THE IDEAL AND THE REAL.
If it were possible to linger over the story of Margaret Hungerford's
life--if other and later interests did not peremptorily claim
attention--how much might be said concerning it? On the surface, it
had many features in common with other lives; and the destruction of
a fancy, the awaking to a truth, terrible and not to be eluded, is
the least rare of mental processes. But the individual history
of every mind, of every heart, has features unlike those of all
others--features worthy, in even the humblest and simplest lives, of
close scanning and of faithful reproduction. Margaret Hungerford was
not an ordinary person; she had strongly-pronounced intellectual and
moral characteristics, and her capacity, whether for good or evil time
and her destiny alone could tell, was great.
The very intensity of her nature, which had made it easy for her to be
deceived, easy for her to build a fair fabric of hope and love on no
sounder foundation than her fancy, made it inevitable that the truth
should come with terrible force to her, and be understood in its
fullest extent and in its darkest meaning--that most full of terror
and despair.
The external circumstances of her life subsequent to her marriage did
not affect Margaret Hungerford so much as might have been anticipated,
in consideration of her delicate nurture, her previous life of
seclusion, and her habitual refinement. She was destined to encounter
many vicissitudes, to endure poverty, hardship, uncertainty, solitude
of the absolute kind, and of that kind which is still more
unbearable--enforced companionship with the mean and base, not in
position merely, but in soul.
She had to endure many actual privations--to do many things, to
witness many scenes which, if they had been unfolded to her in the
home of her girlhood, uncongenial as it had been, as probabilities
lurking in the plan of the fixture, she would have merely regarded
with unalarmed incredulity, would have put aside as things which never
could have any existence.
But these things, when they came, she bore well--bore them with
strength and patience, with quiet resolution and almost indifference,
which, had there been any one to contemplate the girl's life, and
study her character at that time, would have revealed the truth that
worse things than privation and hardship had come to her, and had
rendered them indifferent to her.
Worse things had come. Knowledge and experience, which had outraged
her pride and tortured her love, crushed her faith, scattered her
hopes, and left her life a desert waste, whence the flowers of youth
and trust had been uprooted, and which lay bare to be trampled under
foot of invading foes.
Margaret's delusion had lasted so short a time after her marriage that
the first feeling her discovery of the utter worthlessness of the man
into whose hands she had committed her fate produced in her mind was
dread and distrust of herself.
Was this fading away of love, this dying out of all respect, of all
enthusiasm, this dreary hopelessness and fast coming disbelief in
good, was all this inconstancy on her part? Was she false to her own
feelings, or had she mistaken them? Was she light and fickle, as men
were said to be?
But this dread soon subsided: it could not long disturb Margaret's
clear good sense. The fault was not hers; she was not inconstant,
though she no longer loved Godfrey Hungerford. The truth was, she had
never known him; there was no such person as her fancy had created and
called by his name.
She had believed herself to be doing a fine heroic thing when she
married a disgraced man, a man unjustly judged of his fellows, one
against whom the world had set itself--why, she did not quite know,
but probably from envy--and who therefore needed her love and fidelity
more than a prosperous man could need them. It was a foolish, girlish,
not unnatural delusive notion of grandeur and self-sacrifice, and,
added to the fascination exerted over her by Godfrey Hungerford's good
looks and artistic love-making, it had hurried Margaret to her doom.
The girl married, as she believed, a hero, with a few follies perhaps,
all to be forsworn and forsaken when she should be his, to guide and
inspire every moment of his life, and whose unjust penalties her love
was to render harmless. What did she not believe him to be! Brave,
true, generous, devoted, clever, energetic, unworldly, poetical,
high-minded, and pure--the ideal man who was to disprove those horrid
sayings of disappointed persons, that the lover and the husband are
very different beings, and that "man's love is of man's life a thing
apart."
_They_ would prove it to be their "whole existence." Could any
sacrifice be too great to make for such a prize as this? No. The
sacrifice was made by him. Who would not have loved and married
Godfrey Hungerford? She did not believe that any one could be so bad
as to believe the accusation brought against him by a low mean clique,
a set of men who could not bear to know that he was cleverer at
card-playing than they were--just as he was cleverer at anything
else--and who did not know how to lose their money like gentlemen. Of
course, as he never could be secured against meeting persons of the
sort, it was much better that Godfrey should make up his mind, as he
had done, never to touch a card after their marriage.
And then how great was his love for her! How delightful was the scheme
of the future, according to his casting of it! So Margaret dreamed her
dream, and when the waking came she blamed herself that she could
dream it no longer, and could not be lulled to sleep again.
Godfrey Hungerford has no place in this story, and there is no need to
enter into details of the life he led, and condemned his wife to. He
proved the exact reverse of all she had believed him. Base, mean,
cowardly, in the sense of the cowardice which makes a man
systematically cruel to every creature, human and brute, within his
power, though ready to face danger for bravado's, and exertion for
boasting's sake, or either for that of money--a liar, a gambler, and a
profligate.
He laughed at her credulity when she quoted his promises to her, and
ridiculed her amazement and disgust as ignorance of life, girlish
folly, and squeamishness. In a fitful, "worthless" sort of way, he
liked and admired her to the end; but the truthfulness that was in her
prevented Margaret from taking advantage of this contemptible remnant
of feeling to obtain easier terms of life. She had ceased to love him,
and she never disguised the fact--she let him see it; when he
questioned her, in a moment of maudlin sentiment, she told him so
quite plainly; and her tyrant made the truthfulness which could not
stoop to simulation a fresh cause of complaint against her.
What Margaret suffered, no words, not even her own, could tell; but
the material troubles, the grinding anxieties of her life, deadened
her sense of grief after a time. They were always poor. Money melted
in the hands of her worthless, selfish husband. Sometimes he made a
little, in some of the numerous ways in which money was to be made in
colonial life, sometimes he was quite unemployed. He was always
dissolute and a spendthrift.
It was hard training for Margaret, severe teaching, and not more full
of actual pain, privation, and toil than of bitter humiliation. They
moved about from place to place, for at each Godfrey Hungerford became
known and shunned.
Villany and vice were loud and rampant indeed in the New World then,
as now; but he was not so clever as the superior villains, and not so
low, not so irretrievably ruffianly, as the inferior ruffians, and it
fell out, somehow, that he did not find any permanent place, or take
any specific rank, among them. Of necessity, suffering, both moral and
material, was his wife's lot, and it was wonderful that such suffering
did not degrade, that it only hardened her. It certainly did harden
her, making her cold, indifferent, and difficult to be touched by, or
convinced of, good, or truth, or honesty.
Of necessity, also, her life had been devoid of companionship. Too
proud to tell her sorrows, and unable to endure the associations into
which her husband's evil life would have led her had she been driven
by loneliness to relax in her resolute isolation, she had neither
sympathy nor pity in her wretchedness. But at length, and when things
were going very hard and ill with her, she found a friend.
Time, suffering, and disenchantment had taught Margaret Hungerford
many hard and heavy, but salutary, lessons, before the days came which
brought her fate this alleviation; and she did not regret it, because
it had been procured for her by the care and solicitude of James
Dugdale.
Her love had died--more than died; for there is reverence and pious
grief, with sweetness in its agony, and cherished recollections, to
modify death and make it merciful--it had perished. So had her dislike
of James Dugdale. He had been right, and she had been wrong; and
though he could never be her friend, because she never could admit to
him the one fact or the other, she thought gently and regretfully of
him, when she thought of her old home and of the past at all, which
was not often, for the present absorbed her usually in its misery and
its toil.
When, in the course of their wanderings, the Hungerfords went to the
then infant town, now the prosperous city, of Melbourne, Margaret sent
home one of her infrequent letters to her father. Thus James Dugdale
learned that the woman whose fate he had so unerringly foreseen--the
woman he loved with calm, disinterested, clear-sighted affection--was
at length within reach of his influence, of his indirect help.
An old friend, schoolfellow, and college chum--one Hayes Meredith, a
younger man than James Dugdale by a few years--had been among the
first of those tempted from the life of monotonous toil in England by
the vast and exciting prospects which the young colony offered to
energy, industry, ability, and courage.
Hayes Meredith possessed all these, and some capital too. He had
settled at Port Phillip, and was a thriving and respected member of
the motley community when Godfrey and Margaret Hungerford arrived to
swell the tide of adventure and misery. To him James Dugdale wrote, on
behalf of the woman whose need he divined, whose unhappiness he felt,
with the instinct of sympathy.
Hayes Meredith responded nobly to his old friend's appeal. He
befriended Margaret steadily, with and without her husband's
knowledge; he won her affection, conquered her reserve, softened her
pride, and, though her fate was beyond amelioration by human aid, he
succeeded in making her actual, everyday life more endurable.
When Margaret was sought out by Hayes Meredith, release was drawing
near, release from the tremendous evil of her marriage. Godfrey
Hungerford, by this time utterly incapable of any steady pursuit, and
seized with one of the reckless, restless fits which were becoming
more and more frequent with him, joined a party of explorers bound for
the unknown interior of the continent, and, regardless of Margaret's
fears and necessities, left her alone in the town.
For months she heard nothing of him, or the fate of the expedition;
months during which she was kept from destitution only by Hayes
Meredith's generous and unfailing aid.
At length news came; a few stragglers from the party of explorers
returned. Godfrey Hungerford was not among them; and the remnant
related that he had been murdered, with two others, by a tribe of
aborigines.
Hayes Meredith told Margaret the truth; he sustained and comforted her
in the early days of her horror and grief; he counselled her return to
England, and provided money for her voyage. He secured her cabin and
the services of Rose Moore. It was he who bade her farewell upon the
deck of the Boomerang--he of whom she thought as her only friend.
Margaret had little power of feeling, love, or gratitude in her
now, as she believed, and that little was exerted for the alert,
kindly-voiced, gray-haired, keen-eyed man who left her with a heavy
heart, and said to himself, as the boat shot away from the ship's
side, "Poor girl! she has had hard lines of it hitherto. I wonder what
is before her in England!"