Part 18 (2/2)
Well, thank goodness, modern life is not as the old! There are ways out.
Midnight had just struck. The night was gusty, the north-west wind made fierce attacks on the square, comfortable house. Daphne rose slowly; she moved noiselessly across the floor; she stood with her arms behind her looking down at the sleeping Roger. Then a thought struck her; she reached out a hand to the new number of an American Quarterly which lay, with the paper knife in it, on a table beside the bed. She had ordered it in a mood of jealous annoyance because of a few pages of art criticism in it by Mrs. Fairmile, which impertinently professed to know more about the Vitali Signorelli than its present owner did; but she remembered also an article on ”The Future for Women,” which had seemed to her a fine, progressive thing. She turned the pages noiselessly--her eyes now on the unconscious Roger--now on the book.
”All forms of contract--in business, education, religion, or law--suffer from the weakness and blindness of the persons making them--the marriage contract as much as any other. The dictates of humanity and common-sense alike show that the latter and most important contract should no more be perpetual than any of the others.”
Again:--
”Any covenant between human beings that fails to produce or promote human happiness, cannot in the nature of things be of any force or authority; it is not only a right but a duty to abolish it.”
And a little further:--
”Womanhood is the great fact of woman's life. Wifehood and motherhood are but incidental relations.”
Daphne put down the book. In the dim light, the tension of her slender figure, her frowning brow, her locked arms and hands, made of her a threatening Fate hovering darkly above the man in his deep, defenceless sleep.
She was miserable, consumed with jealous anger. But the temptation of a new licence--a lawless law--was in her veins. Have women been trampled on, insulted, enslaved?--in America, at least, they may now stand on their feet. No need to cringe any more to the insolence and cruelty of men. A woman's life may be soiled and broken; but in the great human workshop of America it can be repaired. She remembered that in the majority of American divorces it is the woman who applies for relief.
And why not? The average woman, when she marries, knows much less of life and the world than the average man. She is more likely--poor soul!--to make mistakes.
She drew closer to the bed. All round her glimmered the furniture and appointments of a costly room--the silver and tortoise-sh.e.l.l on the dressing-table, the long mirrors lining the farther wall, the silk hangings of the bed. Luxury, as light and soft as skill and money could make it--the room breathed it; and in the midst stood the young creature who had designed it, the will within her hardening rapidly to an irrevocable purpose.
Yes, she had made a mistake! But she would retrieve it. She would free herself. She would no longer put up with Roger, with his neglect and deceit--his disagreeable and ungrateful mother--his immoral friends--and this dull, soul-deadening English life.
Roger moved and murmured. She retreated a little, still looking at him fixedly. Was it the child's name? Perhaps. He dreamed interminably, and very often of Beatty. But it did not move her. Beatty, of course, was _her_ child. Every child belongs to the mother in a far profounder sense than to the father. And he, too, would be free; he would naturally marry again.
Case after case of divorce ran through her mind as she stood there; the persons and circ.u.mstances all well known to her. Other stories also, not personally within her ken; the famous scandals of the time, much discussed throughout American society. Her wits cleared and steeled. She began to see the course that she must follow.
It would all depend upon the lawyers; and a good deal--she faced it--upon money. All sorts of technical phrases, vaguely remembered, ran through her mind. She would have to recover her American citizens.h.i.+p--she and the child. A domicile of six months in South Dakota, or in Wyoming--a year in Philadelphia--she began to recall information derived of old from Madeleine Verrier, who had, of course, been forced to consider all these things, and to weigh alternatives.
Advice, of course, must be asked of her at once--and sympathy.
Suddenly, on her brooding, there broke a wave of excitement. Life, instead of being closed, as in a sense it is, for every married woman, was in a moment open and vague again; the doors flung wide to flaming heavens. An intoxication of recovered youth and freedom possessed her.
The sleeping Roger represented things intolerable and outworn. Why should a woman of her gifts, of her opportunities, be chained for life to this commonplace man, now that her pa.s.sion was over?--now that she knew him for what he was, weak, feather-brained, and vicious? She looked at him with a kind of exaltation, spurning him from her path.
But the immediate future!--the practical steps! What kind of evidence would she want?--what kind of witnesses? Something more, no doubt, of both than she had already. She must wait--temporize--do nothing rashly.
If it was for Roger's good as well as her own that they should be free of each other--and she was fast persuading herself of this--she must, for both their sakes, manage the hateful operation without bungling.
What was the alternative? She seemed to ask it of Roger, as she stood looking down upon him. Patience?--with a man who could never sympathize with her intellectually or artistically?--the relations of married life with a husband who made a.s.signations with an old love, under the eyes of the whole neighbourhood?--the narrowing, cramping influences of English provincial society? No! she was born for other and greater things, and she would grasp them. ”My first duty is to myself--to my own development. We have absolutely no _right_ to sacrifice ourselves--as women have been taught to do for thousands of years.”
Bewildered by the rhetoric of her own thoughts, Daphne returned to her seat by the fire, and sat there wildly dreaming, till once more recalled to practical possibilities by the pa.s.sage of the hours on the clock above her.
Miss Farmer? Everything, it seemed, depended on her. But Daphne had no doubts of her. Poor girl!--with her poverty-stricken home, her drunken father lately dismissed from his post, and her evident inclination towards this clever young fellow now employed in the house--Daphne rejoiced to think of what money could do, in this case at least; of the reward that should be waiting for the girl's devotion when the moment came; of the gifts already made, and the grat.i.tude already evoked. No; she could be trusted; she had every reason to be true.
Some fitful sleep came to her at last in the morning hours. But when Roger awoke, she was half-way through her dressing; and when he first saw her, he noticed nothing except that she was paler than usual, and confessed to a broken night.
<script>