RACHEL ON THE PHILOSOPHY OF MARRIAGE.
Probably no girl of nineteen--probably no man or woman of any age--ever
died of a broken heart, unless when that complaint was complicated and
aggravated by the presence of physical disease of some sort.
Rachel's constitution was sound, albeit her nervous organisation was
extremely delicate, and she did not die, neither under this bitter first
blow, nor later on, when she had still sharper provocations.
A little tender petting and coddling at the hands of her cousin
Beatrice, who was now her devoted ally and friend, did more to restore
her than all the doctor's medicines and all her aunt's jellies and
broths.
The very talking of her troubles eased and soothed her, and gave her a
sense of refreshment and rest, and though Beatrice offered her no
encouragement on Mr. Dalrymple's behalf--and indeed hinted pretty
broadly that the terrible thing which had happened was an inevitable
sequel and corrective to a lapse of reason that partook of the character
of temporary insanity, to say the least of it--she was heartily if not
demonstratively sympathetic.
Within a fortnight of her cousin's return she reached that stage of
convalescence which made the removal to South Yarra justifiable, and in
the doctor's opinion expedient.
Mrs. Reade had great difficulty in carrying out this little enterprise.
Her mother had never shown herself so impracticable.
She was determined not to let Rachel out of her sight, she said; and she
stuck to that determination against many artful manoeuvres so steadily
that the powerful small woman, little accustomed to be thwarted, and
still less to own to it, nearly made up her mind to confess herself
beaten, and to break the disappointment to Rachel.
Mrs. Hardy, however, relented in a sudden and unexpected manner. She
received a consignment of furniture and _bric-a-brac_ from her
travelling daughter, together with most interesting and bewildering
advices.
Laura wrote to say that the Toorak House, if it had any respect for
itself, must immediately get rid of its pierglasses, its whitewash, and
its aniline colours; and poor Mrs. Hardy, who had ever walked with the
complacent dignity of a priestess and oracle in the sacred regions of
household art, was too much excited and disturbed by the humiliating
discovery that she was old-fashioned and behind the times, and by her
agonising desire to recover her proper position, to pay the customary
attention even to Rachel's business.
While she was absorbed in beginning the mighty task of re-adjusting her
ideas of taste and the details of her domestic environment, which, after
a few years of painful struggle with the impracticabilities of Eastlake
mediaevalism, was to result in the existing combination of Chippendale
and the Japanesque, she felt that it would be a relief to divest herself
of superfluous cares.
So she laid her daughter under solemn obligations to protect Rachel's
interests and the honour of the family, and allowed her to take the
invalid away with her for a week or two, that so she might give her
undivided attention to the choice of new coverings for the drawing-room
furniture, and the question what should be done to the ceiling.
The two young women were very grateful for the chance which set them
free to follow their own devices. Mrs. Reade brought her new brougham--a
propitiatory offering from Ned after he had scandalously disgraced
himself by going to a public dinner and coming home in a dishevelled
condition at noon next day--and conveyed her charge to South Yarra in a
nest of soft cushions, and laid her on a pillowy sofa in the brightest
of homely boudoirs, where they discussed the situation and afternoon tea
with much content and cheerfulness.
Rachel was strangely peaceful and amiable at this time. She puzzled her
companion excessively. She had, indeed, a sort of exalted
transcendentalism about her that was almost aggravating to that
practical and most unsentimental person. Her way of moralising upon love
and lovers, after such an experience as she had had, was very naive and
touching, but eminently preposterous, Mrs. Reade considered--and she did
not at all mind saying so.
"A lover who is unfaithful does the deadliest dishonour that is possible
to love, in _my_ opinion," said she, with her customary air of decision.
"To break _any_ pledge is bad enough, but to break _that_ pledge ought
to disqualify a man from ever again calling himself a man."
"I do not think there should be any pledges in love, either given or
asked for," said Rachel softly. "Love is not a thing to be tied and
bound. Fancy a man feeling that he _had_ to keep a promise if he did
not wish to do it! And, oh! fancy a woman letting him--being deceived
into letting him make a sacrifice for her! It would be an outrage and a
degradation to both of them. I think Roden--Mr. Dalrymple--is above
that, Beatrice."
From all she had heard, Mrs. Reade was decidedly disposed to think so
too.
"He says that they are a curse upon people's lives--those engagements
that are kept," continued Rachel, looking solemnly out of the window
with her pensive eyes.
"Did he tell you that? Dear me, he must be a most extraordinary man."
"I understand it perfectly--I know what he means. When we love one
another we are not responsible; something in us makes us do it. When we
leave off loving--when we get dissatisfied--we can't help it either. It
is nature that tells us to do the one as well as the other; and nature
should be obeyed, Roden says."
Mrs. Reade made no comment upon this, but thought to herself that it was
a remarkably wise provision of nature--under the circumstances--that her
devotee was endowed with the courage of his convictions.
"It is very hard for me now, but it is the truest kindness and
gentleness on his part," the girl went on, with a tremor in her quiet
voice. "He knows we understand each other better than any one else can
do. I think some day he will come and tell me all about it--when he
thinks I can bear it; how he could not help it; that that other woman's
memory was more to him than any new love a few days old could be, and
how he was true to her and to himself, and to me, not to wrong any of us
any further to gratify my foolishness. It will be something of that
sort, I know; it will be nothing that is a disgrace to him. Ah,
Beatrice, you think I am talking childish nonsense, I see it in your
face."
"I certainly do, my dear. I think you are fully qualified for admission
into the Yarra Bend, if you wish for the candid truth."
"No; you don't know him, and I do. I am puzzled, I don't deny that I am
puzzled a little; but I _trust_ him. He may do what he likes; I shall
never think that he will do anything wrong. Some day it will be
explained, and I shall see that he was right. I shall love him the more
for not being afraid to break off with me when he felt it was a mistake.
Under any circumstances I love him too well not to be thankful I am
spared the misery of seeing him suffer from an irksome marriage that
could not satisfy him. And love--as he and I understand love--would be
degraded by vulgar efforts to keep it under lock and key."
"I don't know whether it occurs to you," remarked Beatrice, with her
head on one side; "but it is a very dangerous doctrine that you and Mr.
Dalrymple seem to believe in. Logically worked out, it leads--goodness
knows where it _doesn't_ lead to."
The blood flew over the girl's pale face. She was the most sensitively
delicate, the most maidenly, of girls; and she scented a meaning in her
cousin's words that shocked her terribly.
"I am sure that cannot be," she said, with a majestic gentleness that
was full of severe reproach.
"You don't imply that husbands and wives, when they are tired of each
other--or even when only one is tired--are at liberty to make fresh
combinations?"
"You _know_ I am not alluding to married people, Beatrice. They are like
nuns who have taken the veil; they have nothing to do with--with--such
things as we have been speaking of."
"Oh, indeed--haven't they?"
"They are in a sacred place. They are out of the common world--out of
the arena, so to speak. They have taken their prizes, and gone to sit
with the spectators. Even if they do marry wrongly, and do not love each
other afterwards, in the fullest way, after such a dedication as they
have made--with such ties and confidences, and intimacies between them,
so sacred, and so close, and so delicate, and so--so--oh, Beatrice,
don't look at me like that! You know what I mean."
"I am trying to follow you, dear."
"You are married yourself, and you know how it is--better than I do. Yet
_I_ know, too. If I were married--if I were Roden's wife----"
"You would lie down at his feet and let him clean his boots on you, if
there did not happen to be a door-mat handy--oh, yes, I quite
understand _that_."
"I would never make demands upon him that he should love me always," the
girl proceeded, with a gentle solemnity that this kind of flippant
witticism could not discompose. "I would never even ask him if he loved
me. It would seem to me a coarse and insulting question, and it would
tempt him to doubt whether he did. If he went away from me, I would
never say to him, 'Write to me often--write me long letters.' It is so
stupid of people to do that! Of course, if he wanted to, he would; and
if he did it because he was asked, his letters would be valueless, and
worse. He should never have to think of me as a mortgage on his life and
his happiness--he should do as he liked--he should love me as he liked.
And if ever he left off loving me, I should know he could not help it--I
should not blame him--I should not ask him why. I should _feel_ it in a
moment--I am sure, long before he did--as one feels a chill in the air
when the sun goes in, even if one's eyes are shut; but I should never
say a word about it. And yet----"
"And yet it would never occur to him, you think, to provide himself with
a more congenial companion?"
"Beatrice, I cannot talk to you, if you make those suggestions."
"I am only making your own suggestions, my dear. You said it was a
degradation to love to keep it under lock and key."
"And I said I was not speaking of married people. You _know_ there is
something--whole worlds of things--besides love to be considered in
their case."
"Married people are just as human as single people--and so, for the
matter of that, are nuns who have taken the veil, I suppose. Vows, if I
understand you rightly, are immoral; and the dictates of nature should
be obeyed. Nature is uncommonly likely to dictate to man who is not in
love with his wife that there might possibly exist a more desirable
woman."
"I don't know how to explain myself," said Rachel, who felt herself in a
distressing entanglement, and yet was conscious that her principles were
being utterly misconstrued; "but I know that _that_--what you allude
to--would be an impossibility."
"Well, I daresay it would," said Mrs. Reade, after a pause. She was
suddenly struck with the impropriety of insisting upon strict logic in
the discussion of these delicate matters, all things considered. Yet she
was not quite content to leave off at this point.
"Put Mr. Dalrymple aside, Rachel. Suppose you were yourself married, not
to him, but to someone you did not particularly care for?"
"That could never be," the girl replied quickly.
"Oh, I don't know. It was very nearly being, I may take leave to remind
you. None of us can forsee what will happen, and 'never' is a ridiculous
word for a child like you to use. You will not live an old maid for
fifty or sixty years because you are disappointed in a lover whom you
have known for a few days--don't you believe it."
"I will make no vows," said Rachel with a faint smile; "but I express to
you my sincere conviction that I shall never marry anybody. If I do--and
I can't say I _wish_ to be an old maid--I shall tell the person, whoever
he is, all about Roden, frankly."
"Of course you will. And very probably he will like you the better for
that frankness, and be quite willing to take you on your own terms. But
then, suppose after years of married life Mr. Dalrymple turned up again,
and you found you felt towards him as you do now--what then?"
"What then?" repeated the girl, much disturbed and a little affronted;
"I should not recognise that I felt so."
"But suppose--for the sake of argument--that you could not help
yourself?"
"I hope I could help it, Beatrice. I should not allow him to remind me
of the past."
"Would not the past suggest itself sufficiently? Ah, my dear, he is a
very strong man! And you are as weak as--well, we needn't say anything
about that. If he wanted your love back, and you had it in your
heart----"
"If he did," interposed Rachel; "but I know he never would--I should
love him no more."
"Would that be in accordance with the terms of your philosophy?"
"Yes, it would. For nature makes us with many capacities. Some of them
counteract the others. Don't talk of these things any more, Beatrice--I
don't like it."
"Very well, dear; I won't."
The little lady got up from her seat on the floor, opened a window, put
the teacups on the table, and asked her cousin if she had seen the
beautiful Persian tiles that Mr. Kingston had just had sent out to him
for one of the dados in the new house.
Rachel responded absently, gazed for a little while in silence upon the
sleepy garden full of flowers and humming bees, and as Mrs. Reade had
expected, returned herself to the abandoned topic.
"At any rate," she said thoughtfully, "there is one thing I would always
do. I would tell the truth. I would never have secrets. I would sooner
do the wrongest thing, the wickedest crime, than hide it. If I _feel_
things in my heart--well, my husband, if I have one, shall know all
that I know. And I will never do anything that he--that the whole
world--may not see."
"Does that seem to you so easy?" inquired Beatrice, settling a top-heavy
rosebud in a slender Venetian vase. "Did you never have any secrets that
you were afraid to tell?"
The girl was silent for several minutes. She was crimson to the throat,
and her face was turned away from her companion.
"I will do what is sure to be right and--safe," she said at last,
falteringly; "I will never marry anybody, if I do not marry Roden."
THE END OF THE SECOND VOLUME.
End of Project Gutenberg's A Mere Chance, Vol. 2 of 3, by Ada Cambridge