The prosecution succeeded in ruining the beautiful woman against whom it was directed. A spiteful old lady had taken advantage of a bad law. The whole proceedings were cruel and vindictive. A law framed by bigots and administered by idiots condemned a woman to lose her conjugal rights; and when she attempted to contract new ties and create for herself a home, it threatened her with the punishment of a felon. Decrees like that of Dr. Lushington impose on women the alternatives of celibacy and prostitution. Lola, who was too human for the one, and too highly organised for the other, was accordingly bludgeoned, defamed, and driven out of society. Somewhere between this world and Nirvana there should be a flaming hell for the makers of our ancient English law; though, perhaps, we should seek them in the limbo of unbaptized innocents and idiots.
Lola did not share the magistrate’s belief in the probability of Captain James having been carried off by accident or fever. On the contrary, she thought it likely that Miss Heald would succeed in producing him in court. To defeat the malice of her enemies, she and Heald took their departure for the continent, via Folkestone and Boulogne, the day after her appearance at Marlborough Street, as an announcement in the Morning Herald testifies. For the next two years we have no reliable information as to the movements or the doings of the pair. Certain particulars are supplied by Eugène de Mirecourt, a wholly untrustworthy writer, who speaks ill of everybody, especially of Lola, and is again and again to be convicted of palpable and serious errors. According to his version,[23] the newly married couple proceeded in the first instance to Spain, where two children were born to them. Here Monsieur de Mirecourt makes the first heavy draft on our credulity, for we can find elsewhere no trace of or allusion to the existence of any children of Lola Montez, who could have had no possible interest in abandoning or repudiating them, since they would have constituted a powerful claim on her wealthy young husband and his affluent relatives. Despite these pledges of affection, we are told, the domestic life of the Healds was troubled by violent quarrels. At Barcelona, in an access of fury, Lola stabbed her husband with a stiletto. The wounded man took to flight, but, unable to stifle his love for his wife, returned to her with assurances of renewed affection. However, he soon found reason to regret this step, and at Madrid again deserted the conjugal roof. Lola advertised for him as for a lost dog, and rewarded the person who found and restored him to her. Here Monsieur de Mirecourt’s effervescent Gallic humour seems to have betrayed him into what is at least unplausible.
“Paris,” he goes on to say, “had next the honour of sheltering this extraordinary couple. Madame sate for her portrait to Claudius Jacquand, but was obliged to interrupt the sitting every day on word being brought that her husband was about to take to flight. On one occasion she was obliged to pursue him as far as Boulogne. Claudius Jacquand painted them both together [this rather conflicts with the sense of the foregoing sentences], the husband presenting his wife with a rich parure of diamonds. When a definite rupture of their relations was decided upon, Heald wished the canvas to be cut in two, as he objected to appearing beside Lola. She, however, obtained possession of the picture in its entirety, and kept it in her room, with its face turned to the wall. ‘My husband,’ she explained, ‘ought not to see everything I do. It wouldn’t be decent.’
“The husband, upon his return to London, obtained a decree of nullity of marriage, and the year following was drowned at Lisbon, the swell of a passing steamer swamping the skiff in which he was taking his pleasure.”
Our delightfully unreliable informant adds that Captain James died in 1852, whereas he lived to witness the Franco-German war. De Mirecourt aimed rather at being funny than accurate, and succeeded in being neither one nor the other. In substance his carefully-seasoned story is true. Lola herself refers to her marriage with Heald as another unfortunate experience in matrimony. There was, no doubt, a fundamental difference in their temperaments, and the vagrant life in France and Spain must have brought out only too well the wife’s capacity for adventure, as much as it must have bored and irritated the well-connected young Englishman. In London they might have pulled together very well. He would have had his club and his race-meetings; she would have had her well-appointed household, her salon, and her box at the Opera. Miss Susanna Heald’s interference destroyed Lola’s dream of an established position, and wrecked two lives.
XXVIII
WESTWARD HO!