THROWS A LITTLE LIGHT ON A SUBJECT SOMETIMES UNCTUOUSLY CONDESCENDED
UPON BY PREACHERS OF "WORDS."
I wonder where Christians find authority for our modern treatment of
illegitimacy? Preachers of all sects are never tired of telling us that
they preach peace and goodwill among men. Their religion is to redeem
all wrongs, to make mankind better, to lift the fallen, and cheer the
broken-hearted. So at least they say, but when we look for deeds, we do
not find many in this lower world. The fulfilment of the Christian ideal
is prudently (?) adjourned to the next, above or below. Wherever one
turns in contemplation of modern Christianity, one finds a ghastly
divergence between its professions and its practice, and at no point is
this more visible than in the behaviour of the Churches towards women
who have sinned. Taking their tone from a corrupt society, which desires
to enjoy its vices, and to prey upon its women without taking upon
itself responsibilities which the poor besotted Turk even never dreams
of shirking, the dispensers of the gospel of peace lead the chorus of
reprobation which is heaped upon the woman, who, like the virgin mother
so many of them profess to worship, bears the burden of maternity in
shame and loneliness. No distinction is drawn between woman and
woman--rarely or ever is the guilt of the man considered; the duties of
fatherhood can be neglected by the seducer with tacit, nay, often with
the full approbation of society and the Churches. But on the woman a
penalty falls that is worse than death. She has yielded to the seducer,
and henceforth she must be pressed down and cast out, unless--and the
distinction is important--she be a sinner of the highest caste in
society, when the sin may be covered with lies as with an embroidered
garment; or, unless she belong to the lowest, where the
difference between morality and immorality is too often nearly
indistinguishable--thirteen centuries of more or less well-paid-for
priestly instruction notwithstanding. Speaking broadly, however, the law
of social life condemns the "unattached" woman and her offspring to
obloquy and degradation, and it does this not merely without the protest
of the Churches, but by their full sanction. For ages priests of all
hues have arrogated to themselves the power of regulating the union of
the sexes; without their rites and blessings no two human beings could
become man and wife. When two were thus united the universal cry was
"What God hath joined together let no man put asunder." The priest, in
fact, arrogated to himself the power of the Deity. His "joining" was
God's, and none but his held on Earth or in Heaven. Greater blasphemy
has hardly ever been committed even by priests. By this abominable
fraud--this false assumption of authority--deeper social wrongs have
come upon the world than from any other priestly assumption whatsoever.
The priest has habituated society to disregard all ties formed in what
is called an illegitimate manner. It has sanctioned the desertion of
women by their seducers, and what is even worse, the desertion of
children by their fathers and mothers, for, of course, if the parents
were not priest-joined, the offspring must be of the devil. A man may,
according to this dogma, have lived the life of a fiend, ruining women,
bringing children into the world to live or die as the poor law or
hunger should order; but this is no hindrance to his obtaining the
blessing of "the Church" should he one day take it into his head to
submit to be married to one woman--for gain, for any reason, or none.
Scoundrel and saint are alike welcome to the priest's services and
blessings if the marriage fees be paid; and with the full concurrence
and blessing of any sectary in the world, a man may disjoin himself from
a woman or women he has lived with for years in order to take another,
if there was no marriage uniting him to these he deserted. God, of
course, could not be expected to "join" those who never sought a
priest's help. The whole basis of this treatment of the sexes is grossly
and blasphemously immoral, and the fruits of it are visible on every
side. To it we owe the highly nourishing character of the "social evil"
quite as much as to man's inherent depravity, and we shall never really
begin to overcome that evil until the whole of the teachings and
assumptions of the sects, as applied to marriage and divorce, are swept
clean out of the public mind.
Who is there to whom the history of some poor woman betrayed and
deserted is not known--a woman, it may be, tender-hearted and true, as
worthy of wifehood as any of her sex? Did society pity that woman? Have
you pitied her? Perhaps, but would you not also gather up your garments
and pass by on the other side, if you met her in public? Habit is so
strong, you will say in excuse; yes, yes, habit is strong, and the woman
is weak. Why should one heed her? She brought her fate on herself. Leave
her to perish. The man she loved has left her, and the world treats her
no worse than he. If her own sex spits upon her and hisses at her, what
can man do? These be the thoughts of most men over broken lives, and
most readers may therefore feel impatient that I should linger over the
ruin and fall of a poor peasant lass. Yet what can I do? my task is to
write the history of this family; its sorrows and failings, its burdens
and tears, are all that it has wherewith to claim the world's attention.
And to my thinking, they mean much. Their lives were real to them, as
yours, reader, is to you, and they had a part in making up the pitiful
social life of this decrepit old England possibly just as high as yours.
Therefore must I ask you to turn aside with me for a moment to look
again on Sally Wanless, when she reappears from her seclusion--a shame
mother, with a babe born to sorrow and shame in her arms. I have said
reappears, but she has not yet ventured to meet the, to her, scathing
gaze of the people in the village street. She steals into the little
garden behind her father's cottage, and there, in the soft September
afternoons, you would find her seated beneath the shade of an old apple
tree, face to face with her doom, and looking at it as one who has no
hope.
In some people the soul wakes late; some, indeed, appear to pass through
the world without its ever awakening. They may be bright-hearted people,
full of animal life and spirits, capable of much work and a few
sacrifices, yet they have never risen up to full consciousness of the
meaning of life, to its higher impulses, and its terrible risks and
obligations. No great inward commotion has ever visited them; they
vegetate tamely on till they reach the grave. Others, like Thomas
Wanless, awake early to consciousness of the mystery and burden of
existence, and battle with hopes and fears their lives long.
Would that his daughter had also found the realities of living ere the
curse of life had come upon her! But she did not. Her awakening came too
late. While it was possible she hid from herself the meaning of her
fall, and refused to look at the awful questions which for the first
time surged in upon her soul. It was not possible for long. When the
wail of her infant first broke on her ear she awoke and was stricken
with the full consciousness of what she had lost. Her past life stood
out before her as something apart; its hopes belonged to another state
of existence, to a life in which her future could have no part. All
lonely at the heart she had borne the pains of motherhood, and a feeble
infant lay by her side bearing witness against her now and evermore. No
father welcomed it. The sound of its feeble cry brought a forsakenness
about the mother's heart nothing could remove. In vain her mother
soothed her. In vain her true-hearted father, bravely hiding away his
shame and grief, took the little one in his arms and fondled it with a
fatherhood that assumed all the sin and all the responsibilities of his
child. Sarah could not be comforted. Blank despair took possession of
her. Why was she not dead? Why did the child live? Surely they would be
both better dead and buried out of sight for ever? This was the under
tone of her thoughts now, save when at times, and as she grew strong
again, gusts of passion like her father's would sweep over her soul.
Then she felt for moments as if she could compel the world to stop and
witness her revenge. Should a fit like this master her, what might one
so desperate not do? Hers was a soul awake and in prison, but if it
burst its bonds?
Let the gay and frivolous, the light talkers, the young and giddy, the
tempter and the tempted, stop to look upon this ruin. Is it a small
thing, do you think, for a man to have the undoing of this woman and
child laid to his charge. He passes in the world unharmed, nay, admired,
probably, the very women in secret whispering admiringly of his prowess.
But does that make his guilt the less? Is there no retributive justice
dogging his heels, from which all the glories and adulations of earth
cannot shield him? Look at the history of such men, and be they kings or
carters, you will find that they become degraded wretches, moral
abortions, repulsive ruins of humanity, as the result of their crimes
against woman. Yea, the woman is avenged, though only after death comes
the judgment.
But Sally Wanless thought not of revenge, that calm September evening,
on which my memory pictures her through the mirror of other eyes,
seated, half in shadow, half in sunlight, beneath the old apple tree.
Her baby lies asleep on her lap, the sunlight glints through the leaves
on her hair, and flickers now and then across the infant's face--but she
heeds neither child nor light. A far-away look is in her eyes--a look
that tells of longing, for what will never be hers again on earth. The
evening sun-glow throws into relief the pale, pinched face with its
unresigned hungry look, for in that face there is no welcome to the
sober autumn warmth. The dull fire of Sally's eyes is the fire of an
unquenchable pain. Where is there room in her life for joy any more? Her
eye does not trace heaven's battlemented walls, in those grand masses of
white clouds--the blue expanse beyond is not eloquent of the near world
unseen. No; her thoughts are self-centred; she never looks upward. Day
after day she sits here, still and silent, as one stunned. Her spirit
seems at such times as if beaten to the earth, never to rise again. The
child sometimes fails to interest or rouse her. When its wails demand
attention, she will fondle and kiss it much, as if it were made of wood.
Alas; poor Sally, winsome lass. How many such as you go aching through
the world, broken-hearted, and forsaken,--waiting for the judgment to
come, when, as they still, perhaps, lingeringly hope, the wrong shall be
righted for evermore.
Her parents yearned after their daughter, and yet feared to break in
rudely upon her brooding spirit. Neighbours came too, full of kindly
promises and curiosity, ready to speak volumes of comforting words; but
Sally shrank from contact with them,--preferred the garden seat, or her
own garret window.
Thomas became broken-hearted about his child. He could not get her to so
much as look at him. Often times he laid his hands softly on her bent
head, and whispered--"Sally, my lass, cheer up a bit. Don't break
mother's heart and mine, by taking on so." But Sally merely wept, and
bent still lower over her babe. They could not get her to go out during
the day--only at night would she creep along by the hedge-rows, in the
most unfrequented paths, accompanied by her mother, and hiding the child
as much as possible, beneath her shawl, when it was not asleep at home.
Her morbid fancy made her think that everyone knew her shame. She could
not see people talking together without a rush of blood to her face, as
if she felt the talk must be of her.
And how fared it all this time with her seducer? As the world elects, it
shall always fare. From it he had neither frown nor word of rebuke.
Those that knew his sin thought as little about it as he did, and that
was apparently never at all. He took no more notice of Sarah Wanless and
the infant girl she had borne to him, than if they had been dogs. Nay,
far less, for they were hateful to his selfish, ease-loving nature, and
therefore he rigorously banished them from his sight and thoughts. Just
as before, he took his "pleasure" coming and going to town, and living
the life of sottish ease, as became a man of fashion and a court
soldier. At the Vicarage his welcome was just as warm as ever, although
every soul within its walls was quite aware of the ruin he had brought
on the poor peasant's daughter. Mrs. Codling's verdict naturally was,
that it served the gipsy right, and and her father too. He was always an
insolent fellow, who never showed proper respect for the Olympians, and
this would perhaps take down his pride a bit. This was the view of the
matter insinuated to Adelaide, who had become "skittish" when the news
first reached her ears, thereby, however, increasing the ardour with
which the captain followed her. Mrs. Codling had quite made up her mind,
that through Adelaide she would succeed in catching the Captain as a
son-in-law, and therefore took occasion to put "matters in their proper
light."
"Of course, my dear," she would say, "we shall have to get rid of the
girl and her brat, for it might be unpleasant to have them in the
parish; but the Captain can manage all that, never fear, and if the
whole nest of them remove to another part of the country, the parish
will have a good riddance. I daresay a few pounds will do it, for all
that old rascal's pride."
Adelaide was soon satisfied, and soon, also, her flippant tongue had
disseminated this view of the case all over the parish; for Adelaide
would talk to the housemaid when no better listener was to be had.