It was an early marrying age, even in that era of early marriages. Many years had passed since Sheridan's metrical toast "to the maiden of bashful fifteen." And, as now, a girl of fifteen was deemed too young for wedlock. But all this did not deter old Shiver-the-Frills from a laudable firmness in getting rid of the daughter he hated. So he married her off—to a man who ought to have been in an insane asylum; in an asylum for the criminally insane, at that.
If Marguerite's life at Knockbrit had been unhappy, her new life was positive torture. Farmer's temper was worse than Shiver-the-Frills. And he added habitual drunkenness to his other allurements.
There is no profit in going into full details of Marguerite's horrible sojourn with him. One of his milder amusements was to pinch her until the blood spurted from her white flesh. He flogged her as he never dared flog his dogs. And he used to lock her for days in an unheated room, in winter, with nothing to eat or drink.
Marguerite stood it as long as she could. Then she ran away. You can imagine how insufferable she had found Farmer, when I say she went back by choice to her father's house.
Shiver-the-Frills greeted the unhappy girl with one of his dear old rages. His rage was not leveled at the cur who had so vilely misused her, but against the young wife who had committed the crime of deserting her husband.
Not being of the breed that uses bare fingers to test the efficiency of buzz-saws, I neither express, nor so much as dare to cherish in secret, any opinion whatsoever on the theme of Woman's Rights. But it is a wholly safe and noncontroversial thing to say that the fate of woman at large, and especially of husband-deserters, to-day, is paradise by comparison with what it was a century ago. For leaving a husband who had not refused to harbor her, Marguerite became in a measure an outcast. She could not divorce Farmer; she could not make him support her, unless she would return to him. She was eyed askance by the elect. Her own family felt that she was smirched.
Shiver-the-Frills cursed her roundly, and is said to have assumed the heavy-father role by ordering her to leave his ramshackle old house. Without money, without protector, without reputation, she was cast adrift.
There was no question of alimony, of legal redress, of freedom; the laws were all on Farmer's side. So was public opinion. Strange to say, no public benefactor even took the trouble to horsewhip the husband. He was not even ostracized from his own circle for his treatment to his girl wife.
Remember, this was in the earliest years of the nineteenth century, and in a country where many people still regarded wife-beating as a healthful indoor sport. Less than three decades had elapsed since a man immortalized by Thackeray had made the proud boast that, during the first year of his married life, he had never, when sober, struck his wife in anger. Nor was it so very long after the Lord Chief Justice of England handed down an official decision that a man might legally "punish his wife with a rod no thicker than his lordship's thumb." Whereat, one woman inquired anxiously whether his lordship chanced to suffer from gouty swelling of the hands. Oh, it was a merry time and a merry land—for women—this "Merrie England of the good old days!"
Marguerite vanished from home, from friends, from family. And a blank space follows. In the lives of scores of super-women—of Lola Montez, Marie de Chevreuse, Lady Hamilton, Adah Menken, Peg Woffington, Adrienne Lecouvreur, even of Cleopatra—there was somewhere a hiatus,—a "dark spot" that they would never afterward consent to illumine. And such a line of asterisks sheared its way across Marguerite's page at this point.