PHOEBE AND THE SQUIRE'S SON. HER RUNAWAY MARRIAGE WITH HIM. HOW
HE DABBLED IN FORGERY AND BURNED HIS FINGERS. OF A JUDGE WHO TOOK
AFTER THE PSALMIST. VAN DIEMEN'S LAND, AND HOW PHOEBE GOT OUT
THERE. HOW BOTH TWINS WERE PROVED DEAD BY IRRESISTIBLE EVIDENCE,
EACH TO EACH. HOW THORNTON FORGOT THAT PHOEBE COULD NEVER BE
LEGALLY HIS WIDOW. HOW HIS SON ACTED WELL UP TO HIS FATHER'S
STANDARD OF IMMORALITY. MARRIAGE A MEANS TO AN END, BUT ONLY ONCE.
AN ILL-STARRED BURGLARY. NORFOLK ISLAND. WHY BOTH MRS. DAVERILLS
CHANGED THEIR NAMES
If this story should ever be retold by a skilful teller, his power of
consecutive narrative and redisposition of crude facts in a better order
will be sure to add an interest it can scarcely command in its present
form. But it is best to make no pretence to niceties of construction,
when a mere presentation of events is the object in view. The following
circumstances in the life of old Mrs. Prichard constitute a case in
point. The story might, so to speak, ask its reader's forgiveness for so
sudden a break into the narrative. Consider that it has done so, and
amend the tale should you ever retell it.
Maisie Runciman, born in the seventies of the previous century, and
close upon eighty years of age at the time of this story, was the
daughter of an Essex miller, who became a widower when she and her twin
sister Phoebe were still quite children. His only other child, a son
many years their senior, died not long after his mother, leaving them to
the sole companionship of their father. He seems to have been a
quarrelsome man, who had estranged himself from both his wife's
relatives and his own. He also had that most unfortunate quality of
holding his head high, as it is called; so high, in fact, that his twin
girls found it difficult to associate with their village neighbours, and
were driven back very much on their own resources for society. Their
father's morose isolation was of his own choosing. He was, however,
affectionate in a rough way to them, and their small household was
peaceful and contented enough. The sisters, wrapped up in one another,
as twins so often are, had no experience of any other condition of life,
and thought it all right and the thing that should be.
All went well enough--without discord anyhow, however
monotonously--until Maisie and Phoebe began to look a little like women;
which happened, to say the truth, at least a year before their father
consented to recognise the fact, and permit them to appear in the robes
of maturity. About that time the young males of the neighbourhood became
aware, each in his private heart, of an adoration cherished for one or
other of the beautiful twins from early boyhood. Would-be lovers began
to buzz about like flies when fruit ripens. If any one of these youths
had any doubt about the intensity and immutability of his passion, it
vanished when the girls announced official womanhood by appearing at
church in the costume of their seniors. Some students of the mysterious
phenomena of Love have held that man is the slave of millinery, and that
women are to all intents and purposes their skirts. It is too delicate a
question for hurried discussion in a narrative which is neither
speculative nor philosophical, but historical. All that concerns its
writer is that no sooner did the costume of the miller's daughters
suggest that they would be eligible for the altar, than they grew so
dear, so dear, that everything masculine and unattached was ambitious to
be the jewel that trembled at their ear, or the girdle about their
dainty, dainty waist.
The worst of it for these girls was that their likeness to one another
outwent that of ordinary twinship. It resembled that of the stage where
the same actor personates both Dromios; and their life was one perpetual
Comedy of Errors. Current jest said that they themselves did not know
which was which. But they did know, perfectly well, and had no
misgivings whatever about becoming permanently confused; even when,
having been dressed in different colours to facilitate distinction, they
changed dresses and produced a climax of complication. Even this was not
so bad as when Phoebe had a tiff with Maisie--a rare thing between
twins--and Maisie avenged herself by pretending to be Phoebe, affecting
that all the latter's protests of identity were malicious
misrepresentation. Who could decide when they themselves were not of a
tale? What settled the matter in the end was that Phoebe cried bitterly
at being misrepresented, while Maisie was so ill-advised as not to do
the same, and even made some parade of triumph. "Yow are Maisie. I heerd
yow a-crowun'," said an old stone-dresser, who, with other mill-hands,
was referred to for an opinion.
This was when they were quite young, before slight variations of
experience had altered appearance and character to the point of making
them distinguishable when seen side by side. Not, however, to the point
of rendering impossible a trick each had played more than once on too
importunate male acquaintances. What could be more disconcerting to the
protestations of a rustic admirer than "Happen you fancy you are
speaking to my sister Phoebe, sir?" from Maisie, or _vice versa_? It was
absolutely impossible to nail either of these girls to her own identity,
in the face of her denial of it in her sister's absence. Perhaps the
only real confidence on the point that ever existed was their mother's,
who knew the two babies apart--so she said--because one smelt of roses,
the other of marjoram.
It may easily have been that the power of duping youth and shrewdness,
as to which sister she really was, weighed too heavily with each of
these girls in their assessment of the value of lovers' vows. And still
more easily that--some three years later than the girlish jest related a
page since--when Maisie, playing off this trick on a wild young son of
the Squire's, was met by an indignant reproach for her attempted
deception, she should have been touched by his earnestness and seeming
insight into her inner soul, and that the incident should have become
the cornerstone of a fatal passion for a damned scoundrel. "Oh,
Maisie--Maisie!"--thus ran his protestation--"Dearest, best, sweetest of
girls, how can you think to dupe me when your voice goes to my heart as
no other voice ever can--ever will? How, when I know you for mine--mine
alone--by touch, by sight, by hearing?" The poor child's innocent little
fraud had been tried on a past-master in deception, and her own arrow
glanced back to wound her, beyond cure perhaps. His duplicity was proved
afterwards by the confession of his elder brother Ralph, a young man
little better than himself, that the two girls had been the subject of a
wager between them, which he had lost. This wager turned on which of the
two should be first "successful" with one of the beautiful twins; and
whether it showed only doubtful taste or infamous bad feeling depended
on what interpretation was put on the word "success" by its
perpetrators. A lenient one was possible so long as no worse came of it
than that Thornton Daverill, the younger brother, became the accepted
suitor of Maisie, and Ralph, the elder, the rejected one of Phoebe.
Thornton's success was no doubt due in a great measure to Maisie's
failure to mislead him about her identity, and Ralph's rejection
possibly to the poor figure he cut when Phoebe played fast and loose
with hers. That there was no truth or honour in Thornton's protestations
to Maisie, or even honest loss of self-control under strong feeling, is
evident from the fact that he told his brother as a good joke that his
power of distinguishing between the girls was due to nothing more
profound than that Maisie always gave him her hand to shake and Phoebe
only her fingers. Possibly this test would only have held good in the
case of men outside the family. It was connected with some minute
sensitiveness of feeling towards that class, not perceptible by any
other.
But in whatever sense Thornton and Maisie were trothplight, her father
opposed their marriage, although it would no doubt have been a social
elevation for the miller's daughter. It must be admitted that for once
the inexorable parent may have been in the right. Tales had reached him,
unhappily too late to prevent the formation of an acquaintance between
the young squires and his daughters, of the profligacies--dissoluteness
with women and at the gaming-table--of both these young men. And it is
little wonder that he resolutely opposed the union of Thornton and
Maisie--she a girl of nineteen!--at least until there was some sign of
reform in the youth, some turning from his evil ways.
It was a sad thing for Maisie that her father's exclusiveness had
created so many obstacles to the associations of his daughters with
older women. No one had ever taken the place of a mother to them. It is
rare enough for even a mother to speak explicitly to her daughter of
what folk mean when they tell of the risks a girl runs who weds with a
man like Thornton Daverill. But she may do so in such a way as to excite
suspicion of the reality, and it is hard on motherless girls that they
should not have this slender chance. A father can do nothing, and old
fulminations of well-worn Scriptural jargon--hers was an adept in
texts--had not even the force of their brutal plain speech. For to these
girls the speech was not plain--it was only what Parson read in Church.
That described and exhausted it.
The rest of the story follows naturally--too naturally--from the
position shown in the above hasty sketch. Old Isaac Runciman's
ill-temper, combined with an almost ludicrous want of tact, took the
form of forbidding Thornton Daverill the house. The student of the art
of dragging lovers asunder cannot be too mindful of the fact that the
more they see of each other, the sooner they will be ripe for
separation. If Maisie had been difficult to influence when her father
contented himself with saying that he forbade the marriage _ex cathedra
paternae auctoritatis_, she became absolutely intractable when, some time
after, this authority went the length of interdicting communications.
Secret interviews, about double the length of the public ones they
supplanted, gave the indignant parent an excuse for locking the girl
into her own room. All worked well for the purpose of a thoroughly
unprincipled scoundrel. Thornton, who would probably have married Maisie
if nothing but legal possession had been open to him, saw his way to the
same advantages without the responsibilities of marriage, and jumped at
them. Do not blame Maisie overmuch for her share of what came about. The
step she consented to was one of which the _full_ meaning could only be
half known to a girl of her age and experience. And the man into whose
hands it threw her past recovery was in her eyes the soul of honour and
chivalry--ill-judging, if at all, from the influence of a too passionate
adoration for herself. Conception of the degree and nature of his
wickedness was probably impossible to her; and, indeed, may have been so
still--however strange it may seem--to the very old lady whom, under the
name of Mrs. Prichard, Dolly Wardle used to visit in Sapps Court, "Mrs.
Picture in the topackest" being the nearest shot she was able to make at
her description.
Whether it was so or not, this old, old woman was the very selfsame
Maisie that sixty odd years before lent a too willing ear to the
importunities of a traitor, masquerading with a purpose; and ultimately
consented to a runaway marriage with him, he being alone responsible for
the arrangement of it and the legality of the wedding. The most flimsy
_mise en scene_ of a mock ceremony was sufficient to dupe a simplicity
like hers; and therein was enacted the wicked old tragedy possible only
in a world like ours, which ignores the pledge of the strong to the
weak, however clearly that pledge may be attested, unless the wording of
it jumps with the formularies of a sanctioned legalism. A grievous wrong
was perpetrated, which only the dishonesty of Themis permits; for an
honest lawgiver's aim should be to find means of enforcing a sham
marriage, all the more relentlessly in proportion to the victim's
innocence and the audacity of the imposture.
The story of Maisie's after-life need hardly have been so terrible, on
the supposition that the prayer "God, have mercy upon us!" is ever
granted. Surely some of the stabs in store for her need not have gone to
the knife-hilt. Much information is lacking to make the tale complete,
but what follows is enough. Listen to it and fill in the blanks if you
can--with surmise of alleviation, with interstices of hypothetical
happiness--however little warrant the known facts of the case may carry
with them.
Thornton Daverill was destined to bring down Nemesis on his head by
touching Themis on a sensitive point--monetary integrity. Within five
years, a curious skill which he possessed of simulating the handwriting
of others, combined with a pressing want of ready money, led him to the
commission of an act which turned out a great error in tactics, whatever
place we assign it in morality. Morally, the forgery of a signature,
especially if it be to bring about a diminution of cash in a well-filled
pocket, is a mere peccadillo compared with the malversation of a young
girl's life. Legally it is felony, and he who commits it may get as long
a term of penal servitude as the murderer of whose guilt the jury is not
confident up to hanging point.
The severity of the penal laws in the reign of George III. was due no
doubt to a vindictiveness against the culprit which--in theory at any
rate--is nowadays obsolete, legislation having for its object rather the
discouragement of crime on the _tapis_ than the meting out of their
deserts to malefactors. In those days the indignation of a jury would
rise to boiling-point in dealing with an offence against sacred
Property, while its blood-heat would remain normal over the deception
and ruin of a mere woman. Therefore the jury that tried Thornton
Daverill for forging the signature of Isaac Runciman on the back of a
promissory note found the accused guilty, and the judge inflicted the
severest penalty but one that Law allows. For Thornton might have been
hanged.
But neither judge nor jury seemed much interested in the convict's
behaviour to the daughter of the man he had tried to swindle out of
money. On the contrary, they jumped to the conclusion that his wife was
morally his accomplice; and, indeed, if it had not been for her great
beauty she would very likely have gone to the galleys too. There was,
however, this difference between their positions, that the prosecution
was dependent on her father's affidavit to prove that the signature was
a forgery, and so long as only the man he hated was legally involved,
he was to be relied on to adhere to his first disclaimer of it. Had
Maisie been placed beside her husband in the dock, how easily her
father might have procured the liberation of both by accepting his
liability--changing his mind about the signature and discharging the
amount claimed! If the continuance of the prosecution had depended on
either payer or payee, this would have been the end of it. What the
creditor--a usurer--wanted was his money, not revenge. Indeed, Thornton
would never have been made the subject of a criminal indictment at his
instance, except to put pressure on Isaac Runciman for payment for his
daughter's sake.
The bringing of the case into Court created a new position. An
accommodation that would have been easy enough at first--an excusable
compounding of a felony--became impossible under the eyes of the Bench.
And this more especially because one of the Judges of Assize who tried
the case acquired an interest in Maisie analogous to the one King David
took in the wife of Uriah the Hittite, and perceived the advantages he
would derive if this forger and gambler was packed off to a life far
worse than the death the astute monarch schemed for the great-hearted
soldier who was serving him. Whether the two were lawfully man and wife
made no difference to this Judge. Maisie's devotion to her scoundrel was
the point his lordship's legal acumen was alive to, and he himself was
scarcely King of Israel. One wonders sometimes--at least, the present
writer has done so--what Bathsheba's feelings were on the occasion
referred to. We can only surmise, and can do little more in the case of
Maisie. The materials for the retelling of this story are very slight.
Their source may be referred to later. For the moment it must be content
with the bare facts.
This Bathsheba was able to say "Hands off!" to _her_ King David, and
also able--but Heaven knows how!--to keep up a correspondence with the
worthless parallel of the Hittite throughout the period of his detention
in an English gaol, or, it may be, on the river hulks, until his
deportation in a convict ship to Sydney, from which place occasional
letters reached her, which were probably as frequent as his
opportunities of sending them, until, a considerable time later--perhaps
as much as five years; dates are not easy to fix--one came saying that
he expected shortly to be transferred to the new penal settlement in Van
Diemen's Land.
At the beginning of last century the black hulks on the Thames and
elsewhere were known and spoken of truly as "floating Hells." Any penal
colony was in one point worse; he who went there left Hope behind, so
far as his hopes were centred in his native land. For to return was
Death.
After his transfer to Van Diemen's Land, no letter reached her for some
months. Then came news that Thornton had benefited by the extraordinary
fulness of the powers granted to the Governors of these penal
settlements, who practically received the convicts on lease for the term
of their service. They were, in fact, slaves. But this told well for
Maisie's husband, whose father had been at school with the then supreme
authority at Macquarie Harbour. This got him almost on his arrival a
ticket-of-leave, by virtue of which he was free within the island during
good behaviour. He soon contrived, by his superior education and
manners, to get a foothold in a rough community, and saw his way to
rising in the world, even to prosperity. In a very short time, said a
later letter, he would save enough to pay Maisie's passage out, and then
she could join him. The only redeeming trait the story shows of this man
is his strange confidence that this girl, whom he had cruelly betrayed,
would face all the terrors of a three-months' sea-voyage and travel,
alone in a strange land, to become the slave and helpless dependent of a
convict on ticket-of-leave.
She had returned to her father's house a year after the trial, her
sister having threatened to leave it unless her father permitted her to
do so, taking with her her two children; a very delicate little boy,
born in the first year of her marriage, and a girl baby only four months
old, which had come into the world eight months after its wretched
parent's conviction. During this life at her father's the little boy
died. He had been christened, after his father and uncle, Phoebe's
rejected suitor--Ralph Thornton Daverill. The little girl she had
baptized by the name of Ruth. This little Ruth she took with her, when,
on Phoebe's marriage two years later, she went to live at the house of
the new-married couple; and one would have said that the twins lived in
even closer union than before, and that nothing could part them again.
It would have been a mistake. Within three years Maisie received a
letter enclosing a draft on a London bank for more than her
passage-money, naming an agent who would arrange for her in everything,
and ending with a postscript:--"Come out at once." Shortly after, no
change having been noticeable in her deportment, except, perhaps, an
increased tenderness to her child and her sister, she vanished suddenly;
leaving only a letter to Phoebe, full of contrition for her behaviour,
but saying that her first duty was towards her husband. She had not
dared to take with her her child, and it had been a bitter grief to her
to forsake it, but she knew well that it would have been as great a
bitterness to Phoebe to lose it, as she was herself childless at the
time; and, indeed, her only consolation was that Phoebe would still
continue to be, as it were, a second mother to "their child," which was
the light in which each had always looked upon it.
Both of them seemed to have been under an impression that only one of
two twins can ever become a mother. Whether there is any foundation for
this, or whether it is a version of a not uncommon belief that twins are
always childless, the story need not stop to inquire. It was falsified
in this case by the birth of a son to Phoebe, _en secondes noces_, many
years later. But this hardly touches the story, as this son died in his
childhood. All that is needed to be known at present is that, as the
result of Maisie's sudden disappearance, Phoebe was left in sole
possession of her four-year-old daughter, to whose young mind it was a
matter of indifference which of two almost indistinguishable identities
she called by the name of mother. With a little encouragement she
accepted the plenary title for the then childless woman to whom the name
gave pleasure, and gradually forgot the mother who had deserted her;
who, in the course of very little time, became the shadow of a name. All
she knew then was that this mother had gone away in a ship; and, indeed,
for months after little more was known to her aunt.
However, a brief letter did come from the ship, just starting for
Sydney, and the next long-delayed one announced her arrival there, and
how she had been met at the port by an agent who would make all
arrangements for her further voyage. How this agency managed to get her
through to Hobart Town in those days is a mystery, for there was no free
immigration to the island till many years after, only transports from
New South Wales being permitted to enter the port. She got there
certainly, and was met by her husband at the ship. And well for her that
it was so, for in those days no woman was safe by herself for an hour in
that country.
It may seem wonderful that so vile a man should have set himself to
consult the happiness of a woman towards whom he was under no
obligation. But her letters to her sister showed that he did so; and
those who have any experience of womanless lands men have to dwell in,
whether or no, know that in such lands the market-value of a good sample
is so far above rubies, that he who has one, and could not afford
another if he lost the first, will be quite kind and nice and
considerate to his treasure, in case King Solomon should come round,
with all the crown-jewels to back him and his mother's valuation to
encourage a high bid. Phoebe had for four or five years the satisfaction
of receiving letters assuring her of her sister's happiness and of the
extraordinary good fortune that had come to the reformed gambler and
forger, whose prison-life had given him a distaste for crimes actively
condemned by Society.
Among the items of news that these letters contained were the births of
two boys. The elder was called Isaac after his grandfather at the urgent
request of Maisie; but on condition that if another boy came he should
be called Ralph Thornton, a repetition of the name of her first baby,
which died in England. This is done commonly enough with a single name,
but the duplication is exceptional. Whether the name was actually used
for the younger child Phoebe never knew. Probably a letter was lost
containing the information.
When Isaac Runciman died Phoebe wrote the news of his death to Maisie
and received no reply from her. In its stead--that is to say, at about
the time it would have been due--came a letter from Thornton Daverill
announcing her sister's death in Australia. It was a brief, unsatisfying
letter. Still, she hoped to receive more details, especially as she had
followed her first letter, telling of her father's death, with another a
fortnight later, giving fuller particulars of the occurrence. In due
course came a second letter from her brother-in-law, professing
contrition for the abruptness of his first, but excusing it on the
ground that he was prostrated with grief at the time, and quite unable
to write. He added very full and even dramatic particulars of her
sister's death, giving her last message to her English relatives, and so
forth.
But that sister was _not_ dead. And herein follow the facts that have
come to light of the means her husband employed to make her seem so, and
of his motives for employing them.
To see these clearly you must keep in mind that Thornton was tied for
life within the limits of the penal settlements. Maisie was free to go;
with her it was merely a question of money. As time went on, her
yearning to see her child and her twin-sister again grew and grew, and
her appeals to her husband to allow her sometime to revisit England in
accordance with his promise became every year more and more urgent. He
would be quite a rich man soon--why should she not? Well--simply that
she might not come back! That was his view, and we have to bear in mind
that it would have been impossible for him to replace her, except from
among female convicts assigned to settlers; nominally as servants, but
actually as mates on hire--suppose we call them. One need not say much
of this unhappy class; it is only mentioned to show that Thornton could
have found no woman to take the place of the beautiful and devoted
helpmeet whose constancy to him had survived every trial. No wonder he
was ill at ease with the idea of her adventuring back to England alone.
But it took a mind as wicked as his to conceive and execute the means by
which he prevented it. It seems to have been suggested by the fact that
the distribution of letters in his district had been assigned to him by
the Governor. This made it easy to deliver them or keep them back, when
it was in his interest to do so, without fear of detection. The letters
coming from England were few indeed, so he was able to examine them at
leisure.
At first he was content to withhold Phoebe's letters, hoping that
Maisie would be satisfied with negative evidence of her death, which he
himself suggested as the probable cause of their suspension. But when
this only increased her anxiety to return to her native land, he cast
about for something he could present as direct proof. The death of her
father supplied the opportunity. A black-edged sheet came, thickly
written with Phoebe's account of his last illness, in ink which, as the
event showed, did not defy obliteration. Probably Thornton had learned,
among malefactors convicted of his own offence, secrets of forgery that
would seem incredible to you or me. He contrived to obliterate this
sheet all but the date-stamps outside, and then--the more readily that
he had been informed that only fraud for gain made forgery
felony--elaborated as a palimpsest a most careful letter in the
handwriting of the father announcing Phoebe's own death, and also that
of the daughter whom Maisie had bequeathed to her care. He must have
been inspired and upborne in this difficult task by the spirit of a true
artist. No doubt all _faussure_, to any person with an accommodating
moral sense, is an unmixed delight. This letter remains, and has been
seen by the present writer and others. The dexterity of the thing almost
passes belief, only a few scarcely perceptible traces of the old writing
being visible, the length of the new words being so chosen as to hide
most of the old ones. What is even more incredible is that the original
letter from Phoebe was deciphered at the British Museum by the courtesy
of the gentlemen engaged in the deciphering and explanation of obscure
inscriptions.
The elaborate fiction the forger devised may have been in part due to a
true artist's pleasure in the use of a splendid opportunity, such as
might never occur again. But on close examination one sees that it was
little more than a skilful recognition of the exigencies of the case.
The object of the letter was to remove once and for ever all temptation
to Maisie to return to her native land. Now, so long as either her
sister or her little girl were living in England the old inducement
would be always at work. Why not kill them both, while he had the
choice? It would be more troublesome to produce proof of the death of
either, later. But he mistrusted his skill in dealing with fatal
illness. A blunder might destroy everything. Stop!--he knew something
better than that. Had not the transport that brought him out passed a
drowned body afloat, and wreckage, even in the English Channel?
Shipwreck was the thing! He decided on sending Nicholas Cropredy, his
wife's brother-in-law, across the Channel on business--to Antwerp,
say--and making Phoebe and little Ruth go out to nurse him through a
fever. Their ship could go to the bottom, with a stroke of his pen.
Only, while he was about it, why not clear away the brother-in-law--send
them all out in the same ship? No--_that_ would not do! Where would the
motive be, for all those three to leave England? A commercial mission
for the man alone would be quite another thing. Very perplexing!...
Yes--no--yes!... There--he had got it! Let them go out and nurse him
through a fever, and all be drowned together, returning to England.
That was a triumph. And the finishing touch to the narrative he based on
it was really genius. Little hope was entertained of the recovery of the
remains, but it was not impossible. The writer's daughter might rest
assured that if any came to the surface, and were identified, they
should be interred in the family grave where her mother reposed in the
Lord, in the sure and certain hope of a joyful resurrection.
Was it to be wondered at that so skilful a contrivance duped an
unsuspicious mind like Maisie's? The only thing that could have excited
suspicion was that the letter had been delayed a post--time, you see,
was needed for the delicate work of forgery--and the date of despatch
from London was in consequence some two months too old. But then the
letter was of the same date; indeed, the forgery was a repeat of the
letter it effaced, wherever this was possible. Besides, the delay of a
letter from England could never occasion surprise.
She took the sealed paper from her husband, breaking the seals with
feverish haste, and destroying the only proof that it had been opened on
the way. For the wax, of course, broke, as her husband had foreseen, on
its old fractures, where he had parted them carefully and reattached
them with some similar wax dissolved in spirit. He watched her reading
the letter, not without an artist's pride at her absolute unsuspicion,
and then had to undergo a pang of fear lest the news should kill her.
For she fell insensible, only to remain for a long time prostrate with
grief, after a slow and painful revival.
There was little need for Thornton to reply to Phoebe's letter that he
had effaced. Nevertheless, he did so; partly, perhaps, from the pleasure
he naturally took in playing out the false _role_ he had assigned
himself. Yes--he was a widower. But the poignancy of his grief had
prevented him writing all the particulars of his wife's death. He now
gave the story of the death of a woman on a farm near, with changed
names and some clever addenda, the composition of which amused his
leisure and gratified a spirit of falsehood which might, more
fortunately employed, have found an outlet in literary fiction. The
effect of this letter on Phoebe was to satisfy her so completely of her
sister's death that, had it ever been called in question, she would have
been the hardest to convert to a belief in the contrary. On the other
hand, Maisie's belief in _her_ death was equally assured, and her
quasi-husband rested secure in his confidence that nothing would now
induce her to leave him. Should he ever wish to be rid of her, he had
only to confess his deception, and pack her off to seek her sister. That
no news ever came of her father's death was not a matter of great
surprise to Maisie. She had no surviving correspondent in England who
would have written about it. Her husband may have practised some
_finesse_ later to convince her of it, but its details are not known to
the writer of the story.
They, however, were never parted until, twenty years later, his death
left Maisie a widow, as she believed. It would have been well for her
had it been so, for he died after making that very common testamentary
mistake--a too ingenious will. It left to "my third son Ralph Thornton
Daverill," on coming of age, all his property after "my wife Maisie,
_nee_ Runciman," had received the share she was "legally entitled to."
But she was unable to produce proof of her marriage when called on to do
so, and was, of course, legally entitled to nothing. Thornton had been
so well off that "widow's thirds" would have placed her in comfortable
circumstances. As it was, the whole of his property went to her only
surviving son, a youth who had inherited, with some of his father's good
looks, all his bad principles; and in addition a taint--we may
suppose--of the penal atmosphere in which he was born. But there was not
a shadow of doubt about his being the person named in the will. Perhaps,
if it had been worded "my lawful son," Themis would have jibbed.
The young man, on coming of age, acquired control of the whole of his
father's property, and soon started on a career of extravagance and
debauchery. His mother, however, retained some influence over him, and
persuaded him, a year later, before he had had time to dissipate the
whole of his inheritance, to return with her to England, hoping that the
moral effect of a change from the gaol-bird atmosphere of felony that
hung over the whole land of his birth would develop whatever germ of
honour or right feeling he possessed.
She was not very sanguine, for his boyhood had been a cruel affliction
to her. And the results showed that whatever hopes she had entertained
were ill-founded. Arrived in London, with money still at command, he
plunged at once into all the dissipations of the town, and it became
evident that in the course of a year or so he would run through the
remainder of his patrimony.
About this time he met with an experience which now and then happens to
men of his class. He fell violently in love--or in what he called
love--with a girl who had very distinct ideas on the subject of
marriage. One was that the first arrangement of their relations which
suggested themselves to her lover were not to be entertained, and
therefore she refused to entertain them. He tried ridicule, indignation,
and protestation--all in vain! She appeared not to object to
persecution--rather liked it. But she held out no hopes except
legitimate ones. At last, when the young man was in a sense
desperate--not in a very noble sense, but desperate for all that--she
intimated to him that, unless he was prepared to accept her scheme of
life, she knew a very respectable young man who was; a young man in
Smithfield Market with whom she had walked out, and you could never have
told. Which means that this young man disguised himself so subtly on
Sunday to go into Society, that none would have guessed that he passed
the week in contact with grease and blood, and dared to twist the tails
of bullocks in revolt against their fate, shrinking naturally from the
axe. His intentions were, nevertheless, honourable, and Polly, the
barmaid at the One Tun Inn, honoured them, while her affections were
disposed towards her Australian suitor whose intentions were not. The
young reprobate, however, had to climb down; but he made his surrender
conditional on one thing--that his marriage with Polly should remain a
secret. No doubt parallel enterprises would have been interrupted by its
publication. Anyhow, his mother never knew of his marriage, nor set eyes
on her daughter-in-law.
His marriage was, in fact, merely a means to an end, and was a most
reluctant concession to circumstances on his part. It was true he
deprived himself of all chance of offering the same terms again for the
same goods, unless, indeed, he ran the risks of a bigamist. But what can
a man do under such circumstances? He is what he is, and it does seem a
pity sometimes that he was made in the image of God, whether for God's
sake or his own. Young Daverill's end attained, he flung away his prize
almost without a term of intermediate neglect to save his face. She,
poor soul, who had lived under the impression that all men were "like
that" but that honourable marriage "reformed" them, was desperate at
first when she found her mistake. Her "lawful husband," having attained
his end, announced his weariness of lawful marriage with a candour even
coarser than that of Browning's less lawful possessor of Love--he who
"half sighed a smile in a yawn, as 'twere." He replied, to all Polly's
passionate claims to him as a legal right, and hints that she could and
would enforce her position:--"Try it on, Poll--you and your lawyers!"
And, indeed, we have never been able to learn how the strong arm of the
Law enforces marital obligations; barring mere cash payments, of which
Polly's attitude was quite oblivious. Moreover, he was at that time
prepared with money, and did actually maintain his wife up to the point
of every possible legal compulsion until the end of his solvency, not a
very long period.
For his life-drama, or the first act of it, was soon played out. It was
substantially his father's over again. He ran through what was left of
his money in a little over a year--so splendid were the gambler's
opportunities in these days; for the Georgian era had still a short
lease of years to run, and folly dies hard. His attempts to reinstate
himself at the expense of a Bank, by a simple process of burglary, in
partnership with a professional hand whose acquaintance he had made at
"The Tun," led to disastrous failure and the summary conviction of both
partners.
None of this came to the knowledge of his wife, as how should it? He
wrote no news of it to her, and their relation was known to very few.
Moreover, the burglary was in Bristol and Polly was at a farmhouse in
Lincolnshire, awaiting a birth which only added another grief to her
life, for her child was born dead. She recovered from a long illness
which swallowed up the remains of the money her husband had given her,
to find herself destitute and minus most of the good looks which had
obtained for her her previous situation. She succeeded thereafter in
maintaining herself by needlework--she was an adept in that--and so
avoided becoming an incumbrance on her family, which she could no longer
help now as she had done in her prosperity. But of her worthless
husband's fate she never knew anything, the trial having taken place
during an illness which nearly ended all her miseries for her. By the
time she was on the way to recovery it would have been difficult to
trace her husband, even had she had any motive for doing so.
As for him--a convict and the son of a convict--his period of detention
in the hulks on the Thames was followed by the usual voyage to the
Antipodes; but this time the vessel into which he was transhipped at
Sydney sailed for Norfolk Island, not Hobart Town nor Macquarie Harbour.
Maisie's son was not destined to revisit the land of his birth. The
early deliverance from actual bondage to a condition free in all but
the name, which had led to his father's successful later career, was
impossible in an island half the size of the Isle of Wight, and the man
grew to his surroundings. A soul ready to accept the impress of every
stamp of depravity in the mint of vice was soon well beyond the reach of
any possible redemption in contact with the moral vileness of the
prisons on what was, but for their contamination, one of the loveliest
islands in the Pacific.
After his departure his mother may have been influenced by a wish to
obliterate her whole past, and this wish may have been the cause of her
adoption of a name not her own. Some lingering reluctance to make her
severance from her own belongings absolute may have dictated the choice
of the name of Prichard, which was that of an old nurse of her
childhood, who had stood by her mother's dying bed. It would serve every
reasonable purpose of disguise without grating on memories of bygone
times. A shred of identity was left to cling to. It is less clear why
the quasi-daughter whom she had never seen should have repudiated her
married name. Polly was under no obligation not to call herself Mrs.
Daverill, unless it were compliance with her promise to keep the
marriage secret. She, however, acquiesced in the Mrs., and supplied a
name as a passport to a respectable widowhood. But she did not dress the
part very vigorously, and report soon accepted the husband as a bad lot
and a riddance. Nothing very uncommon in that!