“Good heavens!” she cried, getting to her feet so quickly that the papers fluttered down to the carpet. “Good heavens! have I allowed myself to be made miserable for so long by a person who was no more than a character out of a novel—one of the black sheep hero novels? Oh, what a fool I was—as foolish as the girls who cry copiously when their fustian hero gets into trouble.”
Then she leant up against the side of the window and was lost in a maze of thought. Several minutes had passed before she found herself, so to speak; and she found herself with a smile on her face.
“Good heavens!” she said again. “Good heavens! After all I was not miserable, but glad. I allowed myself to be driven into marrying him when all the time I did not even like him. I had a sense of committing suicide—of annihilating myself—when I married him, and I now know that it was a relief to me when we were separated. And now the final relief has come—relief and release; and my life is once more in my own hands. Thank God for that! Thank God for that!”
And then, strange though it was, she began to recall, apparently without any connection with her previous reflections, something that she had said to Rosa when on their way to the primrose park in the forenoon—something about immorality—it was certainly a very foolish thing—some hint that if she were to set her mind—no, her heart—upon some object, she would not allow any considerations that were generally called moral considerations to interfere with her achievement of that object.
That was in substance what she had said in her foolishness, and now, thinking upon it, she felt that it was not merely a very foolish thing to say, but a very shocking thing as well. The very idea at which she had hinted was revolting to her now, so that she could not understand what was the origin of the impulse in the force of which she had talked so wildly. This was what she now felt, illustrating with some amount of emphasis how a slight change in the conditions which govern a young woman’s life may cause her to lose a sense of the right perspective in a fancy picture that she is drawing, as she believes, direct from Nature.
It was with a blushing conscience that she now remembered how for some weeks she had been thinking that if the only obstacle that prevented her living her life as she felt that her life should be lived, was what would generally be regarded as a moral one, she would not hesitate for a moment to kick that obstacle out of her way, and live her life in accordance with the dictates of the heart of a woman:—a true woman, quivering with those true instincts which make up the life of a real woman.
That had actually been the substance of her thoughts for several weeks past. She shuddered at the recollection now. She thanked God that she could look at such matters very differently now; and this meant that she thanked God for having removed temptation from her.
The young widow bathed her face and smoothed her hair and looked at herself in the glass, and was quite satisfied with the reflection. She had emerged from an ordeal by fire, and she found that not a hair of her head was singed. The three young men who had passed through the seven times heated furnace must have felt pretty well satisfied with themselves when they found that they had not suffered. Only a few hours earlier this young woman had had her gloomy moments. She was an intelligent girl, and so was perfectly well aware of the fact that a girl’s supreme chance in life comes to her by marriage, and she had thrown this chance away, and it might never return to her. It was the force of this reflection that had caused her to begin experimenting with her maimed life, with a view of making the most of it. The trick which she had played upon the bumptious tenor represented only one of her experiments. All the people around her, men as well as women, had been unable to stem the current of his insolence. They were all ready to lie down before him and allow him to achieve the triumph of the hero of a bas-relief, at their expense: they had permitted him to put his feet on their necks, as it were. She had wondered if it would not be possible for her to trip up this blatant alabaster hero when he was stalking about from neck to neck of better people than himself. Her experiment had succeeded, and she had gone home with a feeling that if she had been made a fool of by a man, she had shown herself capable of making a man look very like a fool even in his own eyes.
This was some encouragement to her; and she had thus been led to wonder if it might not be possible for her to employ her intelligence and her looks to such good purpose as should at least minimize her folly in throwing away her best chance of making a great thing out of her life. She knew that this question demanded some earnest thinking out, considering her position, but she had already attacked it, when lo! in a single moment all the conditions of the contest—it would be a contest, she knew—had changed.
Not once had she thought of the man’s death as a possible factor in the solution of the problem of her life. Death was something between man and his God only, and she had so come to feel that the All-Powerful was leagued against her, that she had never thought of His making a move in her favour. Well, she had been wrong—she had done God an injustice, and she had apologized for it on her knees. And now she felt that if Providence were really and seriously to be on her side, or at least, as the man who met the grizzly in the open prayed, not on the side of the bear, her future might be all that she could hope it would be.
Having asked the forgiveness of God, it was a simple thing now to ask her father to pardon her for the extravagant way in which she had spoken when he had brought to her the news of the man’s death. Mr. Wadhurst was one of those plain-spoken, straightforward men, who think it right and proper to be hypocritical over such matters as death and bankruptcy. He had joined solemnly in the complaints of his unprosperous neighbours over the bad times, and had shaken his head when one of them, who had been going to the wall for years, at last reached that impenetrable boundary of his incapacity; though Mr. Wadhurst did not fail to perceive that he would now be able to join the derelict farm on to his own and obtain the live stock at his own valuation—a chance for which he had been waiting for years. And he had never failed to be deeply shocked when he heard of the death of a drunken wife, or a ne’er-do-weel son, or a consumptive daughter on the eve of her marriage with a scorbutic man; and thus he hoped that God would look upon him as a man with a profound sense of decency. He certainly looked upon himself as such; and he never felt his position stronger in this respect than he did when his daughter met him in a contrite spirit for having spoken with so great a want of delicacy in regard to her rascally husband.
“I’m glad that you have come to see that—that vengeance is God’s, not man’s,” said he, with great solemnity.
She replied substantially that she was glad it was in such capable hands, though the words that she employed were of conventional acquiescence in the conventionally Divine.
“Whatever the man may have been, he died like a man,” resumed her father, repeating the phrase that he had used before. “You must respect his memory for that deed.”
She could not help feeling that she would respect his memory more on this account if he had done the deed before she had met him. But she did not express this view. She only bent her head; she was no longer a rebellious child, only a hypocritical one.
“It’s a shocking thing—an awful thing!” continued her father. “To think that within a year your mother and your husband have gone. Have you yet grasped the fact that you are a widow, Priscilla?”
She certainly had not grasped this fact. The notion of her being a widow seemed to her supremely funny. But for the sake of practice in the career of duplicity which he was marking out for her, she took out her handkerchief and averted her head.
He put a strong arm about her, saying, “My poor child—my poor motherless child! I did not forget you when I was in the town just now. I called at Grindley’s and told them to send one of their hands out here with samples, so as to save you from the ordeal of appearing in public in your ordinary dress.”
She moved away from his sheltering embrace.
“Samples—samples—of what?” she said.
“Of the cap—the—Ah! that I should