A Reconstructed Marriage

"I will do no such things."

"It would stop people's tongues."

"Their tongues may clash till doomsday, ere I will stop them that gate. Never name the wicked woman to me again. I do not know her any more, and I do not want to know, whether she is living or dead, in plenty or poverty, sick or well, happy or miserable. She is out o' this world, as far as I am concerned. Sure!"

"What did Robert say?"

"Threw the whole blame on mysel' – evil be to him!"

"Mother!"

"Yes, evil be to the son who condemns his mother, whether she be right or wrong."

"He will not get Sir Thomas to invest money in the works now, I fear. That will trouble him."

"Weel! The Campbell furnaces have kept blazing so far, without Wynton siller to help them, and their fires willna go out for the want o' it."

"I wonder how Sir Thomas will take his disappointment."

"It is untelling how any man will take anything. You couldna speculate as to how Robert Campbell would take a plate o' parritch; he might like them, and he might send them to the Back o' Beyond. All men are made that way, and we poor women can only put up wi' their tempers and tantrums. God help us!"

At this moment Jepson entered with a basket filled with moss and purple pansies. A card was attached bearing the following message:

"Sir Thomas Wynton sends sincere sympathy, and kind regards to Mrs. and Miss Campbell. He will not intrude on their grief at present, but will call in a few days."

Isabel laid her face against the flowers, Mrs. Campbell read the card with pleasure, and a slight flush of color came back to her cheeks.

"This bit of card will give me the upper hand of a' the clashing jades, who come here wondering and sighing, and doubting and fearing. I shall shake it in their faces, and bid them tak' notice that Sir Thomas Wynton is still in the family as it were. And I shall make one other observe anent the marriage failure, that Sir Thomas will take as personal, any and all unpleasant remarks concerning the Campbells."

"When Sir Thomas pays his visit – "

"You be to see that Dora is present. The creature has a wonderful way o' saying consoling words. I hae noticed that all men find her pleasant and satisfactory. She has the trick o' speaking just what they want to hear – the jade!"

"Do speak decently of Dora, mother. She is Robert's wife."

"More's the pity. God help the poor man! Little pleasure he has wi' her."

"It is not her fault."

"I see how it is – she will lead you wrong next."

"No one can lead me wrong. I wonder if Sir Thomas went to see Robert to-day."

"I think Robert would go and see him. We may wonder all day, but we will know, when Robert comes home; that is, if his temper will let him talk. Dod! but he is a true Campbell – flesh, blood, and bone."

"When Robert was in love with Dora, love made him a kind, good-tempered man."

"Kind men are not profitable in a house; they give where they ought to grip; and it is a sma' share o' this world you will get wi' good temper. You be to threep, and threaten for what you want, and the fires in the furnaces would soon burn low, if there was a kind, good-tempered man watching o'er them."

"Now you are talking like yourself, mother. You will soon put your trouble under your feet."

"Weel, I am not going to sit down on the ash-heap wi' it, as the parfect man o' Uz did – if there ever was such a man – which I am doubting; all the mair, because nobody I ever heard of could tell me in what country on the face o' the globe a place called Uz might be found. If there isna a place called Uz, it is mair than likely there never was a man called Job."

"The Bible says there was."

"Ay, in a parable. The Bible is aye ready to drop into a parable."

"Mother, if you would try and sleep now."

"I will not. I would get sick if I did. I am on watch at present, for I am not up to mark, and I will not gie sickness the fine opportunity o' sleep. If Robert comes hame reasonable, I'll have my talk out wi' him. I am not going to suffer his contradictions, not if I know it."

Fortunately Robert came home early, and was in a civil and communicative mood. He said "he had been to see Sir Thomas, and had been treated in the most considerate manner."

"What did he say about Christina?" asked Isabel timidly.

"He would hear no wrong of her. He said she had written him a beautiful letter, a most honorable letter, a letter he would prize to his dying hour. He thought she had done right, both for herself and him. He told me she had returned all his gifts, and he had directed the jeweler to hold them for her further orders. He thinks she will be sure to call there, in order to find out if they have been given to him, and he has left a note with the jewels, begging her to keep them as a sign of their friendship, and a reminder of the pleasant hours they have spent together. A most unusual and gentlemanly way of looking at things, I must say."

"Will he take a share in the works now?" asked Mrs. Campbell.

"I do not know. He is going abroad as soon as he has rearranged his affairs. He said he would call on you in a few days."

"He sent us some lovely flowers," said Isabel.

"He is a most wasteful man."

"He sent mother and me pansies in a lovely basket lined with moss; they were to say for him he would 'remember' us. And he sent Dora the same basket, filled with white hyacinths. Oh, how sweet they were!"

"And what did they say?"

"I looked for their meaning, and found it was 'unobtrusive loveliness.' You see Dora rarely came into the parlor, when he called."

"That may be so, but he had no business to notice her absence. 'Unobtrusive' indeed, and 'loveliness.' Some men don't know when they go too far."

"He meant all in kindness," said Mrs. Campbell, "and I hope he will call."

Sir Thomas kept his promise. Three days after Christina had so mercilessly jilted him, he called on her mother and sister. But by this time he had taken a still more exalted view of his false love's conduct. He told Mrs. Campbell, that it was not sympathy, but congratulations, that were due her. Was she not the proud mother of a noble daughter, whom neither rank nor wealth could lure from the paths of truth and honor? Of a daughter who held love as beyond price, and who would not wrong either his or her own heart. He waxed eloquent on this subject, and was tearful over the lost treasure of her noble daughter's affection. And Mrs. Campbell smiled grimly, and wondered "if he really thought she was silly enough to believe he believed in any such balderdash."

Isabel certainly believed in him with all her heart, and was never weary of his chivalrous, exalted platitudes; and like all men in love trouble, Sir Thomas was never weary of talking of his wounded heart, and lost bride. So Isabel quickly became his favorite confidant. She listened patiently and with evident interest; she helped him to praise Christina, and when he got to wiping his eyes, Isabel was ready to weep with him.

In a couple of weeks he began to talk of his intended travel, and on this subject Isabel was sincerely inquisitive and enthusiastic. The strongest desire of her heart was to travel in strange countries, and she asked so many questions about the trip Sir Thomas proposed taking, that he brought his maps and guidebooks, and showed her his route down the Mediterranean to Greece, up the Adriatic to Montenegro and Herzegovina, over the Dalmatian mountains, through Austria and Hungary to Buda-Pesth, northward to Prague, Berlin, and Hamburg, into the Baltic, and so by Zealand and the Skager Rack across the North Sea to England again. Oh, what a heaven it opened up to the reserved, solitary woman!

It was impossible for Isabel to hide her delight, and so when this trip had been thoroughly talked over, he came one wet afternoon with the books and maps explanatory of his last journey, which had been altogether on the American continent. He showed her where he had hunted big game in the forests of the Hudson Bay Company, and he described to her the old cities of French Canada. Many afternoons were spent in talking about New York, Chicago, St. Louis, San Francisco, and the wonders of California, Alaska, and Texas. Finally, he carried her to Brazil and Cuba, to the West Indies and to the beautiful Bermudas.

In these parlor wanderings, she lived a life far, far apart from the wet, dull streets of Glasgow, and the monotonous ennui and strife of Traquair House; besides which advantage, both Sir Thomas and herself lost in such pleasant loiterings the first sore pangs of their bereaved hearts. For obvious reasons, both Robert and Mrs. Campbell tolerated these – to them – tiresome recollections. Robert considered the baronet yet as a possible business contingent; and Mrs. Campbell silenced all doubtful sympathizers with remarks about his friendship, and his constant visits. One Sabbath she managed affairs so cleverly, that he even went to Dr. Robertson's church, sat in their pew, and returned home to dine with them. The next day he started on his two years' travel, promising to write Isabel descriptions of all the wonderfuls he saw.

On the night of the same day, Robert called together the women of his household and in the bluntest words told them the strictest economy was hence-forward to be observed. He said the wastrie of the past three or four months was unbelievable, and it had to be made up by a steady curtailment of all household expenses. Then turning to his mother he asked, "in what direction she thought it best to begin?"

She answered promptly: "You are right, Robert. The expenses of the house have been very extravagant, and retrenchment is both wise and necessary. I think in the first place we ought to reduce the number of servants. One man can be spared from the stable, and the second man in the house is not a necessity. McNab must do with one kitchen girl, instead of two; and your son no longer needs a nurse. A boy of his age ought to wait on himself."

"David has not needed a nurse for a long time."

"Who did you say?"

"David."

"I ordered you not to call the boy by that name, in my presence."

"It is his baptismal name. He has no other name."

"Call him Nebuchadnezzar, or Satan, or any name you like in your own room, but in my presence – "

"His name is always David. I was going to remind you that Ducie has been a general servant in the house for many months. She has assisted your chambermaid, helped McNab in the kitchen, and Jepson about the table. I think she has been the most effective maid in the house."

"She may have been chambermaid, cook, and butler rolled into one, but she is not wanted here, and the sooner she finds her way back to Kendal the better every one will like it."

Then Theodora quietly gathered the silks with which she was working, and without noise or hurry left the room. She heard her mother-in-law's scornful laugh, and her husband's angry voice as she closed the door, but she allowed neither to detain her in an atmosphere so highly charged with hatred and opposition.

In about an hour Robert strode into her parlor, and with a lowering face and peevish voice asked: "Why did you go away?"

"There was no further reason for my presence, and more than one reason why it was better for me to go away."

"It is evident you feel no interest in the curtailment of my expenses."

"I am sure that curtailment is not necessary. You gave your shareholders a dividend of ten-per-cent a short time ago, and you are always complaining that the business is too large for you to carry alone. And I do not see that there is the smallest curtailment in your personal expenses."

"Pray what have you to do with my personal expenses?"

"I speak of them because I personally have no expenses from which to draw conclusions."

"I suppose you have as many personal expenses as any other woman. My mother thinks you have more."

"Your mother grudges me the little food I eat. How much money have you given me during the six years I have been your wife?"

"I have paid all your bills."

"What kind of bills?"

"All kinds."

"No. You have paid for a physician when I was sick – nothing else. I have bought little new clothing, and what I have bought I paid for."

"You did not require new clothing."

"When it was to renew and alter, I paid all expenses with my own money."

"You! You have no money! All the money you have is mine. I have allowed you to use it for your personal expenses. Many husbands would not have done so."

"It was my money, Robert. I made it before I even knew your name."

"It was all my money the moment you were my wife."

"It is all gone now. I had to borrow a sovereign from Ducie."

"Good gracious! What an absurdity! What did you want with a sovereign? You have credit in half-a-dozen shops."

"I wanted money, not credit. I cannot buy stamps, stationery, music, medicine, and many other things with credit. And the church wants cash always. I cannot pay church dues with credit. When I borrowed a sovereign from Ducie I wanted a prescription of Dr. Fleming's made up."

"You have credit at Starkie's."

"Starkie does not make up prescriptions. I had to send to Fraser's and I have no credit at Fraser's."

Then he threw a sovereign on the table and said: "Pay Ducie at once. I do not want her chattering all over Glasgow and Kendal."

"So you have decided to send Ducie away?"

"Yes."

"She is all that is left me of my old happy life. Oh, Robert, Robert! have some pity on me."

"My mother and sister are giving up three servants. Surely you can relinquish one."

"It is Scot in the stable, who gives up his helper. It is Jepson in the house, it is McNab in the kitchen. None of these three servants affect your mother's and sister's comfort in the least. Ducie is everything to David and myself. She keeps our rooms clean and comfortable, brings my breakfast, waits on me when I am sick, walks out with David when I am not able to do so, and in many other ways makes things more bearable. I beg you, Robert, not to send her away."

"Then the other three servants must also remain."

"You are not poor, you only feel poor because you spent so much on Christina."

"Who was a wicked failure, and mother says you were the prompter of her sinful conduct."

"Me! I had no more to do with her final choice than your mother had. I did not even know the name of the man she married."

"But you talked sentiment, poetry, honor, and such stuff to her."

"Never. She would not have understood me if I had."

"What do you mean?"

"What I say, Christina turned sentiment, poetry, honor, and such stuff, into laughter. She saw only one side of any person or thing – the comic side. If she could mimic you, she partly understood you; if she could not mimic you, then you were uninteresting and unknowable. But Christina was as kind to me as she could be to any one. She is gone, and I have no friend left here."

"Am I not your friend?"

"You are my husband. I have had many friends, none of them were the least like you."

"A poor man between his mother and his wife is in a desperate fix."

"He is, because he has no business to be in such a position. It is an unnatural one – a forbidden one. Until a man is willing to give up his mother, he has no right to take a wife. Under all conditions it must be one or the other; the two existing happily together are so rare, that they are merely exceptions that prove the rule."

"It would have been very hard on my mother, had I given her up for a wife."

"Yet your mother took her husband away from his mother, and so backward goes it, to the Eden days of every race. And you also made the same mistake that Rebekah told Isaac she was weary of her life for – you married a stranger, and because of this, she is continually asking, as Rebekah did, What good is my life to me with this daughter of Heth under my roof? And also she has made our lives of no good to us!"

"Is it not my duty to love and honor my mother? Is it not right?"

"It is your duty, and your right also, to love and honor the wife whom you have persuaded to leave her father and mother, her home and friends."

"Then the right of the mother, and the right of the wife, are both positive?"

"So positive that both cannot be served in the same place, and at the same time; for the one right will be broken to pieces against the other right, since there is no community of feeling between the family claim of the mother and the moral and natural claim of the wife."

"Then what is a man to do?"

"'A man shall leave father and mother, and cleave unto his wife.' That is the imperative, and ultimate decision of the God and Father of us all. And if it were not the nearly universal rule, what miserable, loveless children would be born, and how the jealous, quarrelling families of the earth would have become hateful in God's sight. We have only to consider our own case. Until your mother came between us, we loved each other truly, and were very happy."

"A man with a big business, Dora, has something else to think of than love."

"In his hours of business, yes; but in his hours of relaxation, his love ought to rest and refresh him." There was a movement in the next room, and Theodora went there with light, swift steps. Robert was walking moodily up and down, and through the open door he saw her kneeling by a large chair, and David's arms were round her neck, and she was telling him he must now go to bed. "Were you tired, that you fell asleep here?" she asked, and he answered: "I was waiting for you, mother, to hear my prayer, and kiss me good-night; and the sleep came to me."

Then she sat down, and David knelt at her knees, and said the Lord's prayer, adding to it a petition for blessing on his father, his grandmother Campbell, his aunts Isabel and Christina, his grandfather and grandmother Newton, and his dear mother, with a final petition that God would love David and make him a good boy. It was a scene so sweet and natural that Robert stood still in respect to the simple rite, vaguely wondering in what forgotten life he had spoken words like them.

Then Theodora called Ducie, and gave the child into her care, but as he was leaving the room he saw his father, and running to him, he said: "Father, kiss David too." Robert's heart stirred to the eager request, and he lifted the little lad in his arms, and actually did kiss him. In that moment the pretty face with its glances so free, so bright, so seeking, without guile or misgiving, impressed itself on Robert's memory forever. Even after the child had gone away, he felt as if he still held him, and the consciousness of the soft, rosy cheek against his own was so vivid that he put his hand up and stroked his cheek until the sensation left him.

He was really in a great strait of feeling, and, if he could not do right of himself, was in a strait, out of which there was no other decent way. He looked longingly at Theodora, who had resumed her work, and her pale, passionless face touched him by its complete contrast to the face he had just left – the hard, gossipy, pitiless, scornful face of his mother. He could not forget his son's prayer. He knew it well, he himself was never one to prompt, nor to correct, so it was certain that Theodora had taught the boy to pray for those who constantly spoke evil of her. He resolved to tell his mother of this incident, and again he tried to read the feeling on his wife's face. It was not depression, it was not sorrow, it was far from anger, there was nothing of indifference in it, and nothing restless or uncertain. He did not understand it. How could such a man as Robert understand a life of pure piety and intelligence, working its way upward through love and pain.

He sat down by her and touched her hand, but said only one word: "Theodora!" She lifted her sad, lovely eyes to his. "Theodora!" he said again, and she laid her hand in his, and whispered "Robert!" Then his kiss brought back the color to her cheeks and the light to her eyes, and when he vowed that he loved her and David more dearly than any other mortals, she believed him; and found sweet words to excuse all his faults, and to tell him he was "loved with all her heart."

Was she a foolish woman to forgive so easily, and so much? It was because she loved so much that she could forgive so much, and of such loving, foolish hearts is the Kingdom of Heaven. For no love is so swift and welcome as returning love. Even the angels desire to witness the reunion of hearts that have been kept apart by fault, or fate, and as for Theodora, she had the courage to be happy in this promise of better days, knowing that she came not to this house by accident, but that it was the very place God had chosen for her. Besides which, the heart has its arguments as well as the head, and at this hour she was judging Robert by her love, and not by her understanding.

CHAPTER IX

THE LAST STRAW

For a few days Theodora clung tenaciously to her hope, but it had only told her a flattering tale. Robert had gradually fallen below the plane – moral and intellectual – on which his wife lived; and it was only by a painful endeavor, that he returned to the Robert of six years previously. His wife's conversation, though bright and clever, was not as pleasant to him as his mother's biting gossip about the house and the callers; and he could assume a slippered, careless toilet in her presence, that made him uncomfortable when at the side of the always prettily gowned Theodora. For when such a circumstance happened, he involuntarily felt compelled to apologize, and he did not think apologies belonged to his position as master of the house. He had lost his taste for music, unless there was some stranger present whom he desired to make envious or astonished; in fact he had descended to that commonplace stage of love, which values a wife or a mistress only according to the value set upon her by outsiders – by their envy and jealousy of himself, as the clever winner of such an extraordinary artist, or beauty. Consequently, in a time of economy, forbidding the entertainment of strangers, Theodora's hours of supremacy were likely to be few and far between.

But this fact did not trouble Robert. He came home from the works tired of the business world, and the household chatter of his mother was a relief that cost him no surrender of any kind. Yet had Theodora attempted the same rôle, he would have seen and felt at once its malice and injustice, and despised her for destroying his ideals and illusions. Thus, even her excellencies were against her. Again, Mrs. Campbell disguised much of the real character of her abuse, in the picturesqueness of the Scotch patois; nothing she said in this form sounded as wicked and cruel as it would have done in plain English. But this disguise would have been a ridiculous effort in Theodora, and could only have subjected her to scorn and laughter; while it was native to her enemy, and a vivid and graphic vehicle both for her malice and her mockery.

Thus, when Robert was rising to go to his own parlor, she would say: "Smoke another cigar, Robert, or light your pipe, boy. I dinna dislike a pipe, I may say freely, I rather fancy it. It doesna remind me o' the stable, and I have no nerves to be shocked by its vulgarity. God be thankit, I was born before nerves were in fashion! And He knows that one nervous woman in a house is mair than enou'. I am sorry for ye, my lad!"

"It is not Dora's nerves, mother; it is her refined taste. She thinks a pipe low, common, plebeian, you know, and for the same reason she hates me to wear a cap – she thinks it makes me look like a workingman. Dora is quite aristocratic, you know," and he mimicked the English accent and idioms, and saw nothing repellent in an old woman giggling at him.

"It is nerves, my lad," she answered, "pure nerves, and nerves are a' imagination. Whenever did I, or your sisters, or any o' our flesh and blood have an attack o' the nerves? Whenever did a decent pipe o' tobacco, or the smell o' a good salt herring mak' any o' us sick at the stomach? Was there ever a Campbell made vulgar, or low, by a cap on his head? 'Deed they are pretty men always, but prettiest of a' when they are wearing the Glengary wi' a sprig o' myrtle in the front o' it. Dod! it makes me scunner at some folks' aristocracy. I trow, I am as weel born as any Methodist preacher's daughter, and I have kin behind me and around me to show it; but you can smoke a pipe, or cap your head, or slipper your feet, and my fine feelings willna suffer for a moment."