The Daughters of Danaus Part 44

"They adjust themselves," said Lady Engleton.

"Adjust themselves!" Hadria vindictively flicked off the head of a dandelion with her parasol. "They awake to find they have been living in a Fool's Paradise--a little upholstered corner with stained gla.s.s windows and rose-coloured light. They find that suddenly they are expected to place in the centre of their life everything that up to that moment they have scarcely been allowed even to know about; they find that they must obediently veer round, with the amiable adaptability of a well-oiled weather-c.o.c.k. Every instinct, every prejudice must be thrown over. All the effects of their training must be instantly overcome. And all this with perfect subjection and cheerfulness, on pain of moral avalanches and deluges, and heaven knows what convulsions of conventional nature!"

"There certainly is some curious incongruity in our training," Lady Engleton admitted.

"Incongruity! Think what it means for a girl to have been taught to connect the idea of something low and evil with that which nevertheless is to lie at the foundation of all her after life. That is what it amounts to, and people complain that women are not logical."

Lady Engleton laughed. "Fortunately things work better in practice than might be expected, judging them in the abstract. How bashful Professor Theobald seems suddenly to have become! Why doesn't he join us, I wonder? However, so much the better; I do like to hear you talk heresy."

"I do more than talk it, I _mean_ it," said Hadria. "I fail utterly to get at the popular point of view."

"But you misrepresent it--there _are_ modifying facts in the case."

"I don't see them. Girls are told: 'So and so is not a nice thing for you to talk about. Wait, however, until the proper signal is given, and then woe betide you if you don't cheerfully accept it as your bounden duty.' If _that_ does not enjoin abject slavishness and deliberate immorality of the most cold-blooded kind, I simply don't know what does."

Lady Engleton seemed to ponder somewhat seriously, as she stood looking down at the grave beside her.

"How we ever came to have tied ourselves into such an extraordinary mental knot is what bewilders me," Hadria continued, "and still more, why it is that we all, by common consent, go on acting and talking as if the tangled skein ran smooth and straight through one's fingers."

"Chiefly, perhaps, because women won't speak out," suggested Lady Engleton.

"They have been so drilled," cried Hadria, "so gagged, so deafened, by 'the shrieks of near relations.'"

Lady Engleton was asking for an explanation, when the wedding-bells began to clang out from the belfry, merry and roughly rejoicing.

"Tom-boy bells," Hadria called them. They seemed to tumble over one another and pick themselves up again, and give chase, and roll over in a heap, and then peal firmly out once more, laughing at their romping digression, joyous and thoughtless and simple-hearted. "Evidently without the least notion what they are celebrating," said Hadria.

The bride came out of church on her husband's arm. The children set up a shout. Hadria and Lady Engleton, and, farther back, Professor Theobald and Joseph Fleming, could see the two figures pa.s.s down to the carriage and hear the carriage drive away. Hadria drew a long breath.

"I am afraid she was in love with Joseph Fleming," remarked Lady Engleton. "I hoped at one time that he cared for her, but that Irish friend of Marion's, Katie O'Halloran, came on the scene and spoilt my little romance."

"I wonder why she married this man? I wonder why the wind blows?" was added in self-derision at the question.

The rest of the party were now departing. "O sleek wedding guests,"

Hadria apostrophized them, "how solemnly they sat there, like all-knowing sphinxes, watching, watching, and that child so helpless--handcuffed, manacled! How many prayers will be offered at the shrine of the G.o.ddess of Duty within the next twelve months!"

Mrs. Jordan, a British matron of solid proportions, pa.s.sed down the path on the arm of a comparatively puny cavalier. The sight seemed to stir up some demon in Hadria's bosom. Fantastic, derisive were her comments on that excellent lady's most cherished principles, and on her well-known and much-vaunted mode of training her large family of daughters.

"Only the traditional ideas carried out by a woman of narrow mind and strong will," said Lady Engleton.

"Oh those traditional ideas! They might have issued fresh and hot from an asylum for criminal lunatics."

"You are deliciously absurd, Hadria."

"It is the criminal lunatics who are absurd," she retorted. "Do you remember how those poor girls used to bewail the restrictions to their reading?"

"Yes, it was really a _reductio ad absurdum_ of our system. The girls seemed afraid to face anything. They would rather die than think. (I wonder why Professor Theobald lingers so up there by the chancel? The time must be getting on.)"

Hadria glanced towards him and made no comment. She was thinking of Mrs.

Jordan's daughters.

"What became of their personality all that time I cannot imagine: their woman's nature that one hears so much about, and from which such prodigious feats were to be looked for, in the future."

"Yes, _that_ is where the inconsistency of a girl's education strikes me most," said Lady Engleton. "If she were intended for the cloister one could understand it. But since she is brought up for the express purpose of being married, it does seem a little absurd not to prepare her a little more for her future life."

"Exactly," cried Hadria, "if the orthodox are really sincere in declaring that life to be so sacred and desirable, why on earth don't they treat it frankly and reverently and teach their girls to understand and respect it, instead of allowing a furtive, sneaky, detestable spirit to hover over it?"

"Yes, I agree with you there," said Lady Engleton.

"And if they _don't_ really in their hearts think it sacred and so on (and how they _can_, under our present conditions, I fail to see), why do they deliberately bring up their girls to be married, as they bring up their sons to a profession? It is inconceivable, and yet good people do it, without a suspicion of the real nature of their conduct, which it wouldn't be polite to describe."

Mrs. Jordan--her face irradiated with satisfaction--was acknowledging the plaudits of the villagers, who shouted more or less in proportion to the eye-filling properties of the departing guests.

Hadria was seized with a fit of laughter. It was an awkward fact, that she never could see Mrs. Jordan's majestic form and n.o.ble bonnet without feeling the same overwhelming impulse to laugh.

"This is disgraceful conduct!" cried Lady Engleton.

Hadria was clearly in one of her most reckless moods to-day.

"You have led me on, and must take the consequences!" she cried.

"Imagine," she continued with diabolical deliberation, "if Marion, on any day _previous_ to this, had gone to her mother and expressed an overpowering maternal instinct--a deep desire to have a child!"

"Good heavens!" exclaimed Lady Engleton.

"Why so shocked, since it is so holy?"

"But that is different."

"Ah! then it is holy only when the social edict goes forth, and proclaims the previous evil good and the previous good evil."

"Come, come; the inconsistency is not quite so bad as that. (How that man does dawdle!)"

Hadria shrugged her shoulders. "It seems to me so; for now suppose, on the other hand, that this same Marion, on any day _subsequent_ to this, should go to that same mother, and announce an exactly opposite feeling--a profound objection to the maternal function--how would she be received? Heavens, with what pained looks, with what plat.i.tudes and proverbs, with what reproofs and axioms and sentiments! She would issue forth from that interview like another St. Sebastian, stuck all over with wounds and arrows. 'Sacred mission,' 'tenderest joy,' 'holiest mission,' 'highest vocation'--one knows the mellifluous phrases."

"But after all she would be wrong in her objection. The instinct is a true one," said Lady Engleton.

"Oh, then why should she be pelted for expressing it previously, if the question is not indiscreet?"

"Well, it would seem rather gruesome, if girls were to be overpowered with that pa.s.sion."

"So we are all to be horribly shocked at the presence of an instinct to-day, and then equally shocked and indignant at its absence to-morrow; our sentiment being determined by the performance or otherwise of the ceremony we have just witnessed. It really shows a touching confidence in the swift adaptability of the woman's sentimental organization!"

Lady Engleton gave an uneasy laugh, and seemed lost in uncomfortable thought. She enjoyed playing with unorthodox speculations, but she objected to have her customary feelings interfered with, by a reasoning which she did not see her way to reduce to a condition of uncertainty.

She liked to leave a question delicately balanced, enjoying all the fun of "advanced" thought without endangering her favourite sentiments. Like many women of talent, she was intensely maternal, in the instinctive sense; and for that reason had a vague desire to insist on all other women being equally so; but the notion of the instinct becoming importunate in a girl revolted her; a state of mind that struggled to justify itself without conscious entrenchment behind mere tradition.

Lady Engleton sincerely tried to shake off prejudice.

"You are in a mixed condition of feeling, I see," Hadria said. "I am not surprised. Our whole scheme of things indeed is so mixed, that the wonder only is we are not all in a state of chronic lunacy. I believe, as a matter of fact, that we _are_; but as we are all lunatics together, there is no one left to put us into asylums."

Lady Engleton laughed.