‘Can we have a light on things?’ said Ralston, in that hoarsely musical growl of his. He struck a match as he spoke, and lit the gas, and then marched sturdily to the door and closed it. ‘You know me—you, Paul Armstrong,’ he said, turning to face the master of the house. ‘I have spent a fighting life, but I have never known a downright murderous fit till now. Have you seen this?’
‘Yes,’ said Paul,’ I’ve seen it.’
The journal Ralston haled from his pocket and held towards him was a fellow to that he had just thrown away in the street.
‘The carrion-hunting hound!’ cried Ralston; ‘I read this, and I came straight here. I knew there was no hiding it from your wife. I say “your wife,” and I hold by the word until faith and friendship are as dead as last year’s leaves. She had to see it, Armstrong, and it was better that a friend should bring it to her. Now, mind you, we who know her rally round. We may be only two or three, but we are a fighting colony. I am by way of being a cleric, but I don’t always cut my linguistic coat to suit my cloth, and my word at this hour is, Damn the bestial ecclesiastical bigotry which seeks to tie the bodies of men and women together when their souls are sundered! Here is a man reported within this last fortnight as having been arrested the day after his marriage at a registrar’s office, and as having been since then condemned to penal servitude for life. Is that fact a relief to the woman who was his victim? Not a bit of it Let her contract a new marriage, and the law will indict her for bigamy. She must live in loneliness, or be classed with harlots. Here is a man I know, an outlying parishioner of mine, whose wife is hopelessly and incurably insane. Is there any release from the marriage-bond for him? Not a chance of it. There are a hundred thousand people of this country, men and women, so saturated and demoralized with drink that only an overwhelming Christian pity could bear to touch ‘em with a barge-pole—husbands intolerable to wives, wives intolerable to husbands, live corpses with corruption distilling at each pore—and this filthy marriage law, which is the last relic of Christianity’s worst barbarism, binds quick and wholesome flesh to stinking death, and bids them fester together in the legal pit. I set one honest man’s curse upon that shameless and abominable creed, and I would not take my hand away from my seal though I went to the stake for setting it there.’
He broke into a stormy laugh, and clapped Paul boisterously upon the shoulder.
‘And now,’ he said, with a sudden change of voice and manner, ‘that we have got rid of the froth of passion, let me offer you one cup of the sound wine of reason. Fight this business through, Paul Armstrong. Don’t give way by half a barleycorn. The story, as it tells against you, will be made known. The truth, as your friends know it, must come out as well. If I had time to read up for the bar, and pass my examinations, I would ask nothing better than to be your counsel. Face the music, Armstrong, and you may help the cause of justice. It is time that this union of quick and dead were done with, and that the ecclesiastic fetish rag which makes its wickedness respectable were burned.’
CHAPTER XXIX
There were the usual legal delays, and public interest in the case would have slumbered had it not been for the newspapers. But a steady-going England, on whose John Bull qualities of reticence and solidity we have been prone to pride ourselves, does occasionally betray a quicker and more curious spirit than it commonly desires to be credited with, and there is no pole to stir it from its hybernating sleep which reaches so far and punches the fat ribs so soundly as the pole of scandal. The press was in one of its occasional Jedburgh justice moods, and was ready to afford impartial trial when it had hanged its victim, and not before.
Paul Armstrong was adjudged a Lothario of the wickeder sort, a purposed betrayer of hearts and destinies. ‘If, as the complainant in this melancholy case avers,’ or ‘If, as the depositions already filed would appear to indicate,’ the defendant was an unlimited rascal; and if that were so, he was an unlimited rascal, and there an end. A thousand men file past the bar of official and unofficial justice without much comment They are branded, more or less justly, in accord with their deserts, and having been first ignored, are altogether forgotten. But every here and there, for some scarcely notable peculiarity, a man or woman is fairly hunted down by the moral pack, mangled and branded, as it were, on a noble moral speculation, and left to quiver for the remnant of his lifetime.