A vagrant wife

by Florence Warden

As for the horror of her husband and the rest of the Braithwaites, if they ever came to hear of the step she had taken, why, she did not care for their opinion, and their disgust could not humiliate her. Besides, the fact of her having become an actress would effectually cut her off from them forever and prevent their trying to bring her back to them, a possibility too dreadful to be considered calmly.

For, now that they were over, yet still fresh in her mind, the trials she had suffered during those few months of married life seemed, in these first days of relief from them, even greater than they had really been. Harry seemed more brutal, more ignorant, more dissipated, Lady Braithwaite and Lilian more coldly insolent, George more selfish, Wilfred more drunken, Stephen more unkind; so that the stage held out attractions for her in the social oblivion it involved which it would have been far from having in her eyes in other circumstances.

Not once did the thought occur to Annie that she was doing wrong in thus leaving her husband without consulting him. From the first she had been too obviously his superior in judgment to set any value on his opinion, and now she only thought she was ridding him as well as herself of an intolerable burden in the simplest manner. She had tried hard to do her duty as a wife, and had succeeded only in exasperating him against her and in unwittingly irritating him to more than his customary excesses. In leaving him free she thought she was rendering him the highest service in her power; and in freeing herself she felt, with a throb of joy, that she was once more able to indulge in her old dreams of ambition and success.

But in this argument with herself she forgot one thing—namely, that she had not left Harry free. This forgetfulness was the natural result of the effacement she had suffered at Garstone Grange which had caused her to depreciate her duties as they had depreciated her rights. It did not occur to her to think that she, morally the stronger of the two, was abandoning her husband, in all the first heat of a singularly wild and passionate nature, to a life in which the innocent indulgence of the affections was no longer possible; for she looked upon him as a brute incapable of any but the lowest forms of love. As for herself, she did not think herself in danger—she was of cooler temperament and higher intellect; her imagination took fire much more readily than her heart; she had thrown herself into the prospect of a brilliant career, and the idea of leading a loveless life had few terrors for her at first, except in rare moments of depression.

But, though the future was full of charm for her, the present was not without great difficulties. How was she to enter upon her new life? She remembered that some years ago, in the old days when her father was alive, when she was still a school girl and theatrical matters had the charm of mystery, she had been with her father on one occasion when he had met and introduced to her an acquaintance of his who was a manager and an actor too, and whom she had wondered to find so exceedingly silent and grave when she remembered how he had made her laugh upon the stage. She now hit upon the bold measure of writing to him, and asking if he would see her; but a week passed, and her letter received no answer. She wrote again to his theater, and this time inclosed a stamped directed envelope, with an apology for doing so, and an earnest request for five minutes of his time. She received in reply a hasty note naming a day and hour when he could see her; and, more excited than she had ever been in her life before, she arrived at the theater at the appointed time. She had to wait a long, weary time, very much ashamed of herself, very much afraid her application would be in vain, very much wishing herself out of the group of shabby men—whom she mistook for actors—with whom she was waiting, when at last the manager came. As his eyes fell on her, she stepped forward, holding his letter and giving her maiden name.

As she had expected, he had long since forgotten her; but he asked her to follow him up-stairs, and gave her a courteous hearing at the back of the dress-circle. After some difficulty, he remembered, or said he remembered, their former meeting. He strongly advised her not to go on the stage, telling her that even great talent did not always command success, that it was a hard life, full of disappointments. Finding her resolution still firm, and for the sake of her father, with whom he had at one time been intimate, he agreed to let her make a very modest first appearance at his theater as a silent “guest.” He did not much approve of lady amateurs, even in this humble capacity, but the girl was much in earnest, her pretty pleading was so touching, that he made this small concession, scarcely doubting that, if she went through all the rehearsals, after a few nights of a suffocating dressing-room and a draughty stage, she would appear no more, cured of her unfortunate whim.

The rehearsals were a hard trial, certainly. To stand about for three or four hours on a dark stage in the company of two or three more “ladies” who would have been scarcely refined enough for her to engage as maids, and then sometimes to be dismissed without having to go through her simple duty of walking across at the back of the scene with a shabby man who by day filled the position of a bill-sticker, was not work too exciting to leave time for some unpleasant reflection. When the piece came out things were a little better. Of the three girls who dressed with her in a large, bare room which seemed miles away, up at the top of the theater, two were illiterate but inoffensive, and the third proved to be one of the merriest little creatures who ever wished to be a great actress when nature intended her for a good washer-woman.

Going home alone at night frightened her dreadfully, and she never got quite used to it. Luckily there were omnibuses which took her nearly the whole way; but the short distance she had to walk before she caught one was a nightly agony, though nobody ever took any notice of the insignificant muffled up figure.

The piece was a failure, and did not run long; but she did duty again in the same humble capacity with the same companions in the comedy which followed, hoping for an opening to something more dignified and better calculated to show off her histrionic powers, if she possessed any. The opening came. It was a very small one, merely the opportunity of saying one line as a maid-servant; but the minutes before hearing her own voice for the first time in public were fraught with a terribly intense excitement which no important part in after-times ever called up in her with the same strength.

It was a few nights after this ordeal that on returning from the theater she was seized, for the first time since leaving Garstone, with a longing to hear what was going on there—how her departure had been taken, and how William passed his time without her. So she wrote to her brother-in-law, giving, as the address for him to write to, that of a stationer whose shop she passed on her way to and from the theater. It was not that she mistrusted the boy’s word, or even his carefulness; but she did not wish to get him into trouble, as would certainly have been the case if any of the rest suspected him of knowing her real address.