About this time he met with an experience which now and then happens to men of his class. He fell violently in love—or in what he called love—with a girl who had very distinct ideas on the subject of marriage. One was that the first arrangement of their relations which suggested themselves to her lover were not to be entertained, and therefore she refused to entertain them. He tried ridicule, indignation, and protestation—all in vain! She appeared not to object to persecution—rather liked it. But she held out no hopes except legitimate ones. At last, when the young man was in a sense desperate—not in a very noble sense, but desperate for all that—she intimated to him that, unless he was prepared to accept her scheme of life, she knew a very respectable young man who was; a young man in Smithfield Market with whom she had walked out, and you could never have told. Which means that this young man disguised himself so subtly on Sunday to go into Society, that none would have guessed that he passed the week in contact with grease and blood, and dared to twist the tails of bullocks in revolt against their fate, shrinking naturally from the axe. His intentions were, nevertheless, honourable, and Polly, the barmaid at the One Tun Inn, honoured them, while her affections were disposed towards her Australian suitor whose intentions were not. The young reprobate, however, had to climb down; but he made his surrender conditional on one thing—that his marriage with Polly should remain a secret. No doubt parallel enterprises would have been interrupted by its publication. Anyhow, his mother never knew of his marriage, nor set eyes on her daughter-in-law.
His marriage was, in fact, merely a means to an end, and was a most reluctant concession to circumstances on his part. It was true he deprived himself of all chance of offering the same terms again for the same goods, unless, indeed, he ran the risks of a bigamist. But what can a man do under such circumstances? He is what he is, and it does seem a pity sometimes that he was made in the image of God, whether for God's sake or his own. Young Daverill's end attained, he flung away his prize almost without a term of intermediate neglect to save his face. She, poor soul, who had lived under the impression that all men were "like that" but that honourable marriage "reformed" them, was desperate at first when she found her mistake. Her "lawful husband," having attained his end, announced his weariness of lawful marriage with a candour even coarser than that of Browning's less lawful possessor of Love—he who "half sighed a smile in a yawn, as 'twere." He replied, to all Polly's passionate claims to him as a legal right, and hints that she could and would enforce her position:—"Try it on, Poll—you and your lawyers!" And, indeed, we have never been able to learn how the strong arm of the Law enforces marital obligations; barring mere cash payments, of which Polly's attitude was quite oblivious. Moreover, he was at that time prepared with money, and did actually maintain his wife up to the point of every possible legal compulsion until the end of his solvency, not a very long period.
For his life-drama, or the first act of it, was soon played out. It was substantially his father's over again. He ran through what was left of his money in a little over a year—so splendid were the gambler's opportunities in these days; for the Georgian era had still a short lease of years to run, and folly dies hard. His attempts to reinstate himself at the expense of a Bank, by a simple process of burglary, in partnership with a professional hand whose acquaintance he had made at "The Tun," led to disastrous failure and the summary conviction of both partners.
None of this came to the knowledge of his wife, as how should it? He wrote no news of it to her, and their relation was known to very few. Moreover, the burglary was in Bristol and Polly was at a farmhouse in Lincolnshire, awaiting a birth which only added another grief to her life, for her child was born dead. She recovered from a long illness which swallowed up the remains of the money her husband had given her, to find herself destitute and minus most of the good looks which had obtained for her her previous situation. She succeeded thereafter in maintaining herself by needlework—she was an adept in that—and so avoided becoming an incumbrance on her family, which she could no longer help now as she had done in her prosperity. But of her worthless husband's fate she never knew anything, the trial having taken place during an illness which nearly ended all her miseries for her. By the time she was on the way to recovery it would have been difficult to trace her husband, even had she had any motive for doing so.
As for him—a convict and the son of a convict—his period of detention in the hulks on the Thames was followed by the usual voyage to the Antipodes; but this time the vessel into which he was transhipped at Sydney sailed for Norfolk Island, not Hobart Town nor Macquarie Harbour. Maisie's son was not destined to revisit the land of his birth. The early deliverance from actual bondage to a condition free in all but the name, which had led to his father's successful later career, was impossible in an island half the size of the Isle of Wight, and the man grew to his surroundings. A soul ready to accept the impress of every stamp of depravity in the mint of vice was soon well beyond the reach of any possible redemption in contact with the moral vileness of the prisons on what was, but for their contamination, one of the loveliest islands in the Pacific.
After his departure his mother may have been influenced by a wish to obliterate her whole past, and this wish may have been the cause of her adoption of a name not her own. Some lingering reluctance to make her severance from her own belongings absolute may have dictated the choice of the name of Prichard, which was that of an old nurse of her childhood, who had stood by her mother's dying bed. It would serve every reasonable purpose of disguise without grating on memories of bygone times. A shred of identity was left to cling to. It is less clear why the quasi-daughter whom she had never seen should have repudiated her married name. Polly was under no obligation not to call herself Mrs. Daverill, unless it were compliance with her promise to keep the marriage secret. She, however, acquiesced in the Mrs., and supplied a name as a passport to a respectable widowhood. But she did not dress the part very vigorously, and report soon accepted the husband as a bad lot and a riddance. Nothing very uncommon in that!
CHAPTER VII
OF DAVE WARDLE'S CONVALESCENCE. OF MRS. RUTH THRALE, WIDOW AND OGRESS, WHO APPRECIATED HIM. HIS ACCOUNT OF HIS HOSPITAL EXPERIENCE. HOW HE MADE THE ACQUAINTANCE OF A COUNTESS, AND TOLD HER ABOUT WIDOW THRALE'S GRANDFATHER'S WATER-MILL. CONCERNING JUNO LUCINA. THESEUS AND ARIADNE. HOW DAVE DETECTED A FAMILY LIKENESS, AND NEARLY RUBBED HIS EYES OUT. HOW GRANNY MARRABLE SHOWED HIM THE MILL AT WORK AND MR. MUGGERIDGE
If the daylight were not so short in October at Chorlton-under-Bradbury, in Rocestershire, that month would quite do for summer in as many autumns as not. As it is, from ten till five, the sun that comes to say goodbye to the apples, that will all be plucked by the end of the month, is so strong that forest trees are duped, and are ready to do their part towards a green Yule if only the midday warmth will linger on to those deadly small hours of the morning, when hoarfrost gets the thin end of its wedge into the almanack, and sleepers go the length of coming out of bed for something to put over their feet, and end by putting it over most of their total. From ten till five, at least, the last swallows seem to be reconsidering their departure, and the skylarks to be taking heart, and thinking they can go on ever so much longer. Then, not unfrequently, day falls in love with night for the sake of the moonrise, and dies of its passion in a blaze of golden splendour. But the memory of her does not live long into the heart of the night, as it did in the long summer twilights. Love cools and the dews fall, and the winds sing dirges in the elms through the leaves they will so soon scatter about the world without remorse; and then one morning the grass is crisp with frost beneath the early riser's feet, and he finds the leaves of the ash all fallen since the dawn, a green, still heap below their old boughs stript and cold. And he goes home and has all sorts of things for breakfast, being in England.