt when, on going into Framsby for the first time in her black dress, she saw the interested expression that came over the faces of all the people whom she knew by sight. Every one gazed at her with that same look of curiosity that came to them when a celebrity chanced to visit the town. And upon that very first day she had met one of the ladies of the best set walking with her two daughters. She had seen them nudge one another and pass on a whisper, and then a little curious smile while she was still a good way off. The smile—and it was a very detestable one—lasted until she had walked past them. Another of the same set was with a stranger on the opposite side of the street, and Priscilla saw her point her out furtively to the stranger, and then over the back of her hand, explain what was the exact nature of the interest that attached to her.
A third lady—she was the wife of the retired colonial civil servant—had shown worse taste still; for although she had never spoken a word to Priscilla in all her life, yet now she stopped her and expressed her deep sympathy for her in “that sad affair,” asking her what her plans were for the future, and saying, “Of course you will leave this neighbourhood as soon as you can.”
How had she borne it all, she now asked herself. How had she the courage to face those people who seemed to think that that blow which had fallen on her had somehow brought Framsby within measurable distance of being thought disreputable by the world at large? But she had not merely borne it all, she had nerved herself to appear in public more frequently than she had ever done, and she went to help her friend Rosa Caffyn at the entertainment the wife of the Rector of St. Mary’s in the Meadows was getting up in the Rectory grounds for the new Nurses’ Home.
It was on account of her unbending attitude under the burden that she had to bear, that Rosa had talked with admiration of her confronting Fate and her splendid rebellion against what the Rector had claimed to be the heavy hand of a Power to whose mandates we should all be cheerfully resigned. Rosa was resolute in declining to accept the theories of the pulpit on the subject of cheerful resignation. How could she accept them, she asked, when her father refused to be either cheerful or resigned in such comparatively small dispensations of Providence as a cook with a heavy hand in the peppering of soups, or a parlourmaid with a passion for arranging the papers in his study?
But if Priscilla now found difficulty in understanding how she had had the resolution to face the world of Framsby as if nothing had happened, she did not fail to feel that her attitude was worthy of admiration, and she knew that it had received the admiration of Framsby in general, though the best set had felt scandalized by it. She had received many tokens of what she felt to be the true sympathy of the ordinary people of the town. A solicitor in the second set had offered to make an application to the courts of law—he was justifiably vague in their definition—to have her marriage rendered null and void, assuring her that he would do everything at his own expense. (He was well known to be an enterprising young man.) Many other and even more gracefully suggested evidences of the sympathy which was felt for her outside the jealously-guarded portals of the “right set” were given to her. In the eyes of the young men she had always been something of a heroine, and this matrimonial adventure of hers had not only established her claims to be looked on as a heroine, it had endowed her with the halo of a saint as well. And thus it was that, when she had appeared on the platform so fearlessly, and with a complete ignoring of the head-shakings and lip-pursings of the front rows, she had been received with the heartiest applause, very disconcerting to Mr. Kelton, who had never before in the whole course of his amateur experience known of an ordinary accompanist so “blanketing” a singer.
Her recollections of the various conflicting incidents and interests in her experiences of the year were quickly followed by some reflections upon her freedom and what she was to do with it. Thus she was led far into a bright if mysterious future; but presently she found her imagination becoming dazzled and dizzy, and down toppled the castle which she was building for herself after the most approved style affected by the architects of such structures in Spain—down toppled the castle, and she awoke from her vision, as one does from a dream of falling masonry, with a start.
What had she been thinking of? Was it all indeed a dream—this sense of Spring in the air—the rain-washed air—this sense of the peace of God?
She looked about her vaguely. Her hands fell on her lap, and came upon the still folded newspapers which remained there. She had forgotten all about the newspapers. (So the prisoner just released from gaol takes but the smallest amount of interest in the certificate of discharge.)
She read the account given in every one of the three of the wreck of the steel-built barque Kingsdale on the coast of Nova Scotia, in the neighbourhood of Yarmouth. The vessel had lost her rudder and become unmanageable, and she had been driven between the low headland and a sunken rock in the darkness. Boats had been stove in on an attempt being made to launch them; and then it was that the passenger whose name was Blaydon—“an unfortunate but well connected gentleman and a friend of Captain Lyman, of the ill-fated vessel”—had nobly volunteered to carry a line ashore. He was a powerful swimmer, and it was believed for some time by the wretched mariners whom he meant to save that his heroic attempt was crowned with success. Unhappily, however, this was not to be. On hauling upon the line after a long interval it had come all too easily. There was no resistance even of the man’s body at the end. It was plain that the brave fellow, about whose shoulders it had been looped, had been dragged out of the bight and engulfed in the boiling surge, perishing in his heroic efforts on behalf of the crew. Through the night’s exposure no fewer than eleven of the crew died within half an hour of being brought ashore by a fishing smack from St. John’s. The survivors, twelve in number, included Captain Lyman, the master, and the second and third mates; also an apprentice named Jarvis, of Hull.
“From information supplied by Captain Lyman, we are able to state that the heroic man who perished in his attempt to provide the crew with the means of saving themselves, had but recently been released from an English prison, having worked out his sentence for a fraud committed by another man whom he was too high-minded to implicate. He had, it was said, a young wife in England, for whom the deepest sympathy will be felt.”
Practically the same account appeared in all the papers; one, however, went more deeply into the past history of the man, giving—evidently by reference to some back files of an English paper—the date and particulars of the trial of Marcus Blaydon; but it did not introduce these details at the cost of the expression of sympathy with the young widow—all the accounts referred to the pathetic incident of the young widow and offered her the tribute of their deep sympathy.
And there the young widow sat at the open window, conscious of no impression beyond that which she had frequently acquired from reading a novel at the same window. She felt that she had been reading an account of a wreck in a novel, in which the hero lost his life in a forlorn hope to rescue his fellow creatures, and the hero had been a black sheep; the object of the writer being to show that even the worst man may have in his nature the elements of the heroic.
The