The Betrayal of John Fordham

"That's all right," said Barbara, gaily. "For goodness sake, don't let us have any quarreling on our house-warming day."

I felt as if I were in a hornets' nest.

A few minutes afterwards my stepmother and Louis were announced, and Barbara ran forward to welcome them.

"I am so glad you have come! There's no need of an introduction, is there? I am John's wife, Barbara. You must call me Barbara – yes, I insist upon it. This is my brother Maxwell. Maxwell, Mrs. Fordham – how funny there should be two of us! And this is your son, Mr. Louis Fordham, John's brother. I hate formality. You mustn't be shocked at my saying that I am a bit of a Bohemian. So is Maxwell, but he goes farther than I do, of course, as he is a man. I hope you are one, too, Mr. Louis?"

"I will become one," said Louis, gallantly, "under your instructions. How do you do, John? What a pretty house you've got!"

I shook hands with him and with my stepmother. Louis was cordial enough in his manner; my stepmother was frigid. Years had passed since I had seen her or Louis, but she had not forgotten, and never would forget. Only with her death would the old animosity die out. She was no older in appearance; Louis had grown into a well-built man, and she doted on him, as she had done since his birth. A good-looking man, too, but for the scar on his forehead. As I raised my eyes to it – with no evil meaning, I am sure – the blood rushed into it, and it became scarlet, while a dark look flashed into my stepmother's eyes.

"He will bear it with him to his grave," said my stepmother.

"What a pity!" said Barbara, who had observed this bye-play. "How did it happen?"

"John gave it him," said my stepmother, coldly.

"But they were boys then," said Barbara, defending me maliciously, "and boys are so cruel."

"The boy is father to the man," remarked my stepmother, with venomous emphasis.

"Now, John," said Barbara, "what have you to say to it?"

My impulse was to reply that the story was false, but I checked myself in time, and simply said:

"Nothing. Either my memory or yours" – to my stepmother – "is at fault."

"You have a shocking memory, John," said Barbara. "Not your fault, my dear – you were born with it. We all forgive you, don't we, Mrs. Fordham – and you, too, Louis? It would be dreadful if we nursed every little grievance, and saved disagreeable things for future use against one another. Let us talk of something pleasant."

"You have the temper of an angel, Barbara," ejaculated Maxwell.

"It runs in our family," returned Barbara, casting up her eyes, "and we won't boast of it. Whether we are married or single, we don't lie on beds of roses."

By the time the dinner came to an end the inuendoes, the sly thrusts, the holding up of my wife as a martyr to my disparagement had become unbearable. The ladies retired to the drawing-room, and I refused to stop and drink with Louis and Maxwell. Strolling from the house I lit a cigar, and upon my return the guests were preparing to take their departure.

"Such a pleasant evening," said my stepmother. "I hope you will turn over a new leaf, John, and be kind to your wife. You have a treasure in her. You must come and dine with us, soon."

I stood at the street door while she and the men entered a cab together. Barbara, standing by my side, waved her handkerchief to them. The moment the cab was out of sight she turned upon me like a fury.

"You beast!" she cried. "Is that the way you treat my friends?"

And she ran into the house.

Sadly enough I followed her, in doubt of the best course to pursue. She solved the doubt by saying:

"I am going to my room. You will find the spare room ready for you."

"This is a bad commencement, Barbara," I ventured to say.

"Thank yourself for it," she retorted, and disappeared.

I possessed a small library of books, which I had sent to the house, and I endeavored to while away the time by reading. But I could not fix my attention; I turned over page after page without any comprehension of the printed words. And so I passed the time in a dull, lethargic state until eleven o'clock struck. I left my book and set myself to the old task of reviewing the incidents of the day, with the same old result. If the fault were mine there must be some defect in my understanding of passing events in which I was concerned. My melancholy musings were interrupted by the sound of Barbara's voice in the room above. She was laughing and singing – a babble of unconnected lines, the laughter of a woman under the influence of drink. The door of her room was opened and shut, and I heard Annette descend the stairs. I intercepted her.

"What is the matter with your mistress?"

"Madame is unwell."

"What is your errand now?"

"Madame has left her medicine in the dining-room; I am fetching it for her."

I left her to fulfill her errand, but kept watch on the landing above. Again I intercepted her. In her hands, as I suspected, was the decanter of brandy.

"Is that the medicine you were sent for?"

"I could not find it, monsieur. I thought this would do her good; she is depressed, and needs something strengthening."

There was no sign of confusion on the woman's face; she was calm and composed.

"Go down again and search for the medicine you were sent for," I said, taking the decanter from her.

"But, monsieur, I have already sought for it, and cannot find it."

"To search again, then, would be useless?"

"Quite useless, monsieur."

"You can go to bed, Annette. I will attend to your mistress."

"It is impossible, monsieur. Madame requires me. Madame engaged me; I am her servant."

"You are my servant also."

"Oh, no, monsieur. It is madame who orders me."

"I am master here. Do as I bid you. Go to bed."

She did not move.

While this colloquy was proceeding there was silence in Barbara's room. Suddenly the door was dashed open, and my wife appeared, her dress disordered, her eyes inflamed, her face distorted by the hysterical passion of the habitual drunkard. As in a flash, I saw the inroads the bestial vice was making upon her beauty.

"Beast, beast, beast!" she shrieked, throwing herself upon me as I recoiled from the horrible sight. By engaging in a disgraceful struggle I might have retained the decanter of brandy, but I was not equal to it. She wrested it from me, and clutching Annette's arm, she dragged her into the room, the lock of which I heard turned a moment afterwards. Then came to my ears her mad laughter at the triumph she had achieved.

CHAPTER XIII

If I have dwelt at greater length than I intended upon the incidents which made their fatal mark upon the early months of my married life, it is because I wish Barbara's character to be clearly understood, and because they supply a pregnant index to what followed. The first night I spent in our new home was a prelude to innumerable nights of the same nature. Safe from observation and free to indulge in her besotted habits, with a willing tool at her beck and call in the person of Annette, with a helpless protector chained to her by bonds which he could not break, she found herself absolute mistress of a drunkard's hellish heaven. She reveled in it, and gave her passions free play. Day after day, night after night, I had by my side a creature who had reached the lowest depths of bestial degradation, and whose one aim in life seemed to be to reach a lower still. She was a large-framed woman with a magnificent constitution, or she would soon have succumbed and become a driveling idiot. Throughout all, singular to say, she preserved her cunning, and the expedients by which she hedged herself in and kept her besetting vice from the knowledge of others except myself and Annette, were nothing short of marvelous in their ingenuity. The room she called her prayer room was her sanctuary, and it was there, attended by Annette, that she freely indulged. She acquired, indeed, a reputation for sanctity, and even our servants were deceived by her clever devices. Annette became housekeeper and the nominal mistress of the establishment, and from her they received their orders. They saw their real mistress only when she was sober, and then she spoke kindly and was liberal to them. When she secluded herself they were given to understand that she was ill or at her devotions. She was supposed to suffer from a mysterious disorder, and her driveling screams in the middle of the nights were attributed to pain. I subsequently learned that they were often attributed to my beating her and knocking her about.

I recall the day when she sat at the table with a livid bruise on her cheek, caused by her falling against the sharp corner of a piece of furniture. The parlor-maid assisted Annette to apply hot fomentations to the bruise, and when, later in the day, I noticed the frightened, horrified looks the girl cast at me, I knew that she had been told the lie that I had struck my wife. Against these calumnies I had no defense. In the kitchen I was regarded as a monster of cruelty, and the servants shrank aside as I passed them. Before the domestics Barbara invariably addressed me in frightened, humble tones. She kept her revilings for my private ear, the only witness of the scenes between us being Annette.

The character foisted upon me was not confined to the house. Our servants related shameful stories against me to their friends in the neighborhood, who, in their turn, poured these stories into their mistresses' ears. Wives and mothers looked darkly at me, and those with whom I had become acquainted did not return my bow. I was completely and effectually ostracised. Under these persecutions was it any wonder that I felt myself becoming hardened? My nature was changed. I grew habitually morose and savage, and by my manner defied my traducers. This made matters worse for me, and gave color to the stories of systematic cruelty laid to my charge. After awhile I slept in the spare room alone, and offered up prayers of thankfulness that we had no children. It was indeed a blessing for which I could not be sufficiently grateful.

One evening when we were at dinner, and Barbara was toying with her food and sighing in the presence of the maid who waited at table, I suggested that she should call in a doctor.

"It is not a doctor I require," she said, gazing at me with mournful significance. "Oh, John, if only you – " And then she checked herself, as if she would not say anything to my discredit before the servant.

"Finish the sentence," I said. "If I only what?"

"Do not force me to speak," she cried, in an imploring tone.

Bursting into tears she rose from the table and left the room.

What clearer evidence of my barbarity could be supplied? The maid would have been bereft of sense not to have understood the implication, and there is no doubt that she took the tale down to her fellow servants in the kitchen. Before them, at meals, she never drank, but it was a common practice with her when we and Annette were together at dinner, to help herself to copious draughts of brandy. I no longer remonstrated with her; she would have added to my distress by drinking deeper.

In all these tricks she was assisted by Maxwell and my stepmother. Louis, for the most part, was a passive spectator. Maxwell drank with her and laughed. My stepmother said:

"See what you are driving her to. You are breaking her heart. I always knew what would happen if you married."

"You are saying what is false, because you hate me," I replied.

"I am speaking the truth," she retorted, "and truly I have no cause to love you. It is my opinion you have some wicked scheme in view. But there will be a judgment upon you for all your cleverness. You robbed me; you robbed Louis of his patrimony. What good is the money doing you?"

It is well I had matters apart from my domestic affairs to occupy me, or my mind would have lost its balance entirely. In accordance with the plan Barbara had laid down for me, I took a small set of chambers in one of the streets leading from the Strand to the river – the locality she had herself proposed – consisting of three rooms, a sitting-room, bedroom, and bathroom; and there I pursued my literary labors. The chambers were at the top of the house, and the sitting-room looked out upon the river. How happy could I have been there, had it not been for the living weight which held me down! Gladly every morning did I leave my home, sadly every evening did I return to it.

At first I wrote a few short stories, which I sent to the magazines. They were refused. Every fresh rejection brought disappointment with it, but disheartened me only a short time. When my manuscripts came back to me I read them carefully, found faults in them, re-wrote them, and tried again, with the same result. Thus a year passed, and I had not advanced a step. Two or three times in the course of this year Barbara visited me.

"You are happy here," she said, and I did not gainsay her. "You like it better than your own home."

"It was your own proposition," I replied. "Will nothing satisfy you?"

"It was not my proposition," she said. "You chose this yourself, and you have assignations here with creatures you love better than me. Oh, I know why you spend the day in these rooms. Do you think I am blind to the life you are living."

She carried her venom to the length of tearing up manuscripts upon which I was engaged; I submitted to this awhile, but eventually I protected myself by locking up my papers when I heard her knock at the door. She was furious at my refusal to give her duplicate keys to the chambers.

"A clear proof," she cried.

On one of these occasions I proposed a separation, and offered to settle upon her half the money I possessed, so long as we remained apart.

"Will you give it me in a lump?" she asked.

"No," I answered, "there must be a guarantee that you will not violate the conditions of the deed, which would be drawn up and signed by both of us. You shall have the interest of the money. If I die before you it will all be yours without restriction."

"Thank you, my dear," she said. "I prefer things as they are. You will not get rid of me so easily. You would divorce me if it were in your power. Of course you won't answer that. But you will never get the chance, love. I am acquainted with the grounds upon which a divorce can be obtained. You shall have no reason to say that I am not a true and faithful wife to you."

And, indeed, upon the score of faithfulness – in its legal sense – I entertained no doubts. She had but one love – brandy.

While I was endeavoring to obtain a footing in the literary field by means of short stories, I was preparing a series of articles upon the curse of the land – drink – drawing upon actual facts and real life for my pen and ink pictures. By good fortune I obtained an introduction to the editor of a paper, the columns of which were open to social subjects, and I submitted a few of these articles to him. He approved of them, and suggesting certain alterations, which I agreed to make, consented to use them. His paper was one which did not admit of signed contributions, and had it been otherwise I should not have put my name to them, my domestic troubles on the same theme being a bar to such a course. The editor did not inquire into the source from which I obtained the facts for my descriptions of the effects of the awful vice; he was content with my method of treatment and with my literary style.

"Just one word of advice," he said, "don't shrink from speaking broadly and plainly. It is a burning question, and you can't put it too strongly. I am not so well up in the subject as yourself, but I should say, even if a man drew entirely upon his imagination, he could not paint more striking pictures than reality can supply. The successful artist paints from life and nature."

"What I describe," I replied, "is what I have seen. Nothing more horrible can be met in the Vision of Hell. This city of shame and sin is full of little hells, and if there is any truth in pulpit sermons and religious ministrations, in every little hell souls are daily being damned."

He threw a searching glance upon me. "I like that. Don't forget the metaphor; use it in one of the early articles. Some writers keep their big plums till the last; it is a mistake. Fairy tales can be written on a Swiss mountain or an Italian lake, but to do justice to such a subject as yours you must dig into Babylon's crust; you need the pest-houses of civilization, the hog-like natures of men and women familiar with crime and poverty."

"The evil is not confined to hovels," I remarked, "nor to the criminal classes. Mansions of the well-to-do supply fruitful material."

"Well, do your best," he said. "We shall create a sensation."

We did. My articles were quoted far and near. Writing under a burning sense of wrong I was not sparing of epithet and denunciation. I worked at fever heat, and was often appalled at what I wrote, but it went into print with scarcely the alteration of a word. Had I written under my own name I might have become a celebrity.

In one of my articles I touched upon the marriage tie in relation to the evil. I described a home – a type of many – in which the wife was a confirmed dipsomaniac; another, in which the husband was drunk every day of his life. They were cases which came under my own eye in the localities where I pursued my investigations. From the lips of the sufferers themselves I received the terrible details of the gradual sinking into the slough of despair. Here was the wretched husband, once a bright mechanic earning a fair wage, whose wife's filthy habits had brought ruin upon him – hopeless, irremediable ruin. Vainly had he striven to reform her, vainly had he pointed out to her the sure consequences of her dissipation. Coming home at night from his work he found his rooms in darkness, his hungry children lying almost naked on the bare boards, and his wife drunk in the nearest gin palace. It had become a common occurrence. She pawned the beds, the furniture, the children's clothes and his own, again and yet again, and when he dragged her from the public-house she lay through the night, gibbering at the awful sights her diseased imagination conjured up. He replaced the furniture, he bought new beds and clothing, he gave his children food, and when his wife was able to crawl out again, off she crept to the pawnbroker to repeat her evil work. The children had grown stunted and deformed, their rags hung loosely on their shrunken limbs, like starving dogs they nosed the gutters for offal. "My God, my God!" he cried, the tears streaming down his face. "What shall I do? How shall I save my children? How shall I save myself?" His voice sank to a whisper. "One night I shall kill her, and there will be murder on my soul!"

In the other case it was the husband who drank, who would not work, who starved his wife and children, and beat them till their flesh was covered with livid bruises. It was the wife who told me the story. "If it were not for my children," she moaned, "I would make a hole in the water." It was not my habit to make more than a passing comment upon my descriptions of real and suffering life as it is to be seen to-day in the fester-spots of London. I had wished to do so, but was requested by my editor to put some restriction upon myself in this respect. "Leave that," he said, "to the editorial pen." At the end of the article in which I narrated these two cases, I wrote: "And these poor creatures are, by the Church and the so-called laws of God, chained to a living curse which blights, destroys, and damns the innocent." The words were allowed to stand.

On the following day a powerful leading article was written by the editor, in which a change in the law of divorce was imperatively demanded.

"Confirmed drunkenness," he said, "is a crime against the true laws of God and man; it is far worse than adultery, and more than a sufficient cause for separation. It is not alone that humanity demands it, but could God make Himself heard in this sinful world there would be a Divine mandate to enforce it." Other papers took up the subject. One popular journal (the season being over, and the House not sitting) made it a theme for the usual yearly correspondence, and columns of letters were printed every day – from despairing husbands and wives approving, from the clergy protesting, from politicians shilly-shallying. Meanwhile my articles had come to an end.

There was no change in my home, except for the worse, and I grew to hate it, to hate all who visited it, to hate myself. I had as little authority in it as any chance guest. I breakfasted, dined, and slept there – and, for variation, there were the scenes I had with Barbara. The lies that were circulated as to my brutality towards her bore fruit, and I was shunned by every soul in the neighborhood. Not a person I met there had a smile or a cordial word for me, and not for one sober hour did Barbara relax her cunning. In her mad fits she was visible only to me and Annette; when she went about the house or was seen in the streets her sad, listless ways (she was always sad when sober) were apparent to all, and her conspicuous ill-health was attributed to my conduct. It was the popular belief that I was "killing her by inches." I heard the words uttered by one of our servants to a servant in the adjoining house, and the indignant comment upon them – "Brute!"

Maxwell tried to borrow money from me, but I was sufficiently incensed to refuse him. "Not another shilling while I live," I said, and he replied that I would live to repent it. Scoundrel as he was, he spoke the truth.

The cases of the two poor homes ruined by a drunken husband and a drunken wife, which I have just narrated, drove my thoughts upon my own – and indeed it may have been because of the position in which I stood that I sifted them to the bottom. They had a peculiar fascination for me.

But even if the law of divorce were so altered as to rescue those who are driven to despair, sometimes to crime, by this frightful vice – which I pray may soon be so – a man situated as I was would find no relief in it. The shame would have to be proved, and the web which had been spun around me was of so cunning a nature that proof was impossible in my case. On the contrary, indeed; all the evidence, except my bare statements, would be turned against myself.

As an instance of the base arts employed to still further entangle and incriminate me I recount the following circumstances. Whose devilish ingenuity first conceived the idea I never discovered.

The spare room in which I slept was at the back of the house, and its window faced the window of another house, used also, I believe, as a bedroom. I stood in front of this window, shaving, one morning; the blind was up and the day was bright. While the razor was at my cheek Barbara rushed into the room, crying at the top of her voice:

"John – John – John! For mercy's sake, don't!" And as she spoke she threw herself upon me.

Fearful lest the razor should cut her I threw it away, but not before I had gashed my cheek, causing blood to flow. Then, observing that she was in her nightdress and that the bosom was open, I quickly drew down the blind.

"What is the meaning of this?" I inquired, bitterly. "Do you fear that I intend to kill myself?"

Her only answer was a series of hysterical shrieks which could be heard a long distance off. For a few moments I thought she had gone mad, and I stooped to raise her from the floor, upon which she had fallen.

"For mercy's sake, for mercy's sake!" she screamed, and in the midst of the confusion Annette entered the room and led her mistress away. I followed her into the passage, the blood running down my face, and there upon the stairs were the servants, who had naturally been alarmed by Barbara's screams, and had run up to see what was the matter.

"Go down," said Annette, speaking to them in a tone of command. "Madame is ill – very, very ill. I will attend to her."

I did not see my wife again that day; the door of her room was locked against me. To all my inquiries after her Annette replied:

"She is more composed; she will recover in a few days, perhaps."

"I wish to see her, Annette."

"Madame will not be seen by any one but me. She ordered me to say so to you."

I had, perforce, to give up the attempt.

I thought of the scene during the day; it was of a different nature from those to which I was accustomed, but there was something strange in it which I could not unfathom. Finally I came to the conclusion that Barbara's malady was developing itself in a new direction, and the last thought in my mind was that anything more than generally prejudicial to my character would come of it.