“Well, Madeline, so I’m going to be married,” Bertie began as soon as the servants had withdrawn.
“There’s no other foolish thing left that you haven’t done,” said Madeline, “and therefore you are quite right to try that.”
“Oh, you think it’s a foolish thing, do you?” said he. “There’s Lotte advising me to marry by all means. But on such a subject your opinion ought to be the best; you have experience to guide you.”
“Yes, I have,” said Madeline with a sort of harsh sadness in her tone, which seemed to say—”What is it to you if I am sad? I have never asked your sympathy.”
Bertie was sorry when he saw that she was hurt by what he said, and he came and squatted on the floor close before her face to make his peace with her.
“Come, Mad, I was only joking; you know that. But in sober earnest, Lotte is advising me to marry. She wants me to marry this Mrs. Bold. She’s a widow with lots of tin, a fine baby, a beautiful complexion, and the George and Dragon hotel up in the High Street. By Jove, Lotte, if I marry her, I’ll keep the public-house myself—it’s just the life to suit me.”
“What,” said Madeline, “that vapid, swarthy creature in the widow’s cap, who looked as though her clothes had been stuck on her back with a pitchfork!” The signora never allowed any woman to be beautiful.
“Instead of being vapid,” said Lotte, “I call her a very lovely woman. She was by far the loveliest woman in the rooms the other night; that is, excepting you, Madeline.”
Even the compliment did not soften the asperity of the maimed beauty. “Every woman is charming according to Lotte,” she said; “I never knew an eye with so little true appreciation. In the first place, what woman on earth could look well in such a thing as that she had on her head.”
“Of course she wears a widow’s cap, but she’ll put that off when Bertie marries her.”
“I don’t see any of course in it,” said Madeline. “The death of twenty husbands should not make me undergo such a penance. It is as much a relic of paganism as the sacrifice of a Hindu woman at the burning of her husband’s body. If not so bloody, it is quite as barbarous, and quite as useless.”
“But you don’t blame her for that,” said Bertie. “She does it because it’s the custom of the country. People would think ill of her if she didn’t do it.”
“Exactly,” said Madeline. “She is just one of those English nonentities who would tie her head up in a bag for three months every summer, if her mother and her grandmother had tied up their heads before her. It would never occur to her to think whether there was any use in submitting to such a nuisance.”
“It’s very hard in a country like England, for a young woman to set herself in opposition to prejudices of that sort,” said the prudent Charlotte.
“What you mean is that it’s very hard for a fool not to be a fool,” said Madeline.
Bertie Stanhope had been so much knocked about the world from his earliest years that he had not retained much respect for the gravity of English customs; but even to his mind an idea presented itself that, perhaps in a wife, true British prejudice would not in the long run be less agreeable than Anglo-Italian freedom from restraint. He did not exactly say so, but he expressed the idea in another way.
“I fancy,” said he, “that if I were to die, and then walk, I should think that my widow looked better in one of those caps than any other kind of headdress.”
“Yes—and you’d fancy also that she could do nothing better than shut herself up and cry for you, or else burn herself. But she would think differently. She’d probably wear one of those horrid she-helmets, because she’d want the courage not to do so; but she’d wear it with a heart longing for the time when she might be allowed to throw it off. I hate such shallow false pretences. For my part I would let the world say what it pleased, and show no grief if I felt none—and perhaps not, if I did.”
“But wearing a widow’s cap won’t lessen her fortune,” said Charlotte.
“Or increase it,” said Madeline. “Then why on earth does she do it?”
“But Lotte’s object is to make her put it off,” said Bertie.
“If it be true that she has got twelve hundred a year quite at her own disposal, and she be not utterly vulgar in her manners, I would advise you to marry her. I dare say she’s to be had for the asking: and as you are not going to marry her for love, it doesn’t much matter whether she is good-looking or not. As to your really marrying a woman for love, I don’t believe you are fool enough for that.”
“Oh, Madeline!” exclaimed her sister.
“And oh, Charlotte!” said the other.
“You don’t mean to say that no man can love a woman unless he be a fool?”
“I mean very much the same thing—that any man who is willing to sacrifice his interest to get possession of a pretty face is a fool. Pretty faces are to be had cheaper than that. I hate your mawkish sentimentality, Lotte. You know as well as I do in what way husbands and wives generally live together; you know how far the warmth of conjugal affection can withstand the trial of a bad dinner, of a rainy day, or of the least privation which poverty brings with it; you know what freedom a man claims for himself, what slavery he would exact from his wife if he could! And you know also how wives generally obey. Marriage means tyranny on one side and deceit on the other. I say that a man is a fool to sacrifice his interests for such a bargain. A woman, too generally, has no other way of living.”
“But Bertie has no other way of living,” said Charlotte.
“Then, in God’s name, let him marry Mrs. Bold,” said Madeline. And so it was settled between them.
But let the gentle-hearted reader be under no apprehension whatsoever. It is not destined that Eleanor shall marry Mr. Slope or Bertie Stanhope. And here perhaps it may be allowed to the novelist to explain his views on a very important point in the art of telling tales. He ventures to reprobate that system which goes so far to violate all proper confidence between the author and his readers by maintaining nearly to the end of the third volume a mystery as to the fate of their favourite personage. Nay, more, and worse than this, is too frequently done. Have not often the profoundest efforts of genius been used to baffle the aspirations of the reader, to raise false hopes and false fears, and to give rise to expectations which are never to be realized? Are not promises all but made of delightful horrors, in lieu of which the writer produces nothing but most commonplace realities in his final chapter? And is there not a species of deceit in this to which the honesty of the present age should lend no countenance?
And what can be the worth of that solicitude which a peep into the third volume can utterly dissipate? What the value of those literary charms which are absolutely destroyed by their enjoyment? When we have once learnt what was that picture before which was hung Mrs. Ratcliffe’s solemn curtain, we feel no further interest about either the frame or the veil. They are to us merely a receptacle for old bones, an inappropriate coffin, which we would wish to have decently buried out of our sight.
And then how grievous a thing it is to have the pleasure of your novel destroyed by the ill-considered triumph of a previous reader. “Oh, you needn’t be alarmed for Augusta; of course she accepts Gustavus in the end.” “How