"That seems sound as a general law, Nance--better for her to make a hundred failures, for that matter, than stay meekly in the first because of any superst.i.tion. But, mind you, if she suspects that the Church may, after all, have succeeded in tying up the infinite with red-tape and sealing-wax--believes that G.o.d is a large, dark notary-public who has recorded her marriage in a book--she will do better to stay. Doubtless the conceit of it will console her--that the G.o.d who looks after the planets has an eye on her, to see that she makes but one guess about so uncertain a thing as a man."

"Then you would advise--"

"No, I wouldn't. The woman who has to be advised should never take advice. I dare say divorce is quite as hazardous as marriage, though possibly most people divorce with a somewhat riper discretion than they marry with. But the point is that neither marriage nor divorce can be considered a royal road to happiness, and a woman ought to get her impetus in either case from her own inner consciousness. I should call divorcing by advice quite as silly as marrying by it."

"But it comes at last to her own law in her own heart?"

"When she has awakened to it--when she honestly feels it. G.o.d's law for woman is the same as for man--and he has but two laws for both that are universal and unchanging: The first is, they are bound at all times to desire happiness; the second is, that they can be happy only by being wise--which is what we sometimes mean when we say 'good,' but of course no one knows what wisdom is for all, nor what goodness is for all, because we are not mechanical dolls of the same pattern. That's why I reverence G.o.d--the scheme is so ingenious--so productive of variety in goodness and wisdom. Probably an evil marriage is as hard to be quit of as any vice. People persist long after the sanct.i.ty has gone--because they lack moral courage. Hoover was quite that way with cigarettes. If some one could only have made Jim believe that G.o.d had joined him to cigarettes, and that he mustn't quit them or he'd shatter the foundations of our domestic integrity--he'd have died in cheerful smoke--very soon after a time when he says I saved his life. All he wanted was some excuse to go on smoking. Most people are so--slothful-souled. But remember, don't advise your friend in town. Her asking advice is a sign that she shouldn't have it. She is not of the coterie that Paul describes--if you don't mind Paul once more--'Happy is he that condemneth not himself in that which he alloweth.'"

There had come to the woman a vast influx of dignity--a joyous increase in the volume of that new feeling that called to her husband. She would have gone back, but one of the reasons would have been because she thought it "right"--because it was what the better world did! But now--ah! now--she was going unhampered by that compulsion which galls even the best. She was free to stay away, but of her own glad, loyal will she was going back to the husband she had treated unjustly, judged by too narrow a standard.

"Allan will be so astonished and delighted," she said, when the coupe rolled out of the train-shed.

She remembered now with a sort of pride the fine, unflinching sternness with which he had condemned divorce. In a man of principles so staunch one might overlook many surface eccentricities.

CHAPTER XII

THE FLEXIBLE MIND OF A PLEASED HUSBAND

As they entered the little reception-room from the hall, the doors of the next room were pushed apart and they saw Allan bowing out Mrs.

Talwin Covil, a meek, suppressed, neutral-tinted woman, the inevitable feminine corollary of such a man as Cyrus Browett, whose only sister she was.

The eyes of Nancy, glad with a knowing gladness, were quick for Allan's face, resting fondly there during the seconds in which he was changing from the dead astonishment to live recognition at sight of Bernal.

During the shouts, the graspings, pokings, nudgings, the pumping of each other's arms that followed, Nancy turned to greet Mrs. Covil, who had paused before her.

"Do sit down a moment and tell me things," she urged, "while those boys go back there to have it out!"

Thus encouraged, Mrs. Covil dropped into a chair, seeming not loath to tell those things she had, while Nancy leaned back and listened duteously for a perfunctory ten minutes. Her thoughts ran ahead to Allan--and to Bernal--as children will run little journeys ahead of a slow-moving elder.

Then suddenly something that the troubled little woman was saying fixed her attention, pulling up her wandering thoughts with a jerk.

"--and the Doctor asked me, my dear, to treat it quite confidentially, except to bother Cyrus. But, I'm sure he would wish you to know. Of course it is a delicate matter--I can readily understand, as he says, how the public would misconstrue the Doctor's words and apply them generally--forgetting that each case requires a different point of view. But with Harold it is really a perfectly flagrant and dreadful case of mismating--due entirely to the poor boy's thoughtless chivalry--barely twenty-eight, mind you--as if a man nowadays knows his mind at all well before thirty-five. Of course, divorce is an evil that, broadly speaking, threatens the sanct.i.ty of our home life--no one understands that better than your husband--and re-marriage after divorce is usually an outrageous scandal--one, indeed, altogether too common--sometimes I wonder what we're coming to, it seems to be done so thoughtlessly--but individual instances are different--'exceptions prove the rule,' you know, as the old saying goes. Now Harold is ready to settle down, and the girl is of excellent family and all that--quite the social and moral brace he needs, in fact."

Nancy was attentive, yet a little puzzled.

"But--you speak of your son, Harold--is he not already married?"

"That's it, my dear. You know what a funny, bright, mischievous boy Harold is--even a little deliciously wild at times--doubtless you read of his marriage when it occurred--how these newspapers do relish anything of the sort--she was a theatrical young woman--what they call a 'show girl,' I believe. Humph!--with reason, I _must_ say! Of all the egregious and inveterate showiness! My dear, she is positively a creature! Oh, if they'd only invent a monocle that would let a young man pierce the glamour of the footlights. I pledge you my word, she's--but never mind that! Harold was a thoughtless, restless boy--not bad, you know, but heedless. Why, he was quite the same about business. He began to speculate, and of course, being brother Cyrus's nephew, his advantage was considerable. But he suddenly declared he wouldn't be a broker any more--and you'd never guess his absurd reason: simply because some stock he held or didn't hold went up or down or something on a rumour in the street that Mr. Russell Sage was extremely ill! He said that this brought him to his senses. He says to me, 'Mater, I've not met Mr. Sage, you know, but from what I hear of him it would be irrational to place myself in a position where I should have to experience emotion of any sort at news of the old gentleman's taking-off. An event so agreeable to the natural order of G.o.d's providence, so plausible, so seemly, should not be endowed with any arbitrary and artificial significance, especially of a monetary character--one must be able to view it absolutely without emotion of any sort, either of regret or rejoicing--one must remain conscientiously indifferent as to when this excellent old gentleman pa.s.ses on to the Golden Sh.o.r.e'--but you know the breezy way in which Harold will sometimes talk. Only now he seems really sobered by this new attachment--"

"But if he is already married--"

"Yes, yes--if you can call it married--a ceremony performed by one of those common magistrates--quite without the sanction of the Church--but all that is past, and he is now ready to marry one who can be a wife to him--only my conscience did hurt me a little, and brother Cyrus said to me, 'You see Linford and tell him I sent you. Linford is a man of remarkable breadth, of rare flexibility.'"

"Yes, and of course Allan was emphatically discouraging." Again she was recalling the fervour with which he had declared himself on this point on that last day when he actually made her believe in him.

"Oh, the Doctor is broad! He is what I should call adaptable. He said by all means to extricate Harold from this wretched predicament, not only on account of the property interests involved, but on account of his moral and spiritual welfare; that, while in spirit he holds deathlessly to the indissolubility of the marriage tie, still it is unreasonable to suppose that G.o.d ever joined Harold to a person so much his inferior, and that we may look forward to the real marriage--that on which the sanct.i.ty of the home is truly based--when the law has freed him from this boyish entanglement. Oh, my dear, I feel so relieved to know that my boy can have a wife from his own cla.s.s--and still have it right up there--with Him, you know!" she concluded with an upward glance, as Nancy watched her with eyes grown strangely quiet, almost steely--watched her as one might watch an ant. She had the look of one whose will had been made suddenly to stand aside by some great inner tumult.

When her caller had gone she dropped back into the chair, absently pulling a glove through the fingers of one hand--her bag and parasol on the floor at her feet. One might have thought her on the point of leaving instead of having just come. The shadows were deepening in the corners of the room and about her half-shut eyes.

A long time she listened to the animated voices of the brothers. At last the doors were pushed apart and they came out, Allan with his hand on Bernal's shoulder.

"There's your bag--now hurry upstairs--the maid will show you where."

As Bernal went out, Nancy looked up at her husband with a manner curiously quiet.

"Well, Nance--" He stepped to the door to see if Bernal was out of hearing--"Bernal pleases me in the way he talks about the old gentleman's estate. Either he is most reasonable, or I have never known my true power over men."

Her face was inscrutable. Indeed, she only half heard.

"Mrs. Covil has been telling me some of your broader views on divorce."

The words shot from her lips with the crispness of an arrow, going straight to the bull's-eye.

He glanced quickly at her, the hint of a frown drawing about his eyes.

"Mrs. Covil should have been more discreet. The authority of a priest in these matters is a thing of delicate adjustment--the law for one may not be the law for all. These are not matters to gossip of."

"So it seems. I was thinking of your opposite counsel to Mrs. Eversley."

"There--really, you know I read minds, at times--somehow I knew that would be the next thing you'd speak of."

"Yes?"

"The circ.u.mstances are entirely different--I may add that--that any intimation of inconsistency will be very unpleasing to me--very!"

"I can see that the circ.u.mstances are different--the Eversleys are not what you would call 'important factors' in the Church--and besides--that is a case of a wife leaving her husband."

"Nance--I'm afraid you're _not_ pleasing me--if I catch your drift. Must I point out the difference--the spiritual difference? That misguided woman wanted to desert her husband merely because he had hurt her pride--her vanity--by certain alleged attentions to other women, concerning the measure of which I had no knowledge. That was a case where the cross must be borne for the true refining of that dross of vanity from her soul. Her husband is of her cla.s.s, and her life with him will chasten her. While here--what have we here?"

He began to pace the floor as he was wont to do when he prepared a sermon.

"Here we have a flagrant example of what is nothing less than spiritual miscegenation--that's it!--why didn't I think of that phrase before--spiritual miscegenation. A rattle-brained boy, with the connivance of a common magistrate, effects a certain kind of alliance with a person inferior to him in every point of view--birth, breeding, station, culture, wealth--a person, moreover, who will doubtless be glad to relinquish her so-called rights for a sum of money. Can that, I ask you, be called a _marriage?_ Can we suppose an all-wise G.o.d to have joined two natures so ill-adapted, so mutually exclusive, so repellent to each other after that first glamour is past. Really, such a supposition is not only puerile but irreverent. It is the conventional supposition, I grant, and theoretically, the unvarying supposition of the Church; but G.o.d has given us reasoning powers to use fearlessly--not to be kept superst.i.tiously in the shackles of any tradition whatsoever.

Why, the very Church itself from its founding is an example of the wisdom of violating tradition when it shall seem meet--it has always had to do this."

"I see, Allan--every case must be judged by itself; every marriage requires a special ruling--"

"Well--er--exactly--only don't get to fancying that you could solve these problems. It's difficult enough for a priest."

"Oh, I'm positive a mere woman couldn't grapple with them--she hasn't the mind to! All she is capable of is to choose who shall think for her."

"And of course it would hardly do to announce that I had counselled a certain procedure of divorce and re-marriage--no matter how flagrant the abuse, nor how obvious the spiritual equity of the step. People at large are so little a.n.a.lytical."

"'Flexible,' Mr. Browett told his sister you were. He was right--you _are_ flexible, Allan--more so than I ever suspected."

"Nance--you _please_ me--you are a good girl. Now I'm going up to Bernal. Bernal certainly pleases me. Of course I shall do the handsome thing by him if he acts along the lines our talk has indicated."