The Heavenly Twins (Victorian Feminist Novel). Grand Sarah
obeyed while in reality they are carefully kept in the dark as to what is going on about them? And why should she object to allow her mother to act as so many other worthy but weak women daily do in self-defence and for the love of peace and quietness? There seemed to be no great good to be gained by persisting, and she might perhaps have ended by acquiescing under protest if her mother had not added by way of postscript: "I doubt very much if I shall be allowed to receive your letters. Your father will probably send any he may capture straight back to you; and, at any rate, he will insist upon seeing them, so do not, my dear child, allude to having heard from me. I earnestly entreat you to remember this."
But the request only made Evadne's blood boil again. She did not belong to the old corrupt state of things herself, and she would not submit to anything savouring of deceit. If her mother were too weak to assert her own independence she felt herself forced to do it for her, so she wrote to her father sharply:
"My mother tells me that you intend to stop all communication between her and myself. I consider that you have no right to do anything of the kind, and unless I hear from her regularly in answer to my letters, I shall be reluctantly compelled to send a detailed statement of my case to every paper in the kingdom in order to find out from my fellow countrywomen what their opinion of your action in the matter is, and also what they would advise us to do. You know my mother's affection for you. You have never had any reason to complain of want of devotion on her part, and when you make your disagreement with me a whip to scourge her with, you are guilty of an unjustifiable act of oppression."
This letter arrived at Fraylingay late one afternoon, and was handed to Mr. Frayling on his return from a pleasant country ride. He read it standing in the hall, and lost his equanimity at once.
"Where is Mrs. Frayling?" he asked a servant who happened to be passing, speaking in a way which caused the man to remark afterward that "Mrs. Frayling was going to catch it about somethin'; and 'e seemed to think I'd made away with 'er."
Mrs. Frayling was in the drawing room, writing one of her pleasant chatty letters to a friend in India, with a cheerful expression on her comely countenance, and all recollections of her domestic difficulties banished for the moment.
When Mr. Frayling entered in his riding dress, with his whip in his hand and his hat on his head (he was one of those men who are most punctilious with strange ladies, but do not feel it necessary to behave like gentlemen in the presence of their own wives, making it appear as if the latter had lost cast and forfeited all claim to their respect by marrying them) Mrs. Frayling looked round from her writing and smiled.
"Have you had a nice ride, dear?" she said.
"Read that!" he exclaimed, slapping Evadne's letter with his whip, and then throwing it down on the table before her rudely: "Read that, and tell me what you think of your daughter now!" Mrs. Frayling's fair face clouded on the instant, and her affectionate heart, which had been so happily expanded the moment before by the kind thoughts about her absent friend that came crowding as she wrote to her, contracted now with a painful spasm of nervous apprehension.
She read the letter through, and then put it down on the table beside her without a word. She did not look at her husband, but at some miniatures which hung on the wall before her. They were portraits of her own people, father, mother, grandmother, a great aunt and uncle, and other near relations, together with a brother and sister much older than herself, and both dead, and forgotten as a rule: but at that moment all that she had ever known of them, details of merry games together, and childish naughtinesses which got them into trouble at the time but made them appear to have been only amusingly mischievous now, recurred to her in one great flash of memory, which showed her also some lost illusions of her early girlhood about a husband's love and tenderness, his constant friendship, the careful, patient teaching of the more powerful mind which was to strengthen her mind and enlarge it too, and the constant companionship which would banish for ever the indefinite gnawing sense of loneliness from which all healthy, young, unmated creatures suffer. She had actually expected at one time to be more to her husband than the mere docile female of his own kind which was all he wanted his wife to be. She had had aspirations which had caused her to yearn for help to develop something beyond the animal side of her, proving the possession in embryo of faculties other than those which had survived Mr. Frayling's rule; but her nature was plastic; one of those which requires the strong and delicate hand of a master to mould it into distinct and lovely form. Motherhood, as it had appeared to her in the delicate dreams of those young days, had promised to be a beautiful and blessed privilege, but then the children of her happy imaginings had been less her own than those of the shadowy perfection who was to have been her husband. She had little sense of humour, but yet she could have smiled when, in this moment of absolute insight, she saw the ideal compared with the real husband, this great fat country gentleman. The folly of having expected even motherhood with such a father for her children to be anything but unsatisfactory and disappointing at the best, dawned upon her for an instant with disheartening effect. But, fortunately, the outlook was so hopeless there seemed nothing more to sigh for, and so she sat for once, looking up at the miniatures without washing out with tears the little mental strength she had left.
Mr. Frayling waited impatiently for her to make some remark when she had read Evadne's letter. Almost anything she could have said must have given him some further food for provocation, and there is nothing more gratifying to an angry man than fresh fuel for his wrath. However, silence sometimes fans the flame as effectually as words, and it did so on this occasion, for, having waited till he could contain himself no longer, he burst out so suddenly that Mrs. Frayling raised her large soft white hand to the heavy braids which it was then the fashion to pile high on the head and have hanging down in two rows to the nape of the neck behind, as if she expected them to be disarranged by the concussion.
"May I ask if you approve of that letter?" he demanded.
But she only set her lips.
Mr. Frayling took a turn about the room with his hands behind his back, holding his riding whip upright, and flicking himself between the shoulders with it as he went.
"Let her write to the papers!" he exclaimed, addressing the pictures on the walls as if he were sure of their sympathy. "Let her write to the papers. I don't care what she does. I cast her off forever. This comes of the higher education of women; a promising specimen! Woman's rights, indeed! Woman's shamelessness and want of common decency once she is let loose from proper control. She'll make the matter public, will she? A girl of nineteen! and take the opinion of her fellow countrywomen on the subject, egad! because I won't let her mother write to her: and my not doing so is an unjustifiable act of oppression, is it? What do you consider it yourself?" he demanded of his wife, striding up to her, and standing over her in a way which, with a flourish of the whip, was unpleasantly suggestive of an impulse to visit her daughter's offence upon her shoulders actually as well as figuratively.
Mrs. Frayling did not shrink, but her comely pink and white face, usually so lineless in its healthy matronly plumpness, suddenly took on a look of age and hardness, the one moment of horrid repulsion marking it more deeply than years of those household cares which write themselves on the mind without contracting the heart had done.
"Do you consider," he repeated, "that I have been guilty of an unmanly act of oppression?"
"I think you have been very unkind," she answered, meaning the same thing. "Her conduct was bad enough to begin with, but now it will be ten times worse. She will write to the papers, if she says she will. Evadne is as brave—! You can't understand her courage. She will do anything she thinks right. And now there will be a public scandal after all we have done to prevent it, and you will never be able to show your face again anywhere, for there isn't a mother in the country from her Majesty downward, who will not take my part and say you have no right to separate me from my daughter."
"I know what the end of it will be." he roared. "I know what happens when women leave the beaten track. They go to the bad altogether. That's what will happen, you'll see. She'll write a volume next to prove that she has a right to be an immoral woman if she chooses. She'll be a common hussey yet, I promise you."
"Sir!" said Mrs. Frayling, stung into dignity for a moment, and rising to her feet in order