A vagrant wife

by Florence Warden

In answer she got the following letter:

“My dear Annie,—I thought you were never going to keep your promise and write to me after all, and you haven’t told me much now you do write to me. For I want to know ever so much more than you say. You need not be afraid of anybody seeing your letter. For when I got it at Moss’ I took it straight back and down to the willow-pond. I read it, and fastened it under the lining of my hunting-cap. So its all rigt. There was a shindy when they new you were gone. George went to your aunt and first he scolded mother and Lil and said they ought to be ashamed of themselves and your aunt dident know where you were. And Harry you should have seen him go on. You would have thought he was a good husbend and you a bad wife if you heard him. He had been to London and sold his hunting-wach and bougt you a dimand ring which I think you would have liked but of course you were write to go away and I said so and he punched my head and I punched him back. So he dident get much good by his interferring with me. They thought I new where you were and I said if they thought I did they migt just try to make me say thats all. So they lissened to reason and Harry drinks more than ever he is as bad as Wilfred evry bit. And he is allways hanging about Green’s forge now. Susan Greens come back a pretty thing for a man married like he is now. I only tell you this becos I think you ought to know being his wife which is a great pity. They none of them know you will never come back except Lil who says you wont and that makes George very angry and one evening made Harry cry like a great baby insted of trying to find you. The place is beesly now you are gone and if I wasent going to uncle Geralds in Ireland I thing I should have to come and dig you out.

“Your afecsionate brother-in-law,

“William Fitzpatrick Braithwaite.

“P.S.—If you could see the black and white rabit now I think you would laugh for his legs are alright but so stiff that he hops bout as if he was made of wood. Jo bit the pups tail off a fortnight ago.”

This letter made Annie thoughtful. The Rubicon was passed now; she could not have gone back, even had she wished to do so, with what they would have considered the contamination of the stage upon her. But what William said about Harry caused her to ask herself for the first time whether she had not done him wrong, whether she ought not still to have stayed and continued coldly to fulfill her wifely duty to the letter, whether there had not been more selfishness than self-sacrifice in giving him back his liberty. She felt not one whit more of affection for the drunken lad who had become the ardent admirer of the blacksmith’s daughter, but this last fact was too significant not to awaken her self-reproach. She felt at the bottom of her heart an unacknowledged gladness that it was no longer in her power to go back, and in the cares of her present life she soon forgot again those of her past.

For the few shillings she received for her work at the theater were not enough to pay her modest expenses for food and lodging without her drawing upon the small sum she had brought with her from the Grange; William’s money she had resolved not to touch except in case of utmost need. So she tried her strength by living too simply, while she passed, in spite of herself, at the theater as a “rich” lady, who “came behind” for a freak. She had clothing enough to last for some time, and before the end of the summer she was lucky in being able to sell a short story; and then, after being for a few weeks out of work and in debt, and almost in danger of absolute want, she got an engagement at a salary which was just enough to live upon, but with no chance of more than a few lines to speak.

And this was her life, with now and then a hope of something better to do, followed always by disappointment and sometimes by despair for nearly three years, at the end of which time she was still appearing at a fashionable comedy theater, where she had been figuring in the programmes for some months on the last line of the list of characters, thus—“Maid, Miss Langton.”

And the brilliant future she had pictured once for herself seemed further away than ever. For she had by this time mastered some of the secrets of success on the stage. The highest success, she still knew, fell only to the highest talent; and this belief, which was directly against the creed of most of her companions, she held to the end. It was all luck, they said. It was chiefly luck, she thought too—the luck of being somebody’s son or somebody’s daughter, of having good looks and bad principles or wealthy friends, of being by chance on the right spot at the right time; and luck had been against her.

Disappointment, too, and weary, weary waiting had taken the bloom off her beauty, which was of a type depending very much on expression; and the look her face habitually wore now was that of a woman whom cares and failures and struggles with necessity had reduced to an automaton. Yet in some respects her position would not have been an unenviable one to a less ambitious woman. The conscientious care which had formerly made her a good governess, and later an almost too submissive wife to her careless husband, made her now fill her very unimportant roles with an attention to the most trifling details which obtained for her the consideration of the authorities in the theater, although it was of course not possible that her efforts to be artistic in her representation of monosyllabic maids should attract the attention of the general public or of the critics in front. And her salary, though not high, was now sufficient to keep her in comfort, which might have been greater, had she been more economical. So that the privilege of thinking herself a martyr was almost out of her reach.