I
The life of Mary Throgmorton, viewed as one would scan the chronicles of
history, impersonally, without regard to the conventions, is the life of
a woman no more than fulfilled in the elements of her being.
All women would be as Mary Throgmorton if they dared. All women would
love as Mary Throgmorton loved--suffer as she suffered. Perhaps not all
might yield, as she yielded towards the end; not all might make her
sacrifices. But, in the latitudinous perspective of Time where
everything vanishes to the point of due proportion, she must range with
that vast army of women who have hungered, loved, been fed and paid the
reckoning with the tears out of their eyes and the very blood out of
their hearts.
It is only when she comes to be observed in the immediate and narrow
surroundings of her circumstance that her life stands out tragically
apart. She becomes then as a monument, set up on a high and lonely hill
amongst the many of those hills in drowsy Devon, a monument, silently
claiming the birthright of all women which the laws men make by force
have so ungenerously circumscribed.
There is no woman who could look at that monument without secret
emotions of a deep respect, while there were many in her lifetime who
spurned Mary Throgmorton with tongue and with a glance of eye, and still
would spurn her to-day in the narrow streets where it is their wont to
walk.
The respect of one's neighbors is a comforting thing to live with, but
it is mostly the little people who earn it and find the pleasure of its
warmth. The respect of the world is won often by suffering and in the
wild and open spaces of the earth. It was on Gethsemane and not in
Bethlehem that Christianity revealed its light.
In Bridnorth, the name of Mary Throgmorton was a byword for many a day.
They would have erased her from their memory if they could. It was in
the hush of voices they spoke of her--that hush with which women muffle
and conceal the envy beneath their spite.
No one woman in Bridnorth, unless it was Fanny Throgmorton, the third of
her three sisters, could have had honesty enough in her heart to
confess, even in silence, her real regard for Mary.
Who should blame them for this? The laws had made them and what is made
in a shapen mold can bend neither to the left nor to the right. They
were too close to her to see her beauty; all too personally involved to
look dispassionately at the greatness of her soul.
Yet there in spirit, as it were some graven monument upon those hills of
Devon, she stands, a figure of tragic nobility. Had indeed they carved
her in stone and set her there upon the hills that overlooked the sea,
they would have recognized then in her broad brow, in the straight
direction of her eyes, the big, if not beautiful then generous line of
her lips, the full firm curve of her breasts, how fine a mate she must
have made, how strong a mother even in the weakest hour of her travail.
Stone truly would have been the medium for her. It was not in color that
she claimed the eye. The fair hair, neither quite golden nor quite
brown, that clear, healthy skin, neither warmed with her blood nor
interestingly pale, these would have franked her passage in a crowd and
none might have noticed her go by.
There on the rising of that cliff in imagination is the place to see her
with the full sweep of Bridnorth bay and that wide open sea below and
all the heathered stretches of the moors behind her. There, had they
carved a statue for her in rough stone, you must have seen at once the
beauty that she had.
But because it was in stone her beauty lay and not in pink white flesh
that makes a fool of many a man, they had the less of mercy for her.
Because it was in stone, man found her cold of touch and stood away. And
yet again because it was in stone, once molten with the heat of life,
there was no hand in little Bridnorth that could have stayed her fate.
Once stirred, the little pettiness of Bridnorth folk charred all like
shavings from the plane at touch of her. Once stirred, she had in her
passion to defy them every one. Once stirred, herself could raise that
monument to the birthright of women which, in fancy, as her tale is
read, will be seen there over Bridnorth on the high cliff's edge.