These were some of the nasty bits of publicity which Jack Wingfield had foreseen. Priscilla had reddened a good deal reading them, but she had not shrunk from their perusal. She accepted everything as part of the ordeal which she had to face. She even smiled when, a few days later, there appeared in one of the papers a letter signed “A Dissatisfied Elector,” affirming that, as the election for the Nuttingford division had to all intents and purposes been won for Mr. John Wingfield by a lady who was not his lawful wife, the seat should be declared vacant.
Jack also smiled—after an interval—and threw the paper into the basket reserved for such rubbish.
CHAPTER XXXII
And then began the persecution which everyone must expect who is unfortunate enough to attain to a position of fame or its modern equivalent, notoriety.
The month was August, and no war worth the salary of a special correspondent was going on, so the newspapers were only too pleased to open their columns to the communications of the usual autumnal faddists, and the greatest of these is the marriage faddist. “The Curious Case” formed the comprehensive heading to a daily page in one paper, containing letter after letter, from “A Spinster,” “One Who Was Deceived,” “Once Bitten Twice Shy,” “True Marriage,” “I Forbid the Banns,” and the rest of them. Without actually commenting on the case, these distinguished writers pointed out day by day how the various points in the curious case of Marcus Blaydon and Priscilla Wadhurst bore out the various contentions of the various faddists. Now this would not have mattered so much but for the fact that it was the most ridiculous of these letters which, after a column’s advocacy of the principles of free love or some other form of profligacy, such as the “Spiritual Union,” or the “Soul to Soul” wedding, invariably wound up by a declaration that “all honour should be given to that brave little woman, who has thrown in her lot with the man she loves, to stand or fall by the principles which she has so fearlessly advocated”—these principles being, of course, the very principles whose enunciation formed the foundation of the ridiculous letter.
The most senseless of all these letters was signed “Two Souls with but a Single Thought;” and the superscription seemed an appropriate one, for the writers did not seem to have more than a single thought between them, and this one was erroneous.
Of course, after a time Priscilla became almost reconciled to the position of being the Topic of the holiday season, though earlier she found it very hard to bear. At first she had boldly faced the newspapers; but soon she found that the thought of what she had read during the day was interfering with her rest at night. She quickly became aware of the fact that persecution is hydra-headed, and every heading is in large capitals. She made up her mind that she would never open another newspaper, and it was as well that she adhered to this resolution; for after some days the American organs, as yellow as jaundice and as nasty, began to arrive, and Jack saw that they were quite dreadful. They commented freely upon the “case,” being outside the jurisdiction of the English courts, and they commented largely upon incidents which they themselves had invented to bear out their own very frankly expressed views regarding the shameless profligacy of the landed gentry of England, and the steadily increasing immorality of the English House of Commons. On the showing of these newspapers, Mr. John Wingfield was typical of both; he had succeeded in combining the profligacy of the one with the immorality of the other; and he certainly could not but admit that the stories of his life which they invented and offered to their readers, fully bore out their contention, that, if the public life of the States was a whirlpool, that of England was a cesspool.
It was only natural that the accredited representative of so much old-world iniquity should feel rather acutely the responsibilities of the position to which he was assigned; but he had been through the States more than once and he had also been in the Malay Archipelago, and had found how closely assimilated were the offensive elements in the weapons of the two countries. The stinkpot of the Malays had its equivalent in the Yellow Press of the United States; but neither of the two did much actual harm to the person against whom they were directed. If a man has only enough strength of mind to disregard the stinkpot he does not find himself greatly demoralised by his experience of its nastiness, and if he only ignores the “pus” of the Yellow Press no one else will pay any attention to its discharges.