I know that in the eyes of the world I was guilty of a great fault--a
fault so grave that society condemns it bitterly. How shall I justify
myself before those who believe a woman owes her whole self to her
husband, whatever his conduct to her may be? That is impossible. To them
I merely plead "guilty," and say nothing of extenuating circumstances.
But there are others who will listen, and be sorry for me. There are
women like Johanna Carey, who will pity me, and lay the blame where it
ought to lie.
I was little more than seventeen when I was married; as mere a child as
any simple, innocent girl of seventeen among you. I knew nothing of what
life was, or what possibilities of happiness or misery it contained. I
married to set away from a home that had been happy, but which had
become miserable. This was how it was:
My own mother died when I was too young a child to feel her loss. For
many years after that, my father and I lived alone together on one of
the great sheep-farms of Adelaide, which belonged to him, and where he
made all the fortune that he left me. A very happy life, very free, with
no trammels of society and no fetters of custom; a simple, rustic life,
which gave me no preparation for the years that came after it.
When I was thirteen my father married again--for my sake, and mine
only. I knew afterward that he was already foreseeing his death, and
feared to leave me alone in the colony. He thought his second wife would
be a mother to me, at the age when I most needed one. He died two years
after, leaving me to her care. He died more peacefully than he could
have done, because of that. This he said to me the very last day of his
life. Ah! I trust the dead do not know the troubles that come to the
living. It would have troubled my father--nay, it would have been
anguish to him, even in heaven itself, if he could have seen my life
after he was gone. It is no use talking or thinking about it. After two
wretched years I was only too glad to be married, and get away from the
woman who owed almost the duty of a mother to me.
Richard Foster was a nephew of my step-mother, the only man I was
allowed to see. He was almost twice my age; but he had pleasant manners,
and a smooth, smooth tongue. I believed he loved me, he swore it so
often and so earnestly; and I was in sore need of love. I wanted some
one to take care of me, and think of me, and comfort me, as my father
had been used to do. So much alone, so desolate I had been since his
death, no one caring whether I were happy or miserable, ill or well,
that I felt grateful to Richard Foster when he said he loved me. He
seemed to come in my father's stead, and my step-mother urged and
hurried on our marriage, and I did not know what I was doing. The
trustees who had charge of my property left me to the care of my
father's widow. That was how I came to marry him when I was only a girl
of seventeen, with no knowledge of the world but what I had learned on
my father's sheep-run.
It was a horrible, shameful thing, if you will only think of it. There
was I, an ignorant, unconscious, bewildered girl, with the film of
childhood over my eyes still; and there was he, a crafty, unprincipled,
double-tongued adventurer, who was in love with my fortune, not with me.
As quickly as he could carry me off from my home, and return to his own
haunts in Europe, he brought me away from the colony, where all whom I
could ever call friends were living. I was utterly alone with him--at
his mercy. There was not an ear that I could whisper a complaint to; not
one face that would look at me in pity and compassion. My father had
been a good man, single-hearted, high-minded, and chivalrous. This man
laughed at all honor and conscience scornfully.
I cannot tell you the shock and horror of it. I had not known there were
such places and such people in the world, until I was thrust suddenly
into the midst of them; innocent at first, like the child I was, but the
film soon passed away from my eyes. I grew to loathe myself as well as
him. How would an angel feel, who was forced to go down to hell, and
become like the lost creatures there, remembering all the time the
undefiled heaven he was banished from? I was no angel, but I had been a
simple, unsullied, clear-minded girl, and I found myself linked in
association with men and women such as frequent the gambling-places on
the Continent. For we lived upon the Continent, going from one
gambling-place to another. How was a girl like me to possess her own
soul, and keep it pure, when it belonged to a man like Richard Foster?
There was one more injury and degradation for me to suffer. I recollect
the first moment I saw the woman who wrought me so much misery
afterward. We were staying in Homburg for a few weeks at a hotel; and
she was seated at a little table in a window, not far from the one where
we were sitting. A handsome, bold-looking, arrogant woman. They had
known one another years before, it seemed. He said she was his cousin.
He left me to go and speak to her, and I watched them, though I did not
know then that any thing more would come of it than a casual
acquaintance. I saw his face grow animated, and his eyes look into hers,
with an expression that stirred something like jealousy within me, if
jealousy can exist without love. When he returned to me, he told me he
had invited her to join us as my companion. She came to us that evening.
She never left us after that. I was too young, he said, to be left alone
in foreign towns while he was attending to his business, and his cousin
would be the most suitable person to take care of me. I hated the woman
instinctively. She was civil to me just at first, but soon there was
open war between us, at which he laughed only; finding amusement for
himself in my fruitless efforts to get rid of her. After a while I
discovered it could only be by setting myself free from him.
Now judge me. Tell me what I was bound to do. Three voices I hear speak.
One says: "You, a poor hasty girl, very weak yet innocent, ought to have
remained in the slough, losing day by day your purity, your worth, your
nobleness, till you grew like your companions. You had vowed ignorantly,
with a profound ignorance it might be, to obey and honor this man till
death parted you. You had no right to break that vow."
Another says: "You should have made of yourself a spy, you should have
laid traps; you should have gathered up every scrap of evidence you
could find against them, that might have freed you in a court of law."
A third says: "It was right for you, for the health of your soul, and
the deliverance of your whole self from an intolerable bondage, to break
the ignorantly-taken vow, and take refuge in flight. No soul can be
bound irrevocably to another for its own hurt and ruin."
I listened then, as I should listen now, to the third voice. The chance
came to me just before I was one-and-twenty. They were bent upon
extorting from me that portion of my father's property which would come
to me, and be solely in my own power, when I came of age. It had been
settled upon me in such a way, that if I were married my husband could
not touch it without my consent.
I must make this quite clear. One-third, of my fortune was so settled
that I myself could not take any portion of it save the interest; but
the other two-thirds were absolutely mine, whether I was married or
single. By locking up one-third, my father had sought to provide against
the possibility of my ever being reduced to poverty. The rest was my
own, to keep if I pleased; to give up to my husband if I pleased.
At first they tried what fair words and flattery would do with me. Then
they changed their tactics. They brought me over to London, where not a
creature knew me. They made me a prisoner in dull, dreary rooms, where I
had no employment and no resources. That is, the woman did it. My
husband, after settling us in a house in London, disappeared, and I saw
no more of him. I know now he wished to keep himself irresponsible for
my imprisonment. She would have been the scape-goat, had any legal
difficulties arisen. He was anxious to retain all his rights over me.
I can see how subtle he was. Though my life was a daily torture, there
was positively nothing I could put into words against him--nothing that
would have authorized me to seek a legal separation. I did not know any
thing of the laws, how should I? except the fact which he dinned into my
ears that he could compel me to live with him. But I know now that the
best friends in the world could not have saved me from him in any other
way than the one I took. He kept within the letter of the law. He
forfeited no atom of his claim upon me.
Then God took me by the hand, and led me into a peaceful and untroubled
refuge, until I had gathered strength again.