Part 27 (2/2)
CHAPTER XVIII.
The first break in the unity of the Fullerton family had occurred on the occasion of Hadria's marriage. The short period that elapsed between that memorable New-Year's-Eve and the wedding had been a painful experience for Dunaghee. Hadria's conduct had shaken her brothers' faith in her and in all womankind. Ernest especially had suffered disillusion.
He had supposed her above the ordinary, pettier weaknesses of humanity.
Other fellows' sisters had seemed to him miserable travesties of their s.e.x compared with her. (There was one exception only, to this rule.) But now, what was he to think? She had shattered his faith. If she hadn't been ”so c.o.c.ksure of herself,” he wouldn't have minded so much; but after all she had professed, to go and marry, and marry a starched specimen like that!
Fred was equally emphatic. For a long time he had regarded it all as a joke. He shook his head knowingly, and said that sort of thing wouldn't go down. When he was at length convinced, he danced with rage. He became cynical. He had no patience with girls. They talked for talking's sake.
It meant nothing.
Algitha understood, better than her brothers could understand, how Hadria's emotional nature had been caught in some strange mood, how the eloquent a.s.surances of her lover might have half convinced her.
Algitha's own experience of proposals set her on the track of the mystery.
”It is most misleading,” she pointed out, to her scoffing brothers. ”One would suppose that marrying was the simplest thing in the world--nothing perilous, nothing to object to about it. A man proposes to you as if he were asking you for the sixth waltz, only his manner is perfervid. And my belief is that half the girls who accept don't realize that they are agreeing to anything much more serious.”
”The more fools they!”
”True; but it really is most bewildering. Claims, obligations, all the ugly sides of the affair are hidden away; the man is at his best, full of refinement and courtesy and unselfishness. And if he persuades the girl that he really does care for her, how can she suppose that she cannot trust her future to him--if he loves her? And yet she can't!”
”How can a man suppose that one girl is going to be different from every other girl?” asked Fred.
”Different, you mean, from what he _supposes_ every other girl to be,”
Algitha corrected. ”It's his own look-out if he's such a fool.”
”I believe Hadria married because she was sick of being the family consolation,” said Ernest.
”Well, of course, the hope of escape was very tempting. You boys don't know what she went through. We all regret her marriage to Hubert Temperley--though between ourselves, not more than _he_ regrets it, if I am not much mistaken--but it is very certain that she could not have gone on living at home much longer, as things were.”
Fred said that she ought to have broken out after Algitha's fas.h.i.+on, if it was so bad as all that.
”I think mother would have died if she had,” said the sister.
”Hadria _was_ awkwardly placed,” Fred admitted.
”Do you remember that evening in the garret when we all told her what we thought?” asked Ernest.
n.o.body had forgotten that painful occasion.
”She said then that if the worst came to the worst, she would simply run away. What could prevent her?”
”That wretched sister of his!” cried Algitha. ”If it hadn't been for her, the marriage would never have taken place. She got the ear of mother after the engagement, and I am certain it was through her influence that mother hurried the wedding on so. If only there had been a little more time, it could have been prevented. And Henriette knew that. She is as _knowing_----!”
”I wish we had strangled her.”
”I shall never forget,” Algitha went on, ”that night when Hadria was taken with a fit of terror--it was nothing less--and wrote to break off the engagement, and that woman undertook to deliver the letter and lost it, _on purpose_ I am always convinced, and then the favourable moment was over.”
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