And Heaven did not hear her prayer.
Speechless, they faced one another. After a bit, he took her roughly by the arm.
“Come, girl,” he said, “we’ll get this rotten business over, quickly. The license reads ‘Dorothea’—I suppose I’ll have to get another one. There now, for God’s sake, don’t sniffle! People are looking at us.”
To give him credit, Grenville Harrison Deane never charged her with the deception of her parents. He never referred to it in so many words. But for two and forty years, Fanny lived in connubial torment, under the shadow of this smothering humiliation, and the fear that he might some day be led to speak of it. Often, there was that in his manner, that threatened to burst into violent and comminatory reproach.
She tried to efface herself, to reduce herself to nothingness, and to spare him the reminder of her substitution. She had a way of watching him, endeavouring to divine his whims and moods, that was loathesome in its humility. Her entire life was an apology for having failed to be her sister.
Unfortunately, Fanny never suspected that the greatest need of her overlord was association with a strong-minded tyrant, who, in the guise of the clinging-vine—or any other—would have thrust upon him the unexperienced pleasure of putting his shoulder to the wheel and hearing it creak as he moved it. He would have been happy doing things, being wheedled into service; but, as matters stood, Fanny Deane would have breathed for him, had such been possible. She relieved him of every burden and responsibility, and became a substitute not only for her silly, simpering sister, but for a shabby armchair and a pair of carpet slippers. Azalea, who was the youngest of five daughters, went so far as to say that the tomb to which his mortal envelope must one day be committed, would never equal in comfort the padded sepulchre her mother provided him while living.
Azalea’s earliest remembrance centred round a very common occurrence—her mother kneeling in the midst of broken toys and howling children, pleading,
“Don’t cry, my darlings! We will mend them! Sh-sh-sh—Please be quiet! Don’t irritate your father.”
She lived in constant dread of irritating a man who would have kept his temper had he really been vouchsafed anything to be irritated about; and her life was one which no self-respecting dog would have endured.
No one was more surprised than Fanny Deane when her four elder girls found husbands. Naturally, perhaps, she regarded marriage as a difficult and sordid undertaking—for parents, that is to say. Many a night, as she sat beside a moaning baby, the thought that one day she might have to engineer her children into the State of Holy Wedlock was like a deadly stricture about her heart. However, Hannah, Flossie, Tottie and May all married without any fuss or flurry, in a satisfactory, chronological fashion, the Civil Service yielding up its living dead to provide their sustenance. They became the Mrs. Polduggans and Mrs. Crogganthorpes of Ottawa; that large, uneasy, imitigable body—scrabbling, straining, jostling, niggling, fighting for the power to give rather than receive—snubs!—and living largely in the hope of supplanting their superiors and lifting themselves out of the ruck composed of other women, whose husbands, like their own, were merely “something in the Government”.