PURGATORY.
And Grant Harlson made love to Jean Cornish and won her heart.
But all the time, unconsciously, he was a man of false pretensions, one
dishonorable and unworthy of her. His friends knew of his marriage and
its sequel. He had never concealed nor thought of concealing his
condition, and it never occurred to him that Jean Cornish was not aware
of it. He had supposed her, if she cared for him as he hoped, to be
somewhat troubled, but to understand that he would do no mean thing,
and that all would be well in time. Then came the sorrow of it, for
Jean Cornish learned, quite accidentally, that Grant Harlson was a man
with a living wife.
She would not believe it at first, and, when convinced, was dazed and
could not understand. No such shock had ever before come into her
life. This man, of whom she had made a hero, a trickster and a liar!
It seemed as if the world were gone! There was a meeting and an
explanation, and she learned how wrong she had been, in one way.
He put the case earnestly and desperately. He would not yield her. He
knew she loved him, and he knew she was too good and wise to suffer
forever herself or let him suffer because, in society, there were
blunders. There was a way out--a clean, right way--and they must take
it. He could get a divorce on grounds of mere desertion, and three
people, at least, would be better off. It was pitiful, the scene, one
afternoon. He had called to see her, and was pleading with her. It
was in the drawing-room, and there were stained windows they both
remembered in later years. He had talked of his bondage and of his
hopes. She was not quite herself; she was suffering too much. I know
what happened. Grant told me once of the wrench of him then, and of
all the scene. There had been a fierce appeal from him. He had become
almost enraged.
"And so," he said, "you would have a man's marriage like the black
biretta of Spain that is drawn over the prisoner's head before they
garrote him?"
She did not move nor speak, but stood straight and silent, her hands
hanging at her sides with the palms loosely open, the very abandonment
of pathetic helplessness.
Such a little woman, to withstand a storm of passion!
As he wondered at her curiously blended strength and weakness, a
sun-shaft blazed through the crimson glass of the upper window. The
reddened light, falling on her up-springing almost coppery locks,
seemed to the man's excited fancy a crown, of thorns, crimsoned with
blood, and there was, oddly enough, a cross in the window.
The thought of another vicarious sacrifice awed him. Must this be one,
too?
"Mistakes, dear, are not crimes. Can you not understand? I have been
mistaken, have suffered, have atoned for my error. Is that enough?"
"But," she said, and her voice seemed to have suddenly grown old and
thin, "you have no right to talk of mistakes. She is your wife."
"The biretta, that ends all, again! No, not so. It is as insane and
inhuman to force two people to remain in wedlock after it has become
odious to them, as it would be to force them into that marriage at
first. Oh, my tender-hearted little one, can you not see that the
bondage is more humiliating, more craven than is the idea of the
veriest chattel mortgage? Yet you refuse to let the injured one go
free, as you would not refuse the poorest prodigal whose one chance for
home and happiness was passing from his sight."
"I cannot answer you when you discuss learnedly on such questions," she
said, with a weary dignity, "for I have never thought about them. Why
should I? It has always seemed to me that a man with more than one
wife was a--a--Mormon. It is all so dreadful. Surely, if a marriage
is anything, it is a vow before God."
"It is you that make the mistake now," he said, "for the mere form of
marriage is nothing but the outward evidence of a union that has
already taken place. The first is the vow before God--not the latter.
I understand why you think all this; clergymen have so long been called
upon to officiate at marriage rites that, with the fatherly assumption
notable in the order all the world over, they have grown to regard
themselves as the especial and heaven-appointed guardians of the
institution. It is all so grotesque when one remembers how ready they
are to 'solemnize'--save the mark!--marriage, no matter what the
conditions. Have the candidates to be known as right and fitting
persons? Is there even the simplest formula of preparatory
examination? None! Two wholly unsuited people may rush into
marriage--and misery--any day by simply presenting themselves before a
sleek-faced person who mumbles drowsily over their clasped hands, and
calls it a vow before God!--as he hurries back to his dinner!"
Still she was silent.
An errand boy trudging by whistled a few bars of the wedding march,
doubtless heard that day at some open church door.
"Dear, there is a higher, holier law of the great Power, who made us
what we are, than this one of slavish obedience to a tradition. Why
must our feet go in the burning ruts?"
"It is not the well-worn ruts that burn, but the by-paths," she
answered, "and oh! _how_ they burn!"
"Let me lift you in my arms and carry you over them, then, that your
feet may not touch. Do not be unjust to yourself. Cannot you see how
right, how good it is? It is not as if I came to you from another
woman----"
The girl faced around on him almost fiercely.
"No, you could not be so bad as that! To have felt the morning kiss of
another woman, to have watched her good-night smile, and then to have
come to me--that would have been too base, too degrading--I should have
hated you because I despised you. I should have loathed you
instead----"
"Of loving me! Be honest and true, little Jean--you do care."
"Yes, I have cared."
"And do still?"
"Yes."
Her tone was as cold and as clear as the sound of an icicle striking
the frozen earth in the fall. It angered him, and his voice shook
roughly.
"A man who binds up his life in the love of a woman is a fool! Because
she is all the world to him, all he works to receive praise from, all
he fears in the blaming, he thinks her capable of as much love as
himself. And even as he watches, he sees her pass from fervor into
apathy. Her affection is but the dry husks of what he hoped to find.
You never cared!"
"Grant," she said, earnestly, "you have told me to be honest. I will
be. I think"--with a little laugh--"that if I had been a man I should
not have been a coward. I shall not be now. You wrong me and yourself
when you say that I never cared. It is because my caring has been so
much a part of myself that I have never been able to stand aloof and
look and comment upon it. It was just me. When I lived, it lived;
when I die----"
"My love!"
"When--no. I do not believe it can die even then! I think it is a
part of my soul, and will outstand all time."
She hesitated as if devising words to express herself with even more
sweet abandon. There was a certain loving recklessness in what she
uttered now:
"Not care? I wish you, too, would understand! Perhaps it is because
we care in such different ways. I don't know, but to me it has been
all! There is no joy, no pleasure, however petty, through all the day,
but it brings with it the swift desire to share it with you. Every
morning I waken with your half-uttered name on my lips, as though, when
I slipped hack through the portals of consciousness into the world of
reality, I came only to find you, as a timid child awakes and calls
feebly for its mother. Once, not long ago, in a street accident, such
as you know of in our busy city, I seemed very close to death, and in
an instant my spirit seemed to have overleaped the peril and the
terrible scene, and was with you. Afterward, one who sat near me said
that, while some screamed or prayed, I said only 'Grant,' and he asked,
lightly, now that danger was over: 'Is the great general your patron
saint?' And I--I did not know that I had said it, since the name can
never be as near to my lips as it is to my heart."
Harlson did not reply. He could not then. His head was bent.
"And when you were ill--ah! then it was the hardest of all! I dreamed
of the little things I could do for you--how your dear head could rest
on my shoulders, and it might help to ease the pain; how I could save
you from annoyances; how I could--love you!"
"Then come, love of me; I need you--we need each other."
"No, I think a woman who loves a man could scarcely bear that he had
ever been bound to another still living, or even dead."
"But----"
"No. It is not right."
It is not always that even he who is right and strong in the
consciousness of it, and resolute toward the end he is seeking may
express himself as he would in protest against the object yielding to
what is in the social world, though it be wrong. Grant Harlson looked
down upon the slender figure and into the earnest face and was helpless
for the time. Yet he was fixed of mind.
He was very tender with her, but this was not a man to give up easily
what was his. He pleaded with her further, but in vain. She would not
yield.
And so the weeks passed, with the problem yet unsolved. They were
still much together, for she could not turn him away, and he would not
stay away. There was more pleading on his part, and more anger
sometimes. It seemed to him absurd that lives should be blighted
because of a legend.
And she was unhappy, and, it may be, gradually attaining to broader
views and moral bravery. Jean Cornish was courageous, but there was
the legend.
And suddenly all was changed, the problem finding a solution not
expected. Grant Harlson's wife was, as has been said, a woman of
reason and of force, and she had her own life, with its objects. She
chafed under the bond which still connected her with Harlson, and she
broke it cleanly. It was she, not he, who sought divorce, and the
simple logical ground of incompatibility of temperament was all that
was required, in the State where she resided. There was no defense.
Grant Harlson became free, and Jean Cornish, since his freedom came in
this way, promised, at last, to become his wife.