Lucretia was first to come.
The winter it all happened, I was house-bound with rheumatism and had
no active part in the drama. By day I was wheeled into the little
upstairs study and sat with my mind on chloroform liniment and
flannels, while my family and friends came to me, bearing gifts.
Sometimes they sought the house to amuse me, sometimes to relieve
their minds.
Lucretia's burden was heaviest, so she was first.
The November morning was raw and hideous. There were flakes of snow on
my sister's venerable and shabby sealskin. She laid back the {66} veil
on the edge of her little black bonnet,--she had been a widow for two
years,--brushed the snow from her slightly worn shopping-bag and sat
down in front of the fire, pulling nervously at her gloves.
Lucretia is thin, sharp-featured ivory-skinned. Her aspect is both
fatigued and ardent. Nothing that Mary and I were ever able to do for
her lifted in the least from her own spirit the weight of her
poverty-stricken, troublous, married life; and in her outer woman she
persists in retaining that aspect of carefully brushed, valiantly
borne adversity which is so trying to more prosperous and
would-be-helpful kin.
I made a few comments on the weather, which Lucretia did not answer.
Realizing suddenly that she was agitated, I became silent, hoping that
{67} the quiet, comfortable room, the snapping fire, and my own
inertness, would act as a sedative. It did not occur to me that any
really serious matter could be afoot. I had ceased to expect that life
would offer any of us anything worse than occasional physical
discomfort.
Having regained her composure, my sister spoke without preface.
"I am in great trouble, Benjamin. Desire has made up her mind to leave
her husband, and nothing I say has the slightest effect."
"Good Heavens! Lucretia! What do you mean?"
"Just what I say. Desire declares she isn't satisfied as Arnold
Ackroyd's wife. So she proposes to put an end to the relation. I judge
she intends, later, to contract another marriage, though she is n't
disposed to lay stress on that point."
{68}
I continued to look at Lucretia wide-eyed, and possibly wide-mouthed.
The things she was saying were so preposterous, so incredible, that I
could not accept them. It was as if I had received a message that the
full moon was not "satisfied" to climb the evening sky.
"Lord! Lord! Little Desire!" I muttered.
"She is a woman of thirty, Benjamin."
"What does she say?" I exploded. "What is wrong in her married life?
People don't do these things causelessly--not the people we are or
know."
"She says a great deal," returned her mother dryly. "Did you ever know
a Withacre to be lacking in words, Benjamin? Desire is very fluent. I
might say she is eloquent."
{69}
"But what does it all amount to, anyhow?" I demanded impatiently.
Dazed though I was, my consciousness of being the head of the family
was returning.
Lucretia lifted her left hand, which was trembling, and checked off
the items on her fingers. Her hands were shapely, though dark and
shrunken, with swollen veins across the back. The firelight struck the
worn gold of her wedding ring.
"She demands a less hampered life; a more variegated self-expression;
a chance to help the world in her own way; an existence that shall be
a daily development; the opportunity to give perpetual stimulus and
refreshment to an utterly congenial mate. Oh! I know her reasons by
heart," said Lucretia. "They sound like fine things, don't they,
Benjamin?"
{70}
"Who is the other man?"
"Fortunately, none of us know him. He is a Westerner with one of those
absurdly swollen fortunes. Desire would n't have thought it a wider
life to marry a poorer man. Such women don't."
"I wish you would n't put Desire in a class and call her such women,
Lucretia," I protested irritably.
My sister looked at me strangely.
"You, too? Can money buy you too?" she said.
She rose and steadied her trembling arms upon the low mantle. She
stood, a black-clad figure, between me and the glowing hearth, looking
down into the heart of the fire as she spoke. I had begun to perceive,
vaguely, that here was no sister I had ever known before. In a way she
was beside, or rather beyond, herself.
{71}
We Raynies are self-controlled people. Lucretia had always been a
silent woman, keeping her emotions to her self. But they say
earthquakes, vast convulsion of regions beneath the lowest seas, will
sometimes force up to light of day strange flotsam from the ocean-bed.
Things that the eyes of men have never seen, nor their busy minds
conceived, float up to face the sun. From Lucretia's shaken soul arose
such un-imagined things.
Her words came forth swiftly, almost with violence.
"Benjamin, my daughter proposes leaving for Reno, Nevada, next week to
procure a divorce.--I'm not saying that plenty of divorces are n't
justified. I know they are. Plenty of remarriages too, I make no
doubt. I've lived long enough to know that extremes are always wrong,
and the middle course {72} is almost always right. I will admit, if
you like, that every case is a thing apart, and stands on its own
merits, and that only God and a woman's conscience are the judges of
what she should do. But Desire's case has no merits!
"I know Arnold, and I know Desire; he is a busy man and she is an
indulged woman. She might have entered into his life and interests if
she had chosen; the door was as much open as it can be between a man
and a woman. I don't claim it is ever easy for them to see clearly
into each other's worlds. But they do it, every day. Here is Arnold
working himself to death, reducing fractures and removing appendixes,
and trying to make the people who swarm to him into whole and healthy
men and women. That's a good way to help the world if you do it with
every ounce of {73} conscience there is in you. Here is Desire,
fiddling with art and literature and civics and economics, and wanting
to uplift the masses with Scandinavian dramas and mediaeval art and
woman suffrage. If she really wants to enrich life for others, and she
says she does, why, in Heaven's name, does n't she hold up Arnold
Ackroyd's hands? There is work that is worth while, and it would take
more brains and ability than she owns to do it well! It is _her_ work;
she chose it; she dedicated herself to it. Now she repudiates it for a
whim."
"How do you know it is just a whim, Lucretia?" I interrupted rather
shame-facedly. "Mightn't it be--er--a very violent attachment?"
Lucretia shook her head.
"These women nowadays are simply crazy about themselves. Are {74}
self-centred people ever capable of great passions?"