'Come here, Madge,' she cried, opening her arms wide, and speaking with a sobbing voice; 'come here.'

She hugged her sister fiercely, and cried over her.

'I can understand,' she said--'I can understand.' She repeated the words again and again. 'It isn't a pretty thing to have to face; but it's your trouble, darling, and we must stick together. As for me,' she added, with a new outbreak of tears, which a laugh made half hysteric, 'I shall stick like wax.'

Annette's threat was no _brutum fulmen_, as the society newspapers soon began to show. Paragraphs appeared here and there indicating that the unprosperous matrimonial affairs of a popular playwright would shortly excite the interest of the public; and one day Paul, driving along the Strand, and finding his cab momentarily arrested by a block in the traffic, was frozen to the marrow by the sight of a newspaper placard which by way of sole contents bore the words, 'Who is the real Mrs.

Armstrong? Divorce proceedings inst.i.tuted against a famous playwright.'

At first his thought was: 'Some enemy has done this;' but he knew the journal and most of the influential members of its staff, and he could not guess that he counted an enemy among them. He had dined with the editor a week before at the same club-table, and had found him not less cordial than he had ever been before.

'I suppose the man is justified,' Paul thought when the power of reflection returned to him. 'The whole story is on its way to the public ears, and neither he nor any other man can stop it It's his business to be first in the field with it if he can.'

He turned his cab homeward, for he had no heart to face the people he had meant to meet, and on his way, just to gratify the natural instinct of self-torture, he bought a copy of the journal, and read there that Messrs. Berry and Smythe, the well-known firm of solicitors in Lincoln's Inn, had that day filed a pet.i.tion for divorce against Mr. Paul Armstrong, the well-known dramatist, and that remarkable revelations were expected.

For these past few years home had seemed Paradise. He had never for any fraction of an instant wavered in his love, and use and wont had helped to set a seal of sanct.i.ty upon it With the pa.s.sage of the months and years, with the growth of many intimate acquaintanceships, and not a few closer and dearer ties about him, home had grown to be as sacred to him as if the union on which it was founded had been blessed by all the priests of all the churches. No purer and more tranquil spirit of affectionate loyalty had breathed in any home in England, and now the balm of his soul was vitriol, and that which had been the bread of life to him was steeped in gall and wormwood. The very honest purpose of his life, his constant and sober pursuit of a worthy fame, recoiled upon him here as if it had been in itself a crime. Not to have striven, to have been content with a dull obscurity of fortune, to have wasted his days in idleness and his nights in foolish revel, would have seemed a happier course to him. And as it was the better part of life which chastised him most cruelly, so it was the best and worthiest affection he had ever known which turned upon him with a cup of poison in its hand and bade him drink it to the dregs. Life and the world are so made that only the most desolate can suffer by themselves. If by any trick of magic he could have borne his chastis.e.m.e.nt alone, he would have accepted it with something like a scorn of fate.

He had discharged his cab within a hundred yards of home, and had read the stinging paragraph beneath a lamp-post almost at his own doorstep.

He entered the house noiselessly, and from Madge's music-room there floated down to him the sound of Chopin's great Funeral March. She played this and some other favourites of her own as few musicians play them, for music had been the one delight of her life, and but for the fleeting theatrical ambition, and for Paul, she might have become famous as an executant He stood in the hall to listen as the alternate wail and triumph filled and thrilled the air, and thinking that she was alone, he strolled silently to his dressing-room, and then in smoking-jacket and slippers went to join her. Except for the glow of the fire the room was in darkness, and a voice which came out of the darkness startled him.

'I had prepared myself to wait for hours,' said the voice; and Ralston emerged from a shadowed corner with an outstretched hand--Ralston, with his big sagacious head, all unexpectedly silver-white, and moustache and beard of snow, but with the same old hand-grip, and the same half-dictatorial, half-affectionate tone. Madge struck a resolving chord, rose, and with a kiss and a whispered 'I know the news,' slipped from the room before he could make an effort to detain her.

'Can we have a light on things?' said Ralston, in that hoa.r.s.ely musical growl of his. He struck a match as he spoke, and lit the gas, and then marched st.u.r.dily to the door and closed it. 'You know me--you, Paul Armstrong,' he said, turning to face the master of the house. 'I have spent a fighting life, but I have never known a downright murderous fit till now. Have you seen this?'

'Yes,' said Paul,' I've seen it.'

The journal Ralston haled from his pocket and held towards him was a fellow to that he had just thrown away in the street.

'The carrion-hunting hound!' cried Ralston; 'I read this, and I came straight here. I knew there was no hiding it from your wife. I say "your wife," and I hold by the word until faith and friendship are as dead as last year's leaves. She had to see it, Armstrong, and it was better that a friend should bring it to her. Now, mind you, we who know her rally round. We may be only two or three, but we are a fighting colony. I am by way of being a cleric, but I don't always cut my linguistic coat to suit my cloth, and my word at this hour is, d.a.m.n the b.e.s.t.i.a.l ecclesiastical bigotry which seeks to tie the bodies of men and women together when their souls are sundered! Here is a man reported within this last fortnight as having been arrested the day after his marriage at a registrar's office, and as having been since then condemned to penal servitude for life. Is that fact a relief to the woman who was his victim? Not a bit of it Let her contract a new marriage, and the law will indict her for bigamy. She must live in loneliness, or be cla.s.sed with harlots. Here is a man I know, an outlying parishioner of mine, whose wife is hopelessly and incurably insane. Is there any release from the marriage-bond for him? Not a chance of it. There are a hundred thousand people of this country, men and women, so saturated and demoralized with drink that only an overwhelming Christian pity could bear to touch 'em with a barge-pole--husbands intolerable to wives, wives intolerable to husbands, live corpses with corruption distilling at each pore--and this filthy marriage law, which is the last relic of Christianity's worst barbarism, binds quick and wholesome flesh to stinking death, and bids them fester together in the legal pit. I set one honest man's curse upon that shameless and abominable creed, and I would not take my hand away from my seal though I went to the stake for setting it there.'

He broke into a stormy laugh, and clapped Paul boisterously upon the shoulder.

'And now,' he said, with a sudden change of voice and manner, 'that we have got rid of the froth of pa.s.sion, let me offer you one cup of the sound wine of reason. Fight this business through, Paul Armstrong. Don't give way by half a barleycorn. The story, as it tells against you, will be made known. The truth, as your friends know it, must come out as well. If I had time to read up for the bar, and pa.s.s my examinations, I would ask nothing better than to be your counsel. Face the music, Armstrong, and you may help the cause of justice. It is time that this union of quick and dead were done with, and that the ecclesiastic fetish rag which makes its wickedness respectable were burned.'

CHAPTER XXIX

There were the usual legal delays, and public interest in the case would have slumbered had it not been for the newspapers. But a steady-going England, on whose John Bull qualities of reticence and solidity we have been p.r.o.ne to pride ourselves, does occasionally betray a quicker and more curious spirit than it commonly desires to be credited with, and there is no pole to stir it from its hybernating sleep which reaches so far and punches the fat ribs so soundly as the pole of scandal. The press was in one of its occasional Jedburgh justice moods, and was ready to afford impartial trial when it had hanged its victim, and not before.

Paul Armstrong was adjudged a Lothario of the wickeder sort, a purposed betrayer of hearts and destinies. 'If, as the complainant in this melancholy case avers,' or 'If, as the depositions already filed would appear to indicate,' the defendant was an unlimited rascal; and if that were so, he _was_ an unlimited rascal, and there an end. A thousand men file past the bar of official and unofficial justice without much comment They are branded, more or less justly, in accord with their deserts, and having been first ignored, are altogether forgotten. But every here and there, for some scarcely notable peculiarity, a man or woman is fairly hunted down by the moral pack, mangled and branded, as it were, on a n.o.ble moral speculation, and left to quiver for the remnant of his lifetime.

In these days Paul Armstrong pondered much and often over the saying of the man who had been his master in the arts of fiction and the drama: 'Men reserve their bitterest repentances for their best actions.' If only he had played the man of the world towards Annette instead of playing the Quixote, how different a position he would have held towards the moral pack! To marry your mistress under no compulsion, but merely in the desire to relieve the last sufferings of a parting soul, to sacrifice a year or two of pulsing ambitions to this act of charity, had not in itself appeared an act of wickedness. Nor had it seemed wholly intolerable from his own point of view that, after a struggle prolonged beyond the needs of decency, he should have run away from the contaminations which belonged inevitably to a life spent in the society of an incurable dipsomaniac. Nor could he as yet blame himself overmuch if he had at last yielded to the claims of that domesticity which offered him involuntary shelter: the invitations of a home of love and confidence; an atmosphere in which no cloud hovered which could not be puffed away in a cloud of tobacco smoke, or shattered into nothing by the clear breath of a single friendly laugh. It was not quite an honest view of the case--no man surveying his own circ.u.mstances is ever entirely honest--but to himself the question was convincing, Who would not have hastened from that h.e.l.l to find this heaven?

Ralston at least stood undauntedly by him, and inveighed with anger against what he proclaimed to be an unnatural law.

'Do you know Constantinople?' he asked one evening as the two sat together.

'Yes,' Paul answered; 'I know it tourist fashion. I stayed a week there once.'

'You remember the tribes of yellow dogs who make night hideous?' Ralston questioned. 'They hunt in packs, and eat any raffle of the streets which may be thrown to 'em. I've seen 'em wolfing cardboard boxes that have been swept out of the drapers' shops in the early morning, the poor hungry devils! They'd fall across any intruder from another parish and crunch him hide and bones. But they never attack one another, and there's no record of one yellow dog who tried to eat another yellow dog who belonged to the same gang. There's a mighty difference between the canine and the human, eh? You're one of our breed, Armstrong--yellow dog of the yellow dog quill-driving tribe--and your comrades haven't the gentlemanly instinct of the Constantinople cur. They get round you and worry you,' he declaimed, rising, and striding about the room, with an occasional double-handed clutch at the lapels of his coat, his one gesture of rage--'they worry you for their twopenny-halfpenny mouthful of lineage, and they'd gnaw their own mothers out of their coffins for the same reward.'

'As bad as that?' asked Paul, with a dreary little laugh.

'As bad as that, sir!' Ralston declared wrathfully, though he too laughed a moment at his own vehemence.

But the fighting Ralston was on fire with his theme, and returned to it often.

'You had a namesake once,' he said, 'who was an Apostle. He talked with a centurion, who told him, "With a great price I obtained this freedom."

With a great price! I wonder if it were like the price we pay for what we call the freedom of the press. I fought for that in my own day, fought and suffered, and paid in coin and heart's blood, and I have asked myself since if I am glad or sorry that I won. Are we the better for having bred this vulture crowd?'

The hot heart of the advocate warmed the cold heart of the sufferer from time to time, but neither long nor often. The coals of anger will not burn freely on any honest hearth when the conscience of the owner compels him to turn down the damper every other minute.

The cause in the Law Courts lingered, and the seasons changed Paul's friendships stopped away--not by ones or twos, but in battalions. Poor little Madge could go nowhere, and ceased to wish to go anywhere, to find herself brushing against offended skirts whose owners drew them away from pollution.

'In all my foolish life,' Paul told Ralston, 'I have known one thoroughly good woman.'

'Lucky bargee!' said Ralston. 'Not one man in a million has your chance.'

'One woman,' Paul went on, 'as pure as a daisy, who could surrender her whole life for the sake of love--a creature who never spoke an unkind word or thought an unkind thought of any living sister, or dead one, for that matter.'

He choked. He could go no further for the time.

'I know her,' said Ralston--'I know her.'

'And women,' said Paul, 'who are not worthy to unlace her shoes cold-shoulder her, and look at her with contempt. I dare cry the history of two or three on the housetops.'

'And if you dared--what good?' Ralston asked.

'There is no G.o.d,' cried Paul; 'there is no justice in the world.'

'There is a G.o.d,' said Ralston, 'and there is very little justice. Who are we that we should cry out for justice? We are here to learn. And look here, Paul Armstrong: the biggest and hardest lesson set us is to learn long views.'

'Long views?' said Paul, staring at him.

'Long views,' Ralston repeated steadily. 'I know what I'm talking about We are learners, and learners in the lowest cla.s.s. That's nonsense,' he corrected himself, 'and I hate exaggeration, though I am guilty of it a hundred times a day. But we are learners, and, whether our cla.s.s is high or low makes little difference to the fact that there is much to learn.

The man who is the stronger and the better for his trouble is the scholar who goes to the top of the cla.s.s. Look ahead, man, and ask whether Paul Armstrong is to be a firmer or a flabbier small element in G.o.d's great universe for what is now befalling him. Your own action has chosen you to be a sort of martyr in a big cause. We are on the fringe of the s.e.x-fight, so far; but before our children are grown men and women, the battle will be in full swing. We have got to settle this question of the sanct.i.ty of marriage. What a certain kind of animal calls "free love" is of the beast and b.e.s.t.i.a.l; but a reasoned and loyal love between man and woman is a beautiful and n.o.ble thing, and it is not the less beautiful and n.o.ble because it has not been sanctified by the payment of seven-and-sixpence to the Inland Revenue. You have a principle to fight for, and you have Madge to fight for. By the G.o.d I worship,' he cried, in sudden wrath, 'I would fight for the principle against death itself, and for a woman like Madge I would die at a slow fire.'

'But, Ralston,' Paul besought him--'Ralston, you don't understand. You find animation there; but it is there my weakness lies. Do you think I care for myself?'

'Of course I do,' said Ralston. 'If you hadn't cared for yourself you would never have brought a child like Madge into such an evil as this.'

'That's true enough,' said Paul; 'that's truth itself.'

He laid his elbows on the table, and leaned his head disconsolately upon his hands. His companion shook him by the shoulder in the rough amity which men use with one another.

'Look here, Armstrong: w.i.l.l.y-nilly, you're the champion of a great cause, and you have the sweetest woman in the world to fight for. Don't flaunt the flag insolently--in the present temper of the public that will never do--but stand by it all the same. So far as you're concerned, Armstrong, it's a selfish accident that turns you Squire of Dames; but you're in the tourney now, and you've got to behave respectably.'

'If you mean by behaving respectably that I've got to hold by Madge, and live all this down if I can, and do my best to flutter through life on a broken wing, I am with you.'