CHAPTER THE FIRST.
OLIVIA'S JUSTIFICATION.
I know that in the eyes of the world I was guilty of a great fault—a fault so grave that society condemns it bitterly. How shall I justify myself before those who believe a woman owes her whole self to her husband, whatever his conduct to her may be? That is impossible. To them I merely plead "guilty," and say nothing of extenuating circumstances.
But there are others who will listen, and be sorry for me. There are women like Johanna Carey, who will pity me, and lay the blame where it ought to lie.
I was little more than seventeen when I was married; as mere a child as any simple, innocent girl of seventeen among you. I knew nothing of what life was, or what possibilities of happiness or misery it contained. I married to set away from a home that had been happy, but which had become miserable. This was how it was:
My own mother died when I was too young a child to feel her loss. For many years after that, my father and I lived alone together on one of the great sheep-farms of Adelaide, which belonged to him, and where he made all the fortune that he left me. A very happy life, very free, with no trammels of society and no fetters of custom; a simple, rustic life, which gave me no preparation for the years that came after it.
When I was thirteen my father married again—for my sake, and mine only. I knew afterward that he was already foreseeing his death, and feared to leave me alone in the colony. He thought his second wife would be a mother to me, at the age when I most needed one. He died two years after, leaving me to her care. He died more peacefully than he could have done, because of that. This he said to me the very last day of his life. Ah! I trust the dead do not know the troubles that come to the living. It would have troubled my father—nay, it would have been anguish to him, even in heaven itself, if he could have seen my life after he was gone. It is no use talking or thinking about it. After two wretched years I was only too glad to be married, and get away from the woman who owed almost the duty of a mother to me.
Richard Foster was a nephew of my step-mother, the only man I was allowed to see. He was almost twice my age; but he had pleasant manners, and a smooth, smooth tongue. I believed he loved me, he swore it so often and so earnestly; and I was in sore need of love. I wanted some one to take care of me, and think of me, and comfort me, as my father had been used to do. So much alone, so desolate I had been since his death, no one caring whether I were happy or miserable, ill or well, that I felt grateful to Richard Foster when he said he loved me. He seemed to come in my father's stead, and my step-mother urged and hurried on our marriage, and I did not know what I was doing. The trustees who had charge of my property left me to the care of my father's widow. That was how I came to marry him when I was only a girl of seventeen, with no knowledge of the world but what I had learned on my father's sheep-run.
It was a horrible, shameful thing, if you will only think of it. There was I, an ignorant, unconscious, bewildered girl, with the film of childhood over my eyes still; and there was he, a crafty, unprincipled, double-tongued adventurer, who was in love with my fortune, not with me. As quickly as he could carry me off from my home, and return to his own haunts in Europe, he brought me away from the colony, where all whom I could ever call friends were living. I was utterly alone with him—at his mercy. There was not an ear that I could whisper a complaint to; not one face that would look at me in pity and compassion. My father had been a good man, single-hearted, high-minded, and chivalrous. This man laughed at all honor and conscience scornfully.
I cannot tell you the shock and horror of it. I had not known there were such places and such people in the world, until I was thrust suddenly into the midst of them; innocent at first, like the child I was, but the film soon passed away from my eyes. I grew to loathe myself as well as him. How would an angel feel, who was forced to go down to hell, and become like the lost creatures there, remembering all the time the undefiled heaven he was banished from? I was no angel, but I had been a simple, unsullied, clear-minded girl, and I found myself linked in association with men and women such as frequent the gambling-places on the Continent. For we lived upon the Continent, going from one gambling-place to another. How was a girl like me to possess her own soul, and keep it pure, when it belonged to a man like Richard Foster?
There was one more injury and degradation for me to suffer. I recollect the first moment I saw the woman who wrought me so much misery afterward. We were staying in Homburg for a few weeks at a hotel; and she was seated at a little table in a window, not far from the one where we were sitting. A handsome, bold-looking, arrogant woman. They had known one another years before, it seemed. He said she was his cousin. He left me to go and speak to her, and I watched them, though I did not know then that any thing more would come of it than a casual acquaintance. I saw his face grow animated, and his eyes look into hers, with an expression that stirred something like jealousy within me, if jealousy can exist without love. When he returned to me, he told me he had invited her to join us as my companion. She came to us that evening.
She never left us after that. I was too young, he said, to be left alone in foreign towns while he was attending to his business, and his cousin would be the most suitable person to take care of me. I hated the woman instinctively. She was civil to me just at first, but soon there was open war between us, at which he laughed only; finding amusement for himself in my fruitless efforts to get rid of her. After a while I discovered it could only be by setting myself free from him.
Now judge me. Tell me what I was bound to do. Three voices I hear speak.
One says: "You, a poor hasty girl, very weak yet innocent, ought to have remained in the slough, losing day by day your purity, your worth, your nobleness, till you grew like your companions. You had vowed ignorantly, with a profound ignorance it might be, to obey and honor this man till death parted you. You had no right to break that vow."
Another says: "You should have made of yourself a spy, you should have laid traps; you should have gathered up every scrap of evidence you could find against them, that might have freed you in a court of law."
A third says: "It was right for you, for the health of your soul, and the deliverance of your whole self from an intolerable bondage, to break the ignorantly-taken vow, and take refuge in flight. No soul can be bound irrevocably to another for its own hurt and ruin."
I listened then, as I should listen now, to the third voice. The chance came to me just before I was one-and-twenty. They were bent upon extorting from me that portion of my father's property which would come to me, and be solely in my own power, when I came of age. It had been settled upon me in such a way, that if I were married my husband could not touch it without my consent.
I must make this quite clear. One-third, of my fortune was so settled that I myself could not take any portion of it save the interest; but the other two-thirds were absolutely mine, whether I was married or single. By locking up one-third, my father had sought to provide against the possibility of my ever being reduced to poverty. The rest was my own, to keep if I pleased; to give up to my husband if I pleased.
At first they tried what fair words and flattery would do with me. Then they changed their tactics. They brought me over to London, where not a creature knew me. They made me a prisoner in dull, dreary rooms, where I had no employment and no resources. That is, the woman did it. My husband, after settling us in a house in London, disappeared, and I saw no more of him. I know now he wished to keep himself irresponsible for my imprisonment. She would have been the scape-goat, had any legal difficulties arisen. He was anxious to retain all his rights over me.
I can see how subtle he was. Though my life was a daily torture, there was positively nothing I could put into words against him—nothing that would have authorized me to seek a legal separation. I did not know any thing of the laws, how should I? except the fact which he dinned into my ears that he could compel me to live with him. But I know now that the best friends in the world could not have saved me from him in any other way than the one I took. He kept within the letter of the law. He forfeited no atom of his claim upon me.
Then God took me by the hand, and led me into a peaceful and untroubled refuge, until I had gathered strength again.