The Boltons Are Much Troubled
The condition of the inhabitants of Puritan Grange during the six weeks
immediately after the verdict was very sad indeed. I have described
badly the character of the lady living there, if I have induced my
readers to think that her heart was hardened against her daughter. She
was a woman of strong convictions and bitter prejudices; but her heart
was soft enough. When she married, circumstances had separated her
widely from her own family, in which she had never known either a
brother or a sister; and the burden of her marriage with an old man had
been brightened to her by the possession of an only child,--of one
daughter, who had been the lamp of her life, the solitary delight of her
heart, the single relief to the otherwise solitary tedium of her
monotonous existence. She had, indeed attended to the religious training
of her girl with constant care;--but the yearnings of her maternal heart
had softened even her religion, so that the laws, and dogmas, and texts,
and exercises by which her husband was oppressed, and her servants
afflicted, had been made lighter for Hester,--sometimes not without
pangs of conscience on the part of the self-convicted parent. She had
known, as well as other mothers, how to gloat over the sweet charms of
the one thing which in all the world had been quite her own. She had
revelled in kisses and soft touches. Her Hester's garments had been a
delight to her, till she had taught herself to think that though
sackcloth and ashes were the proper wear for herself and her husband,
nothing was too soft, too silken, too delicate for her little girl. The
roses in the garden, and the goldfish in the bowl, and the pet spaniel,
had been there because such surroundings had been needed for the
joyousness of her girl. And the theological hardness of the literature
of the house had been somewhat mitigated as Hester grew into reading, so
that Watt was occasionally relieved by Wordsworth, and Thomson's
'Seasons' was alternated with George Withers's 'Hallelujah.'
Then had come, first the idea of the marriage, and, immediately
consequent upon the idea, the marriage itself. The story of that has
been told, but the reader has perhaps hardly been made to understand the
utter bereavement which it brought on the mother. It is natural that the
adult bird should delight to leave the family nest, and that the mother
bird should have its heart-strings torn by the separation. It must be
so, alas! even when the divulsions are made in the happiest manner. But
here the tearing away had nothing in it to reconcile the mother. She was
suddenly told that her daughter was to be no longer her own. Her
step-son had interfered and her husband had become powerful over her
with a sudden obstinacy. She had had no hand in the choice. She would
fain have postponed any choice, and would then fain have herself made
the choice. But a man was brought who was distasteful to her at all
points, and she was told that that man was to have her daughter! He was
thoroughly distasteful. He had been a spendthrift and a gambler;--then a
seeker after gold in wild, godless countries, and, to her thinking, not
at all the better because he had been a successful seeker. She believed
the man to be an atheist. She was told that his father was an infidel,
and was ready to believe the worst of the son. And yet in this terrible
emergency she was powerless. The girl was allowed to see the man, and
declared almost at once that she would transfer herself from her
mother's keeping to the keeping of this wicked one! She was transferred,
and the mother had been left alone.
Then came the blow,--very quickly, the blow which, as she now told
herself morning, noon, and night, was no worse than she had expected.
Another woman claimed the man as her husband, and so claimed him that
the world all around her had declared that the claim would be made good.
And the man himself had owned enough to make him unfit,--as she
thought,--to have the custody of any honest woman. Then she acknowledged
to herself the full weight of the misfortune that had fallen upon
them,--the misfortune which never would have fallen upon them had they
listened to her counsel,--and she had immediately put her shoulders to
the wheel with the object of rescuing her child from the perils, from
the sin, from the degradation of her position. And could she have
rescued her, could she have induced her daughter to remain at Puritan
Grange, there would even then have been consolation. It was one of the
tenets of her life,--the strongest, perhaps, of all those doctrines on
which she built her faith,--that this world is a world of woe; that
wailing and suffering, if not gnashing of teeth, is and should be the
condition of mankind preparatory to eternal bliss. For eternal bliss
there could, she thought, be no other preparation. She did not want to be
happy here, or to have those happy around her whom she loved. She had
stumbled and gone astray,--she told herself hourly now that she had
stumbled and gone astray,--in preparing those roses and ribbons, and
other lightnesses for her young girl. It should have been all sackcloth
and ashes. Had it been all sackcloth and ashes there would not have been
this terrible fall. But if the loved one would now come back to
sackcloth and ashes,--if she would assent to the blackness of religious
asceticism, to penitence and theological gloom, and would lead the life
of the godly but comfortless here in order that she might insure the
glories and joys of the future life, then there might be
consolation;--then it might be felt that this tribulation had been a
precious balm by which an erring soul had been brought back to its due
humility.
But Wordsworth and Thomson, though upon the whole moral poets, had done
their work. Or, if not done altogether by them, the work had been done
by the latitude which had admitted them. So that the young wife, when
she found herself breathing the free air with which her husband
surrounded her, was able to burst asunder the remnants of those cords of
fanaticism with which her mother had endeavoured to constrain her. She
looked abroad, and soon taught herself to feel that the world was bright
and merry, that this mortal life was by no means necessarily a place of
gloom, and the companionship of the man to whom Providence had allotted
her was to her so happy, so enjoyable, so sufficient, that she found
herself to have escaped from a dark prison and to be roaming among
shrubs and flowers, and running waters, which were ever green, which
never faded, and the music of which was always in her ears. When the
first tidings of Euphemia Smith came to Folking she was in all her
thoughts and theories of life poles asunder from her mother. There might
be suffering and tribulation,--suffering even to death. But her idea of
the manner in which the suffering should be endured and death awaited
was altogether opposed to that which was hot within her mother's bosom.
But not the less did the mother still pray, still struggle, and still
hope. They, neither of them, quite understood each other, but the mother
did not at all understand the daughter. She, the mother, knew what the
verdict had been, and was taught to believe that by that verdict the
very ceremony of her daughter's marriage had been rendered null and
void. It was in vain that the truth of the matter came to her from
Robert Bolton, diluted through the vague explanations of her husband.
'It does not alter the marriage, Robert says.' So it was that the old
man told his tale, not perfectly understanding, not even quite
believing, what his son had told him.
'How can he dare to say so?' demanded the indignant mother of the
injured woman. 'Not alter the marriage when the jury have declared that
the other woman is his wife! In the eyes of God she is not his wife.
That cannot be imputed as sin to her,--not that,--because she did it not
knowing. She, poor innocent, was betrayed. But now that she knows it,
every mouthful that she eats of his bread is a sin.'
'It is the old man's bread,' said this older man, weakly.
'What matter? It is the bread of adultery.' It may certainly be said
that at this time Mrs. Bolton herself would have been relieved from none
of her sufferings by any new evidence which would have shown that
Crinkett and the others had sworn falsely. Though she loved her daughter
dearly, though her daughter's misery made her miserable, yet she did not
wish to restore the husband to the wife. Any allusion to a possibility
that the verdict had been a mistaken verdict was distasteful to her. Her
own original opinion respecting Caldigate had been made good by the
verdict. The verdict had proved her to be right, and her husband with
all his sons to have been wrong. The triumph had been very dark to her;
but still it had been a triumph. It was to her an established fact that
John Caldigate was not her daughter's husband and therefore she was
anxious, not to rehabilitate her daughter's position, but to receive her
own miserable child once more beneath the shelter of her own wing. That
they two might pray together, struggle together, together wear their
sackcloth and ashes, and together console themselves with their hopes of
eternal joys, while they shuddered, not altogether uncomfortably, at
the torments prepared for others,--this was now the only outlook in
which she could find a gleam of satisfaction; and she was so assured of
the reasonableness of her wishes, so convinced that the house of her
parents was now the only house in which Hester could live without
running counter to the precepts of her own religion, and counter also to
the rules of the wicked outside world, that she could not bring herself
to believe but that she would succeed at last. Merely to ask her child
to come, to repeat the invitation, and then to take a refusal, was by no
means sufficient for her energy. She had failed grievously when she had
endeavoured to make her daughter a prisoner at the Grange. After such an
attempt as that, it could hardly be thought that ordinary invitations
would be efficacious. But when that attempt had been made, it was
possible that Hester should justify herself by the law. According to law
she had then been Caldigate's wife. There had been some ground for her
to stand upon as a wife, and as a wife she had stood upon it very
firmly. But now there was not an inch of ground. The man had been
convicted as a bigamist, and the other woman, the first woman, had been
proved to be his wife. Mrs. Bolton had got it into her head that the two
had been dissevered as though by some supernal power; and no explanation
to the contrary, brought to her by her husband from Robert, had any
power of shaking her conviction. It was manifest to all men and to all
women, that she who had been seduced, betrayed, and sacrificed should
now return with her innocent babe to the protection of her father's
roof; and no stone must be left unturned till the unfortunate one had
been made to understand her duty.
The old banker in these days had not a good time, nor, indeed, had the
Boltons generally. Mrs. Bolton, though prone to grasp at power on every
side, was apt, like some other women who are equally grasping, to
expect almost omnipotence from the men around her when she was desirous
that something should be done by them in accordance with her own
bidding. Knowing her husband to be weak from age and sorrow, she could
still jeer at him because he was not abnormally strong; and though her
intercourse with his sons and their families was now scanty and
infrequent, still by a word here and a line there she could make her
reproaches felt by them all. Robert, who saw his father every day, heard
very much of them. Daniel was often stung, and even Nicholas. And the
reproaches reached as far as William, the barrister up in London.
'I am sure I don't know what we can do,' said the miserable father,
sitting huddled up in his arm-chair one evening towards the end of
August. It was very hot, but the windows were closed because he could
not bear a draught, and he was somewhat impatiently waiting for the hour
of prayers which were antecedent to bed, where he could be silent even
if he could not sleep.
'There are five of you. One should be at the house every day to tell her
of her duty.'
'I couldn't go.'
'They could go,--if they cared. If they cared they would go. They are
her brothers.'
'Mr. Caldigate would not let them enter the house,' said the old man.
'Do you mean that he would separate her from her brother and her
parents?'
'Not if she wished to see them. She is her own mistress, and he will
abet her in whatever she may choose to do. That is what Robert says.'
'And what Robert says is to be law?'
'He knows what he is talking about.' Mr. Bolton as he said this shook
his head angrily, because he was fatigued.
'And he is to be your guide even when your daughter's soul is in
jeopardy?' This was the line of argument in reference to which Mr.
Bolton always felt himself to be as weak as water before his wife. He
did not dare to rebel against her religious supremacy, not simply
because he was a weak old man in presence of a strong woman, but from
fear of denunciation. He, too, believed her creed, though he was made
miserable by her constant adherence to it. He believed, and would fain
have let that suffice. She believed, and endeavoured to live up to her
belief. And so it came to pass that when she spoke to him of his own
soul, of the souls of those who were dear to him, or even of souls in
general, he was frightened and paralysed. He had more than once
attempted to reply with worldly arguments, but had suffered so much in
the encounter that he had learned to abstain. 'I cannot believe that she
would refuse to see us. I shall go myself; but if we all went we should
surely persuade her.' In answer to this the poor man only groaned, till
the coming in of the old servant to arrange the chairs and put the big
Bible on the table relieved him from something of his misery.
'I certainly will not interfere,' Robert Bolton said to his father on
the next morning. 'I will not go to Folking, because I am sure that I
should do no good. Hester, no doubt, would be better at your
house,--much better. There is nothing I would not do to get her back
from the Caldigates altogether,--if there was a chance of success. But
we have no power;--none whatever.'
'No power at all,' said the banker, shaking his head, and feeling some
satisfaction at the possession of an intelligible word which he could
quote to his wife.
'She is controller of her own actions as completely as are you and I. We
have already seen how inefficacious with her are all attempts at
persuasion. And she knows her position. If he were out of prison
to-morrow he would be her husband.'
'But he has another wife.'
'Of that the civil law knows nothing. If money were coming to her he
could claim it, and the verdict against him would only be evidence, to
be taken for what it was worth. It would have been all very well had she
wished to sever herself from him; but as she is determined not to do so,
any interference would be useless.' The question as to the marriage or
no marriage was not made quite clear to the banker's mind, but he did
understand that neither he, nor his wife, nor his sons had 'any power,'
and of that argument he was determined to make use.
William, the barrister in London, was induced to write a letter, a very
lengthy and elaborate epistle having come from Mrs. Bolton to his wife,
in which the religious duty of all the Boltons was set forth in strong
language, and in which he was incited to do something. It was almost the
first letter which Mrs. William Bolton had ever received from her
step-mother, whatever trifling correspondence there might have been
between them having been of no consequence. They, too, felt that it
would be better that Hester should return to her old home, but felt also
that they had no power. 'Of course, she won't,' said Mrs. William.
'She has a will of her own,' said the barrister.
'Why should she? Think of the gloom of that home at Chesterton, and her
absolute independence at Folking. No doubt it would be better. The
position is so frightful that even the gloom would be better. But she
won't. We all know that.'
The barrister, however, feeling that it would be better, thought that he
should perform his duty by expressing his opinion, and wrote a letter to
Hester, which was intended to be if possible persuasive;--and this was
the answer:--
'DEAR WILLIAM,--If you were carried away to prison on some horrible
false accusation, would Fanny go away from you, and desert your
house and your affairs, and return to her parents? You ask her, and
ask her whether she would believe anything that anybody could say
against you. If they told her that her children were nameless, would
she agree to make them so by giving up your name? Wouldn't she cling
to you the more, the more all the world was against you?' ('I
would,' said Fanny, with tearful energy. 'Fanny' was, of course,
Mrs. William Bolton, and was the happy mother of five nearly
grown-up sons and daughters, and certainly stood in no peril as to
her own or their possession of the name of Bolton. The letter was
being read aloud to her by her husband, whose mind was also stirred
in his sister's favour by the nature of the arguments used.) 'If
so,' continued the writer, 'why shouldn't I be the same? I don't
believe a word the people said. I am sure I am his wife. And as,
when he was taken away from me, he left a house for his wife and
child to live in, I shall continue to live in it.
'All the same, I know you mean to be good to me. Give my best love
to Fanny, and believe me your affectionate sister,
'HESTER CALDIGATE.'
In every letter and stroke of the name as she wrote it there was an
assertion that she claimed it as her own, and that she was not ashamed
of it.
'Upon my word,' said Mrs. William Bolton, through her tears, 'I am
beginning to think that she is almost right.' There was so much of
conjugal proper feeling in this that the husband could only kiss his
wife and leave her without further argument on the matter.