Chapter VIII.
Cassandra was right. The marriage went wrong.
It was the old, old, young, young story.
But which of those old young stories?
Ah, yes! there are so many of them. And yet all human tragedies belong to one Trilogy. There are but three kinds of wrongs in our lives.
The wrongs a man does to his own soul or body, or suffers in either.
The wrongs of man against his brother man.
The wrongs between man and woman.
This is one of the old young stories of the wrong between man and woman.
It might be made a very long and very painful story. Chapter after chapter might describe the gradual vanishing of illusions, the slight divergence, the widening of estrangement, the death of trust, the deceit on one side, the wearing misery of doubt on the other, the dragging march step by step, day by day, to the final wrong, the halt on the hither edge, and the careless, the desperate, the irremediable plunge at last.
But the statement of the result is sad enough. Let all these dreary chapters be condensed into one!
A fatality preceded the wrong. It was this: —
The woman was coarse, and the man was fine. No gentle influences had received her in the facile days of childhood, and trained her nobler nature to the masterhood. Her eyes had been familiar with vulgar people and their vulgar ways. Her ears had heard their coarse talk. Her mind had narrowed to their ignoble methods of judgment. Her heart’s desire had been taught to be for the cheap and mundane possessions, money, show, titles, place, notoriety; and not for the priceless and immortal wages of an earnest life, Peace, Joy, and Love. She could not comprehend a great soul unless its body were dubbed My Lord or Sir Edwin, and wore some gaud of a star at the breast, or a ribbon at the knee.
Poor child! She was young enough to be docile. But after the blind happiness of that honeymoon at Brothertoft Manor, the old feeling of her first interview with her lover revived and exasperated.
“I believe he wants to make me feel ignorant and vulgar,” she thought, “so that he can govern me. But he shall not. I intend to be mistress. I’m sick of his meek suggestions. No sir; my way is my way, and I mean to have it.”
And so, rebuked by contact with a delicacy she could not understand, she resolutely coarsened herself, sometimes for spite, sometimes for sorry consolation. Her unsensitive nature trampled roughly on his scruples.
“My dear Jane,” he said to her at Brothertoft, “could you not instruct Mr. Skaats to be a little more indulgent with the Manor tenants?”
“Mr. Skaats’s business is to get the rents, for us to spend.”
“But these people have been used to gentler treatment.”
“Yes; they have been allowed to delay and shirk as they pleased. My property must not be wasted as yours was.”
“It is a hard summer for them, with this drought.”
“It is an expensive summer for us, with these repairs.”
Again, when they were re-established in New York, other causes of dispute came up.
“I wish, my dear Jane,” he said, “that you would be a little more civil with my patriot friends from Boston.”
“I don’t like people who talk through their noses.”
“Forgive the twang for the sake of the good sense.”
“Good sense! It seems to me tiresome grumbling. I hate the word ‘Grievance.’ I despise the name Patriot.”
“Remember, my dear child, that I think with these gentlemen!”
“Yes; and you are injuring your reputation and your chances by it. A Brothertoft should be conservative, and stand by his order.”
“I try to be conservative of Right. I stand by the Order of Worth, Courage, and Loyalty to Freedom.”
“O, there you go again into your foggy metaphysics!”
Again, he came one day, and said, with much concern: “My dear, I was distressed to know from Skaats that your father’s estate owned a third of the ‘Red Rover.’”
“Why?” she asked, with no concern.
“I was sure you did not know, or you would be as much shocked as I am. She is in the slave-trade!”
“Well. And I have often heard my father call her a ‘tidy bit of property,’ and say she had paid for herself a dozen times.”
He could not make her comprehend his hatred of this vile business, and his contempt, as a gentleman, for all the base subterfuges by which base people tried to defend it.
The Red Rover fortunately did not remain a subject of discussion. On that very trip the Negroes rose and broiled the captain and crew, — and served them right. Then, being used only to the navigation of dug-outs, they omitted to pump the vessel, whereupon she sunk, and the sharks had a festival.