A Reconstructed Marriage Part 40

"Ducie?"

"Yes, sir."

"You were told to leave this house forever, at half-past three this afternoon. Why have you not done so?"

"The party who told me was not my mistress."

"Am I your master?"

"I suppose so."

"Then listen to me. Here is your quarter's wage. As you are a young girl, I will not send you to the street now that it is dark. You may stay until eight o'clock to-morrow morning. Then you will go."

"I shall go to-night, sir. I will not take a favor from you, though I have done this house many favors."

"Robert, Robert!" cried Theodora, "consider what you are doing. Ducie, do not go away yet--for David's sake--let me keep Ducie, Robert."

"David will go to school in the autumn. He wants no nurse."

"Then let her stop until autumn. Robert, dear Robert, I entreat you that I may keep Ducie."

"After her impertinence to my mother, it is impossible. You ought to feel that."

"_Oh dear, oh dear!_" Theodora covered her face with her hands, and burst into pa.s.sionate weeping.

Immediately Ducie was at her side comforting her. "Don't, ma'am. Please don't cry. Ducie knows it is not your fault."

Then Theodora unfastened the brooch at her throat and drew a ring from her finger.

"Take them, dear," she said. "We ought to pay you for three months'

extra work, but I have no money. You know that, Ducie. Take these instead. Keep them for my sake, dear. Oh Ducie, Ducie! you are my only friend here, and they are sending you away. My G.o.d, my dear G.o.d, have pity on me!"

She spoke rapidly in a transport of sorrowful feeling; she forced the trinkets into Ducie's hand, and walking with her to the door, kissed her there; then sobbing like a little child, she fell upon the sofa in hopeless distress.

"What folly!" cried Robert. "Who would believe all this fuss was about a common servant girl--a disobedient, insolent servant girl. Why did she not obey my mother's order?"

Then Theodora rose to her feet. She put tears away, and answered proudly: "Because I was her mistress, and I told her to come with me."

"You told her to disobey my mother?"

"Yes. Your mother dismissed her without my permission. Suppose I had called your mother's chambermaid, and ordered her to leave the house--the cases are precisely the same."

"Not at all; mother is mistress and housekeeper. When she ordered Ducie to leave, that was quite sufficient."

"Do you expect me to obey your mother's orders?"

"I obey her orders."

"If they were kind and just orders, I would do all I could to meet them; when they are unjust and tyrannical, I will not obey them. I will be a partner in none of her sins and cruelties; I know a better way, if she does not. And I must have a maid, Robert."

"I will tell mother to hire one for you. But we shall have no more English girls, so do not expect what you will not get."

"Would any English girl want to come to Glasgow, for the sake of Glasgow? That is a difficult thing to imagine."

"And I do not approve of you giving valuable jewelry away."

"It was my very own. I had it long before I saw you."

"It was scandalous of Ducie to accept it. She ought not to be allowed to carry it away. You were not responsible when you gave it."

"And if it is scandalous for Ducie, my friend, to take a gift of my jewelry from my hands, what about the Campbelton women, who broke open my trunk, and took out of its case my cla.s.s ring of diamonds and sapphires, worth eighty pounds; a ring my cla.s.s paid for, and gave me.

You promised me it should be returned. It never has been. Do you pretend that ring was yours? And is everything I possess yours? And do you permit your kindred to help themselves to whatever of mine they choose to appropriate?"

"You possess nothing--the hair on your head is mine. I can sell it if I choose. Your wedding ring is mine."

"I believe nothing of the kind. It is incredible."

"It is the law of England."

"You ought to have told me those things before I was married. I was beguiled into slavery. Why are girls in school not taught such things, if, indeed, they are true?"

"It is the law of England. Any lawyer will tell you so."

"Then it is contrary to the law of the Holy and Just One, and I will never acknowledge its right. I say, and shall always say, my cla.s.s ring was stolen; and that the person who took it was, and is, a thief. The law may give you my clothing and ornaments, and your mother, a.s.suming your things to be hers, may give them away; and you may call it lawful, but justice and equity would soon dispose of that legal fiction. I shall always deny it. To falter in doing so, would be sin."

In uttering these words she became a Theodora he had never before seen.

Her beauty was triumphant over both her anger and her sorrow. Her splendid eyes stabbed him with their scornful glances; her air and att.i.tude was regal as that of Justice herself, and her words went home like javelins. Mentally and spiritually, he cowered before her.

So he took out his watch and said: "Dinner is served."

"I want no dinner."

He answered, "Very well," but there was the look in his eyes of a man who knows he is defrauding his own soul. And though at that moment he understood his mother's hatred of her, and believed that he himself hated her, yet even then, at the root of his hate, there lay a secret, ardent thirst for her love.

CHAPTER X

THEODORA MAKES A NEW LIFE

It is not by grand or romantic events, that life is usually shaped; the most trivial things are the ministers of Destiny, but no matter how insignificant they may appear, they bring with them a sense of fatality not to be put away. When the great dramatist would make Oth.e.l.lo murder Desdemona, he did not choose as a cause the loss of some priceless necklace, or a diamond ornament, he knew intuitively that such a simple thing as a pocket handkerchief would be more natural.

So in Theodora's case, the everyday occurrence of a quarrel with a servant girl was the culmination of years full of far more cogent reasons, for her final decision to abandon a life which she was unable to manage. But when Robert went to his dinner, and left her alone to struggle with a defeat and a loss she felt so keenly she came to this positive conclusion. In that hour her life was brought to the fine point of a single word. "Yes" or "No," which was it to be? Would she accept for herself and her child the wretched life she had unknowingly chosen?

Or, would she abandon it, and seek some happier environment? And after half-an-hour's intense thought and feeling, she stood erect, and, clasping her hands, uttered an emphatic "Yes!" Even at that hour, her messenger was on his way to consult her parents, and she had little doubt as to their decision. She believed they would bid her "Go in G.o.d's name"; and fortified by that order, she would follow the advice David Campbell gave her. He knew the United States well, and it was a wonderful thing, he should have come home in this time of her trouble.

Surely he had been sent for her help and direction.